The Joffrey Ballet's 2026 'Winning Works' Showcase is Why We Should All Care About Ballet
- Marielle Bokor
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
I’m tired of people who take narrow views on what art is, and I’m tired of people who tell me what to care about, or what’s over, or what an art form is allowed to be. It’s part of why we are here, at Culture Combine - because we know better. We can confidently call comic books literature, and video games art, because we know this to be true – and we know that every rising art form has once been labelled “not art” simply because it challenged what people thought art was.
But art is alive when it explores its borders and stretches its edges. Art is challenging, to the viewer and the performer. It should leave you with questions, and leave images burned in your brain. It also needs to know what it is, and what it’s built on - what built it. It should teach, and it should grow.
That’s exactly what you get with Winning Works at MCA, featuring the Grainger Academy of the Joffrey Ballet - a perfect pairing of up and coming dancers in an iconic institution working together with boundary pushing, emerging choreographers waiting to burst on the scene. These five works are part of a 16 year tradition for the Joffrey of selecting and funding ALAAN (African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Native American) choreographers to create their vision in collaboration with the Grainger Academy, the only student training program that’s fully owned and operated by the Joffrey Ballet. And all of this is part of the Joffrey’s larger mission: Joffrey for All, which promotes ‘diversity and innovation in the dance world.’
It’s an iconic award from an iconic institution that features immensely talented dancers and choreographers coming together to present truly new things for their audience. And winning isn’t just about making the pieces - winning choreographers has launched careers. What you’re seeing then, is the beginning of great new things.
This year’s winners are Fran Diaz, Julia Feldman, DaYoung Jung, Daniel Ojeda and Alexandra Schooling. Each winner spent time in residence at the Grainger Academy working with the dancers and Joffrey staff to create something new based on their own inspiration and vision, returning in March to fine-tune for opening night.
DaYoung’s piece, To Carry Our Own Names was almost sculptural, with beautiful and evocative lighting by David Goodman-Edberg. Principal dancers melted into each other, and even when the full ensemble was on stage, there were quiet individual moments happening in different corners. It felt as though the corps always breathed and moved as one, and there were beautiful moments where the entire group amassed into beautiful, impeccably lit shapes. It felt as though there was a strength in the community of dancers, and yet each was given an individual moment of proud presentation - perhaps, to carry their own names.
The second piece was called Hushed Power, by Alexandra Schooling. This piece was actually inspired by sand, and the all female cast wore blazing copper costumes created by the Joffrey Ballet Costume shop. The soundtrack was wildly varied throughout the piece, and featured works by Claude Debussy, Gregor Quendel, Christian Sinding and an anonymous choir.
Schooling, in her video intro, mentioned the dichotomous nature of sand - that it could be both soft and abrasive, and that stuck in my mind as I observed the choreography - dancers tumbled noiselessly in broken yet graceful poses, drifted as though carried by wind, and at times took on more staccato, abrasive movements. Shapes shifted as in dunes, and moments of extreme grace on the part of the dancers were interrupted by a sharp mechanical buzzing. As I let myself explore the theme in my mind, I started to think about erosion, and how even a small, soft single grain of sand, over time, can carve mountains, and how that ties in to the hushed power of femininity.
Daniel Ojeda’s winning work, Visitors, blew my mind in such a profound way that I can hardly adequately convey it here. If you pick up a ticket for Winning Works for nothing else but this piece, it will be worth the price of admission. Ojeda, who started life as a musical theater kid before becoming a principal dancer and choreographer at the Idaho ballet, has crafted something incredible with “Visitors.”
Every single moment of this piece is burned in my brain, beginning with its opening, which sees a single spotlit dancer, eerily, stoically walking off stage. She’s too slow to seem real, and too silent and non-emotive. A male dancer follows her, desperately, but doesn’t reach her. It feels like a fever dream or a particularly cinematic nightmare.
Suddenly, lights go up, and latin music plays. The corps is alive with bright music and dancing. It’s as though we’re somewhere else entirely, but our eerie disappearing girl is still slowly leaving the stage, and our dreamer, in his pajamas, is mystified, and confused. The ensemble, meanwhile, is almost aggressively upbeat, and seems almost callous to our dreamer, who’s still trying to reach her, even as he’s being grabbed at and enticed to dance with them. As if too exhausted to resist, he joins in with a few partners, and the scene suddenly changes again.
This time, our female soloist is seated in a rolling chair, spotlit on an otherwise dark stage, until the ensemble arrives and envelops her until she’s mostly invisible to us. Our dreamer runs to them, and to her, but as he goes to break through the mass of people, they almost violently burst forth into a rock number, with music by The BOMB Pulse. Again, at certain points, our dreamer is compelled to participate but still earnestly chases her. People run by at dizzying speed, trying to pull him in different directions – until he reaches her, pulling her up to stand beside him. She’s there, but she isn’t, and spends equal time dancing beautifully and being almost pulled or carried along by him, until one final turn, a beautiful lift, gentle return, and fade to black.
Simply put, this is a masterpiece, incorporating a sort of sad, bleak, surreal cinematography a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with a frantic, delirious and sinister happiness that’s unsettling by design. Impeccably lit, beautifully danced, and packed with longing and desperation, it’s something that makes me absolutely crave more from this choreographer, and sends me to the internet after to make sure I follow his work - because I can’t remember the last time - and perhaps this is the first time - I’ve felt so absolutely, overwhelmingly captured by a dance piece.
While it might seem hard to follow something like that, Julia Feldman’s piece, Èclat, underpinned by a lush John Adams composition, is all about grandeur and hearkens back to a more classical understanding of ballet. As its name suggests, and as was reinforced by Feldman, this is about grandeur and beauty. And it lives up to its name. Dancers in flowing white gowns fill up the stage as they turn, spin and are lifted through the air. Gorgeous, time stopping leaps that are full of power and energy but land as if the performers are weightless. It’s a feast for the eyes and an embarrassment of riches – a full on smorgasbord of the beauty of ballet, performed by some absolutely ridiculously talented students who take on the full mantle of the Joffrey’s reputation with effortless grace.
Rounding out the show was Fran Diaz’s ‘A Strange House We Must Keep and Fill’ which takes Feldman’s idea and turns it on its ear a little bit. It’s about virtuosity, Diaz emphasizes in his video intro – but not such as we know it. Instead, it’s about virtuosity through more common steps and techniques, rather than intricacies and complexities. Performing “normal movements” or common ones, at least, in a virtuosic way.
I think Diaz’s piece takes our Grainger Academy dancers furthest out of their “norm” as far as technique goes, and genre. It’s unrelenting, hard, and leans into street or funk dancing. It’s aggressive and bold, quick and sharp. One of the things I love about this for ballet dancers is that it removes the illusion of softness and perfection and reminds us that nobody goes harder than a ballet dancer - bleeding for their art is an everyday thing, not a thing worth even mentioning, and the amount of strength and muscle it takes to do things that feel floaty and effortless translates into a commanding presence and power in a piece like this.
Make no mistake- this is demanding precision and only gets faster and more involved as it goes along, but it’s something entirely different than we see, both in posture and movement, for a ballet troupe, and something interesting, imposing and refreshing.
I hesitate to bring current events like Timothee Chalamet's blatantly ignorant comments about ballet and opera into a review of this magnificent set of performances, but Winning Works is the exact reason why you should care about art, including traditional forms like ballet and opera – and the exact reason you will, if you’re willing to immerse yourself and listen to what these exciting new voices have to say.
Winning Works runs from March 13th to the 26th at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Chicago, and tickets for this (if you’re local) can be acquired here.