BalletX The Four Seasons Reimagined Review
June 5, 2026 | TD Pavilion at Highmark Mann – Philadelphia, PA, USA
Two hot dogs. A cheesesteak. A beer. And ballet. This doesn’t happen often, but when BalletX takes over the Skyline Stage at the Highmark Mann Center for the Performing Arts, it feels like a very specific kind of Philadelphia summer night.
Celebrating fifty years, the Mann is an outdoor theatre venue alive with a different kind of buoyancy – contemporary ballet performed in the open air in direct relationship with the elements… and I love it. The space feels more vast tonight. The dancers move differently in it. The audience does too, settling in as if this is just what you do here when the weather turns.
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BalletX The Four Seasons Reimagined Review
The Four Seasons Reimagined is structured simply enough: outside venue, four choreographers, one season each. Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, reworked. An original score by Dan Deacon. A live orchestra, performing in real time, the music moving underneath like a current.
But the real story is BalletX itself.
I’ve said this before, but BalletX reminds me of the Avengers.
Not in some polished marketing way; rather, in the sense that every dancer is fully formed on their own, but the way they function together is the point. The partnering work- it’s like butter. One lift dissolves into the next phrase without visible effort. Dancers appear, disappear, and reappear in new configurations. It’s speed, lifts, flexibility.
They trust each other. You can see it.
Deep pliés staying low to the ground. Different partnerships throughout the evening. Nothing ever feels like it’s breaking apart. That cohesion doesn’t come out of nowhere.
BalletX has a very specific artistic ecosystem around it, shaped in large part by Christine Cox.
There’s a consistency in taste here, a willingness to take risks without turning it into spectacle for its own sake.
The company keeps bringing in choreographers who do very different things, and somehow it still feels like one organism.
There’s also just… a vibe. A confidence. A kind of Philly-specific creative ease. They don’t behave like ballet has to justify itself.
Morgann Runacre-Temple’s “Summer” comes in first. It is airy, round, circular. I just love how this company moves together. If you are paying attention, you can see the symbiotic relationship these dancers have with one another.
The stage never really settles. Dan Deacon’s score moves like weather, sometimes driving, sometimes just hanging in the air. Then a billowing, black weather balloon drifts overhead. I stop watching the stage for a second.
What is going on?
The balloon floats across the sky like it was part of the piece already. Or like the evening absorbed it. And suddenly the line between what’s staged and what isn’t gets blurry.
“Fall”, by Penny Saunders, is grounded. Gravity. A sensation of unraveling, of undoing. Costumes are intentionally in darker hues, the dancers partnering, rising, and quite literally falling.
By “Winter”, nature’s light has changed completely, the audience finding itself suddenly submerged beneath the Philadelphia night sky. When the performance began, daylight still lingered over the Skyline Stage yet by the time Jamar Roberts’ “Winter” arrives, the sun has slipped away and darkness settles over Fairmount Park.
The shift is not just atmospheric – it becomes part of the choreography. Dancers enter with icy precision, rigid movements like icicles, like frozen matter. Icy blue pointe shoes seem to stick to the ground like ice.
At one point, the female dancers move like sticks, quite contrary to the airy port de bras typical of ballet. It lands because it’s physical, not conceptual.
And now we are inside it. Not watching Winter, rather sitting inside it.
There is something punk rock about Trey McIntyre’s “Spring” in the sense that it comes back resilient and renewed, year after year after year. The movement is fast, buoyant, large, and circular, not unlike a celebration.
The section, musically filled with horns, a dazzling uptempo score, ends with a collapse and rainbow-colored confetti. It feels like June -celebrations, Pride Month, graduations, renewal, and all the other joyful rites of passage.
What lingers after the performance is BalletX itself, and at the end of the evening, I keep thinking about Philadelphia artists who build entire ecosystems like this.
This week, the city lost Dito van Reigersberg, a theater pioneer, drag icon, and force behind Pig Iron Theatre Company. He was also married to choreographer Matthew Neenan, co-founder of BalletX.
BalletX doesn’t exist in isolation and neither did Dito’s work. This group, these friends, are all powerhouse creatives who have shaped decades of innovative arts in Philadelphia, making things that are loud, experimental, funny, strange, and unafraid to be too much.
You feel it in BalletX.
You feel it in Pig Iron.
You feel it in the people who keep choosing to make work here anyway.
And at the Mann, under a darkening sky, with a weather balloon still somewhere overhead and confetti on the ground, that feeling lingers. Even in that one second of silence between the final note and what follows – an appropriate, thunderous applause that rolls through the Skyline Stage at the Highmark Mann Center for the Performing Arts – the open air swallows the sound and sends it back out, larger than life.
The artists receive a standing ovation of thousands. A collective applause, as if to say:
We needed that.
Featured Photo of Dancers of BalletX. in The Four Seasons Reimagined. Photo by Vikki Sloviter.
