Dance Theatre of Harlem Announces 2027 New York Season and World Premiere

Dance Theatre of Harlem Announces 2027 New York Season and World Premiere

Dance Theatre of Harlem returns home to New York City Center this spring for a four-night season, April 1–4, 2027, with a program that features works from George Balanchine, Nacho Duato, and Robert Garland and a world premiere co-choreographed by Matthew Rushing, Associate Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Samantha Figgins, a dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

The 2027 New York Season repertoire is a study in Dance Theatre of Harlem’s range from contemporary to classical.

The program will span from the gilded court of a French king, the concrete of a maximum-security prison, to Balanchine's own brand of virtuosic joy and the ancient promise of beauty rising out of ashes.

Tickets for Dance Theatre of Harlem's New York Season, April 1–4, 2027 at New York City Center are on sale now. For more information visit www.dancetheatreofharlem.org.

ABOUT THE WORKS

WORLD PREMIERE

Choreographed by Matthew Rushing and Samantha Figgins

The 2027 New York Season program features a world premiere co-choreographed by Matthew Rushing and Samantha Figgins, inspired by the phrase "beauty for ashes" from Isaiah 61. The new work traces the human journey from grief, loss, and adversity toward healing, resilience, and renewal, carrying the full weight of sorrow before arriving, in its final moments, at an image of transformation.

While the season's newest work asks audiences to sit with something deeper, Brahms Variations turns toward ceremony and swagger, imagining a royal court and Harlem meeting as equals.

BRAHMS VARIATIONS

Choreographed by Robert Garland

BRAHMS VARIATIONS is inspired by Louis XIV. DTH Artistic Director Robert Garland notes, “in my own life, Arthur Mitchell stood just as luminous as Louis XIV, a Harlem monarch with a crown of vision and defiance, ruling not from Versailles but from Lenox Avenue.”

In this work, their worlds drift toward one another like constellations long separated: the gilded ritual of Louis XIV's court meeting the electric swagger of Harlem. What emerges is a kind of ceremonial dream, a place where baroque splendor and uptown brilliance bow to one another, and the lineage of ballet is reborn in a new, majestic light. Garland dedicates the work to the late DTH ballerina Lorraine Graves and the late Fabian Barnes.

Where Brahms Variations looks to lineage and legacy, Coming Together turns its attention inward, toward endurance.

COMING TOGETHER

Choreographed by Nacho Duato

At the heart of Coming Together lies a stark and haunting source: a repeated, eight-sentence text written by Sam Melville, a political activist incarcerated at Attica Prison. His words, steady, lucid, and unsettling in their calm, were penned just months before he was killed in the Attica uprising of September 9, 1971. That text becomes the pulse of the work, a mantra that refuses to fade, circling back on itself with increasing urgency.

Nacho Duato builds the work on Frederic Rzewski's score of the same name, a composition that uses the techniques of minimalism not as an aesthetic exercise but as a way of generating a charged, coherent emotional world. In response, Duato mirrors Rzewski's restless repetition and intricate structure, shaping a ballet that is fiercely physical yet undeniably poetic, a work where tension, beauty, and human resilience move in relentless counterpoint.

Against that gravity, Tarantella offers a different register entirely: pure, unfiltered joy.

TARANTELLA

Choreographed by George Balanchine

Tarantella, George Balanchine's exuberant, virtuosic showcase for two dancers, brings a whirlwind of speed, wit, and technical brilliance that has delighted ballet audiences for generations.

Together, the four works trace a thread from Harlem to Versailles, from Attica to ballet's own beginnings, and into a story of renewal all their own, offering New York audiences four nights that hold the full range of what Dance Theatre of Harlem has always done best: telling the truth, beautifully.

Tickets are on sale now.