Kansas City Ballet: Pulse

Kansas City Ballet: Pulse at Muriel Kauffman Theatre - Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

When Jerome Robbins set dancers moving to Philip Glass, he captured the way a single repeating rhythm can build into something hypnotic and irresistible. Glass Pieces brings that pulse to the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts as part of Kansas City Ballet's May triple bill, with the Kansas City Symphony performing live alongside every turn and leap.

The program pairs Robbins with George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, a modernist work that matches Paul Hindemith's music to the temperaments that shape human personality—melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric—each expressed through sharply different movement. Together, these two legends of American ballet offer a study in how sound becomes motion, how rhythm drives the body, and how structure creates beauty.

Rounding out the evening is a world-premiere work by Melissa Hough, completing a curated program by Devon Carney that celebrates the choreographer's relationship to the score. The music drives the design here: Glass's minimalism, Hindemith's angular modernism, and whatever sonic landscape Hough has chosen for her new creation.

Kansas City gets this rare combination of repertory classics and original choreography with a full orchestra in the pit, turning the Muriel Kauffman Theatre into a space where dancers and musicians share the same heartbeat. Get Pulse tickets and enjoy Glass’s rhythmic drive through Robbins’s choreography.