Preview: OHIO CONTEMPORARY BALLET at HEINZ POLL SUMMER DANCE FESTIVAL

Cleveland’s Ohio Contemporary Ballet (OCB) will open the 52nd Heinz Poll Summer Dance Festival this weekend at Akron, Ohio’s Forest Lodge Park with a stylistically diverse mixed repertory program including a tango-inspired world premiere.

The free outdoor performances will also be area audiences’ first look at new company dancer Bethany Montalvo, a native of Modesto, California who majored in Ballet Performance at the University of Oklahoma and was a member of Nashville Ballet 2 and Twin Cities Ballet of Minnesota before joining OCB. 

The company also welcomes back Colombian dancer Bryan Salinas, who originally joined OCB in 2022 as a part of the company’s International Cultural Exchange.  

OCB’s program kicks off with Paul Taylor’s 1978 modern dance masterwork, “Airs.” Danced to music by George Frideric Handel, the 25-minute work features four women and three men moving in spatial patterns that suggest gusts, eddies, and an inevitable flow of energy from shape to shape and from dancer to dancer,” says former Clevelander Susan McGuire, who set the work on OCB.

The majestic flow of “Airs” then gives way to the wholly energetic tambourine-slapping energy of Pamela Pribisco’s “Tarantella” (2005). The folk dance-inspired duet danced to music by Louis Moreau Gottschalk will have audiences dancing in their seats.

Next, the company reprises choreographer Nycole Ray’s “Opaque.” Originally created in 2015 for Dallas Black Dance Theatre: Encore!, Ray created a new section for the modern dance work when she staged it on OCB this past February. 

Danced to music by British composer Max Richter, the 20-minute piece for 11 dancers, themed around exclusion, transparency, and a lack of connection, features the performers costumed in floor-length black skirts, which create the illusion of floating across the floor, and the new solo section has the dancer floating in the center of a stage-filling black skirt.

The program then concludes with the premiere of choreographer Danielle Diniz’s “Red Rhythm.” Commissioned for OCB, the 15-minute ballet for 11 dancers is danced to Spanish music including “Tangos Canasteros” by Lole y Manuel and “Tafat” by the Taalbi Brothers. 

Diniz, a New York-based dancer and award-winning choreographer who is married to New York City Ballet principal dancer Daniel Ulbricht, says “Red Rhythm” was partially inspired by her Latin heritage and the movement she saw in an outdoor sculpture at The Mount, Edith Wharton Cultural Center in the Berkshires.   

In a recent rehearsal of the work, I found it to be an energetic blending of tango and Broadway styles meshed with ballet and a fiery Flamenco dance attitude. It is sure to be a rousing conclusion to OCB’s eclectic evening of dance. 

Ohio Contemporary Ballet performs at the 52nd Heinz Poll Summer Dance Festival at 8:45 p.m., Friday, July 24 and Saturday, July 25, 2026, at Forest Lodge Park, at the corner of Jefferson Ave./S. Hawkins Ave. in Akron, Ohio. The stage is located on the baseball field (Map). ADMISSION IS FREE. Guests are invited to bring blankets and/or a chair for lawn seating. Pre-show children’s dance activities led by The University of Akron Dance Institute start at 7:45 p.m.

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