Kansas City Ballet: Pulse

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

A composer confronts human moods through movement. Paul Hindemith's score for The Four Temperaments divides personality into melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric types, and George Balanchine answers with choreography that doesn't illustrate emotion—it embodies it. Kansas City Ballet brings Balanchine's modernist vision to the Muriel Kauffman Theatre alongside Jerome Robbins and a world-premiere work by Melissa Hough, performed with the Kansas City Symphony live onstage.

Hough's new piece joins two titans without trying to hide. Balanchine strips classical ballet to its essentials, revealing how a flexed foot or angular port de bras can express what words flatten. Robbins does something else entirely in Glass Pieces: he builds rhythm and movement around Philip Glass's hypnotic minimalism, letting repetition turn into its own kind of drama.

The triple bill works because each choreographer sees differently. Balanchine maps the mind. Robbins catches the pulse of a culture in motion. Hough adds discovery—her choreography unknown, her musical choice still unannounced, the work itself waiting to be encountered for the first time. Devon Carney curated the program to set these voices beside one another, not to make them agree.

The Symphony performs live, which means the music doesn't accompany the dancing—it converges with it. Grab your ticket for Kansas City Ballet's Pulse at the Kauffman Center.