BE HERE NOW

April 25-27 & May 2-4, 2025 at Peter Martin Wege Theatre

We close out our 2024-25 season with Be Here Now, a compilation of four stand-alone works, showcasing the true diversity and versatility our company offers. The program features the return of Le Grand Jazz!, choreographed by Darrell Grand Moultrie for GRB in October 2023. Moultrie’s work features classic tunes as well as songs from contemporary jazz artists, including Duke Ellington & Count Basie, Michael Bublé, Chris Botti, Ella Fitzgerald, Samara Joy, and the Melton Mustafa Orchestra. Le Grand Jazz! shares an infectious energy with the audience as it highlights a community of dancers who are playful, sometimes introspective, and always full of life. Our resident choreographer Penny Saunders will also create an entirely new work to be featured in this performance, her 9th original work for the company. George Balanchine’s Italian inspired Tarantella is an exuberant pas de deux, full of personality, speed, and spirit. Created in 1964 for New York City Ballet dancers Edward Villella and Patricia McBride, Tarantella is an exciting showcase of virtuosic dancing. The show concludes with Be Here Now, choreographed by Trey McIntyre to a playlist of music by The Mamas and the Papas, Janis Joplin, Steve Miller Band, Sly and the Family Stone, The Hollies, Jefferson Airplane, and The Youngbloods. Created in honor of the 50th anniversary of the “Summer of Love,” Be Here Now transports us to 1967 San Francisco, during a time of cultural revolution and youthful expression, inviting us to delight in the present moment and revel in music, movement, and love.

BE HERE NOW | DATES & TIMES

Friday, April 25, 2025

Saturday, April 26, 2025

  • FREE Family Matinee performance at 2:00 p.m. – Featuring an introduction to the world of professional ballet and an excerpt of the Be Here Now program, this family focused production will last about 45-60 minutes. | Tickets available closer to performance date. 
  • Evening performance at 7:30 p.m. | Get Tickets

Sunday, April 27, 2025

Friday, May 2, 2025

Saturday, May 3, 2025

Sunday, May 4, 2025

BE HERE NOW | SNEAK PEEK

BE HERE NOW | CREATORS

Darrell Grand Moultrie

Darrell Grand Moultrie

Choreographer

Biography

Darrell Grand Moultrie has quickly emerged as one of America’s most sought after choreographers and master teachers. Not one to be pigeonholed into any particular genre, Moultrie has carved out an impressive career that seamlessly weaves his choreographic talents through multiple genres. Most recently Grammy Award winning artist Beyonce selected Darrell as one of her choreographers for her Mrs. Carter World Tour and Tony Award winning director Diane Paulus tapped Darrell to choreograph the original musical Witness Uganda at American Repertory Theater that she directed. A proud recipient of the 2007 Princess Grace Choreography Fellowship Award, Darrell’s work has been performed by Ailey 2, The Juilliard School, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, Colorado Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, North Carolina Dance Theatre, BalletMet Columbus, Milwaukee Ballet, Atlanta Ballet, Sacramento Ballet, Rasta Thomas and his Bad Boys of Dance, Tulsa Ballet, Ballet X, Ballet Arkansas, and. Smuin Ballet. This year he will set World Premieres for Dance Theatre of Harlem, Richmond Ballet, The Boston Conservatory, and The Oregon Ballet Theater. Darrell was approached by Central Park SummerStage’s dance curator to choreograph under his own moniker, inspiring him to form the pick-up company — Dance Grand Moultrie, which premiered in Central Park in July 2011. Dance Magazine’s Wendy Perron raved of the premiere, The Melting Pot gave further opportunity to see his unique blend of movements: big moves juxtaposed with small, sensual gestures… Going to see dance at SummerStage is always a pleasant way to spend a summer night—and it’s free. When the program is this good, you can’t believe your luck. Victoria Morgan, Artistic Director of Cincinnati Ballet comments, What makes Darrell unique as a choreographer is that he knows how to get to the soul of a performer. His work is well-crafted and theatrical and even in abstract pieces, he makes you feel as though you are following a story. With an innate sense of timing he takes his audience on a journey that ends in pure satisfaction. Darrell has taught and choreographed at many prestigious institutions across the United States, including The Juilliard School, The Ailey School, Dance Theatre of Harlem, CalArts, Point Park Conservatory of Performing Arts, University of Nevada, COCA St. Louis, and Perry Mansfield. He also served as the Director of Musical Theatre at the Harbor Conservatory of the Performing Arts. As a performer, Darrell was part of the original cast of the hit musical Billy Elliot on Broadway. He has also been seen in West Side Story in Milan, Italy, at the world famous La Scala Opera House, and was a part of the original workshops of the Public Theatre’s Radiant Baby directed by George C. Wolfe, Sweet Charity, and The Color Purple. He was seen on Broadway in the smash hits Hairspray The Musical with Harvey Fierstein, and AIDA where he understudied the role of Mereb, performing opposite Toni Braxton. Darrell is a proud New Yorker, born and raised in Harlem. A graduate of the esteemed Juilliard School, today he is one of the few choreographers working in the theater, ballet, modern, and commercial dance genres.

