Brooklyn Ballet to Debut SOFT POWER with Four Premieres This March
Brooklyn Ballet explores the intersection of ballet and street dance in 'Soft Power'
Brooklyn Ballet will present Soft Power, an evening of movement and live music that explores the tension, resonance, and shared language between classical ballet and street dance.
Running March 12-15 at The Mark O'Donnell Theater in Downtown Brooklyn, the season brings together four world premieres by guest choreographers and longtime collaborators, inviting audiences into a dynamic exchange between formality and freedom, structure and spontaneity, legacy and evolution.
At the heart of Soft Power is a commitment to dialogue between disciplines, between artists, and between generations of movement-makers. The program features four choreographers: three guest choreographers alongside Brooklyn Ballet Founder and Artistic Director Lynn Parkerson, with works performed by Brooklyn-based contemporary dance artist Alexis Diggs, street dancer and longtime company collaborator Mike "Big Mike" Fields, and Alexis Zanety, contemporary teacher and choreographer and former First Soloist with Cuba's National Dance Company. Together, the evening examines how ballet and street dance reflect, resist, and reshape one another within a shared cultural landscape.
Parkerson's sub-binary receives its world premiere this spring after debuting as an excerpt last season and evolving during the company's 2025 North Fork Arts Center residency. Built around real-time improvisation, the three-movement work moves from a male/male duet to an all-female trio and into a final collaboration with a female street dancer, tracing a shifting landscape of contrast and connection. Set to a live, improvised score by Toni Mora Tur, where piano and electronics rise and fall in conversation, the piece unfolds through unspoken exchanges that blur the line between formal technique and freestyle expression.
Dreams of Tomorrow, by Alexis Diggs, introduces the company to a contemporary movement language shaped by reflections on freedom, resilience, and collective care. Set in part to Maurice Ravel's Ondine, played live by Kessa Mefford , the ensemble work treats hope as a practice rather than a promise, asking how possibility is pursued within both personal and systemic tension.
With support from a New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) grant, Mike "Big Mike" Fields' Let 'em Cook brings ballet and street dance into a shared physical terrain. Each dancer offers a message to their younger and older selves, turning communication into choreography and tracing how memory and experience reshape the body's relationship to form, freedom, and identity.
Absence, by Alexis Zanety, is a personal and quiet, elegiac tribute to the choreographer's mother. The piece travels through imagined and unseen worlds, exploring grief, nostalgia, and compassion as pathways from loss toward release and the power of memory in a body in motion.
"This season brings together dancers and choreographers working across different disciplines and movement languages, and what emerges is quite literally our mission in motion," reflects Parkerson. "The process challenges our artists and our audiences to meet on an even Playing Field, to listen through movement, and to discover where shape, rhythm, and energy align, and where difference becomes dialogue rather than division."
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
Thursday, March 12, 7pm, Opening Night Benefit Performance with Reception to follow
Friday, March 13, 7pm, Free Beer Friday!
Saturday, March 14, 3pm, Children's Matinee
Saturday, March 14, 7pm, Post-Performance Q & A
Sunday, March 15, 3pm
A post-performance Q+A will take place following Saturday evening's performance.
TICKETS and VENUE INFORMATION
General seating is available for $35, student and senior, $20, and children under 12, $15. Premium reserved seating, $50, is available for all performances.
Tickets available for purchase at https://www.brooklynballet.org/performances/2026/spring-season-2026
The Mark O'Donnell Theater at the Entertainment Community Fund is located at 160 Schermerhorn Street, in downtown Brooklyn, accessible by A, C, F and G trains.
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