Philadelphia Ballet’s 60th season will include world premieres of ‘Boléro,’ ‘La Sylphide,’ and one by Stanton Welch
The season will open with a revival of "Le Corsaire," but Corella is reworking the story to remove the concept of slavery.
When Philadelphia Ballet opens its 2024-25 season at the Academy of Music, it will be celebrating the company’s 60th anniversary as well as Angel Corella’s 10th year as artistic director.
The program will also include three world premieres: two by Corella and one from Stanton Welch, who is the artistic director of the Houston Ballet, the company announced Tuesday morning.
It will also be heavy on the full-length ballets and lighter on Balanchine. Nutcracker will be the only Balanchine ballet next season, Corella said, adding that Balanchine will be back in future years.
“We’re seeing that definitely full lengths, that people react to them,” he said. “They like the name recognition.”
The season will open in October with a revival of Corella’s Le Corsaire, a story of a pirate who falls in love with an enslaved woman, the second ballet he rechoreographed for Philadelphia Ballet.
The dance will stay the same, but Corella is more sensitive to the story now. He’s considering making the ballet an arranged marriage, replacing the enslaved characters with a bride and bridesmaids.
“Working with Carmen [last fall] ... ,” Corella said, “it gave me an idea of how storytelling through ballet could be taken to a new a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing theater.”
“I’m still working on how the plot is going to continue ... I’m trying to keep things a little bit more fresh, but also without losing the actual history of the piece.”
Nutcracker will make its annual appearance in December, followed by Corella’s Swan Lake in March.
Also in March, the ballet will present a triple bill. It will be a black-and-white program including a revival of demi-soloist Russell Ducker’s Dance Card, which is ballroom-inspired and performed in black gowns and tails. Welch has said he wanted his piece, a world premiere, to be danced in white and include a piano on stage, Corella said.
That program will also include the world premiere of a new Corella ballet, Boléro, which will be danced in black and white.
“I’m going to use the whole company, I’m going to use the second company, and I’m going to use part of the school. It’s going to be a very large cast on stage, he said.
“The dancers are going to be coming in on stage with each instrument and feel the stage with the apotheosis of the music at the end. So I think it’s very exciting.”
The season will wrap up in May with a second Corella ballet, La Sylphide (not to be confused with Les Sylphides), a ballet in the Romantic tradition set in Scotland with music by Hermann Lovenskjold.
La Sylphide is “one of the ballets that I danced the least,” Corella said. “So it would be definitely something that it is a challenge.
“What I do every season is I look at the talent” and match dancers with potential ballets. “We have beautiful, beautiful female dancers. We have beautiful male dancers that they could do James [the male lead in La Sylphide] great justice.”
Études, choreographed by Harald Lander, shares the program with La Sylphide.
“It’s a ballet that I always wanted to bring for the company,” Corella said.