Penny Saunders

Penny Saunders

Choreographer

Biography

Penny Saunders, originally from West Palm Beach, Florida, graduated from the Harid Conservatory in 1995 and began her professional career with The American Repertory Ballet under the direction of Septime Webre. She went on to dance with Ballet Arizona, MOMIX Dance Theater, Cedar Lake Ensemble, and in 2004 she joined Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

In 2011, Saunders won the International Commissioning Project which launched her choreographic career, creating pieces for Hubbard Street, Cincinnati Ballet, Whim W’Him, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Parsons Dance, Oklahoma City Ballet, BalletX, Sacramento Ballet, The Royal New Zealand Ballet, Tulsa Ballet, Diablo Ballet, Dayton Ballet, Eugene Ballet,  Charlotte Ballet and Seattle Dance Collective among others.

Saunders is honored to be the Resident Choreographer at The Grand Rapids Ballet, to have received support from The New York City Ballet Choreographic Commissions Initiative, to have participated in The Guggenheim Works & Process, and The National Choreographers Initiative, and to be the recipient of the 2016 Princess Grace Choreographic Fellowship. She is currently Artist in Residence at USC Kaufman School of Dance as well as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at The University of Utah School of Dance.

George Balanchine

George Balanchine

Choreographer

Biography

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, George Balanchine (1904-1983) is regarded as the foremost contemporary choreographer in the world of ballet. He came to the United States in late 1933, at the age of 29, accepting the invitation of the young American arts patron Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996), whose great passions included the dream of creating a ballet company in America. At Balanchine’s behest, the School of American Ballet was founded in 1934, the first product of the Balanchine-Kirstein collaboration. Several ballet companies directed by the two were created and dissolved in the years that followed, while Balanchine found other outlets for his choreography. Eventually, with a performance on October 11, 1948, New York City Ballet was born. Balanchine served as its ballet master and principal choreographer from 1948 until his death in 1983.

Balanchine’s more than 400 dance works include Serenade (1934), Concerto Barocco (1941), Le Palais de Cristal, later renamed Symphony in C (1947), Orpheus (1948), The Nutcracker (1954), Agon (1957)Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972), Vienna Waltzes (1977), Ballo della Regina (1978), and Mozartiana (1981). His final ballet, a new version of Stravinsky’s Variations for Orchestra, was created in 1982. He also choreographed for films, operas, revues, and musicals. Among his best-known dances for the stage is Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, originally created for Broadway’s On Your Toes (1936). The musical was later made into a movie.

A major artistic figure of the twentieth century, Balanchine revolutionized the look of classical ballet. Taking classicism as his base, he heightened, quickened, expanded, streamlined, and even inverted the fundamentals of the 400-year-old language of academic dance. This had an inestimable influence on the growth of dance in America. Although at first his style seemed particularly suited to the energy and speed of American dancers, especially those he trained, his ballets are now performed by all the major classical ballet companies throughout the world.

Trey McIntyre

Trey McIntyre

Choreographer

Biography

Trey McIntyre was created in 1969 as a collaboration between his mother and father. His interest both in art and getting the hell away from Kansas led him to train at North Carolina School of the Arts and the Houston Ballet Academy. In 1989, he was appointed Choreographic Apprentice to Houston Ballet, a position created especially for him, and in 1995 he became the company’s Choreographic Associate. He has worked for more than 30 years as a freelance choreographer, producing more than 100 pieces during the span of his career so far. He also did a bunch of other cool things, including working with a lot of amazing companies such as The Stuttgart Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Queensland Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, New York City Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre, BalletX, The Washington Ballet, Ballet Memphis, and San Francisco Ballet.

He has won numerous awards and honors such as the Choo San Goh Award for Choreography, a Lifetime Achievement Award from The National Society of Arts and Letters, two personal grants for choreography from The National Endowment for the Arts, and is a United States Artists Fellow. In 2019, he won the Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography for his work Your Flesh Shall be a Great Poem, which he created for San Francisco Ballet for their Unbound Festival. He was named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2001, one of People Magazine’s “25 Hottest Bachelors” in 2003, and one of Out Magazine’s 2008 “Tastemakers.” The New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay said of Mclntyre, “…There’s a fertility of invention and a modernity of spirit here that are all Mr. Mclntyre’s own.” The Los Angeles Times wrote, “…There is indeed such a thing as genuine 21st century ballet, and it belongs more to this guy from Wichita than any of the over-hyped pretenders from England, France or Russia.”

In 2005, he founded his dance company, Trey McIntyre Project, achieving great audience and critical success. McIntyre created over 23 original works for the company as well as numerous film projects, interactive site specific works, and photography collections.

A confessed polymath, McIntyre has developed a cult following for his photography of the human body (see more at Patreon), written several published essays, and completed the feature-length documentary Gravity Hero, which premiered at the Dance on Camera Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

His main focus recently has been adding more love into the world. He loves you and doesn’t even know you.

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