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Arts Intel Report

Vienna State Ballet: Visionary Dances

Dancers of the Vienna State Ballet.

Mar 27 – Apr 17, 2026
Opernring 2, 1010 Wien, Austria

You could say that every ballet is a vision, but this program in Vienna, “Visionary Dances,” seems to be reaching for something beyond sight. It begins with Justin Peck’s Heatscape, made for the Miami City Ballet in 2015 and evoking sun, sand, and energy at a boil. The middle work is Wayne McGregor’s 2018 Yugen—the word is Japanese and means “mysterious or profound grace.” The ballet is choreographed to Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms (1965). A choral work sung in Hebrew, it ends with the words “Together in unity.” Edmund de Waal, a potter of fine porcelain who also creates ethereal installations for museums, designed the set of tall open-air vitrines—sacred spaces for the dancers to enter. Yugen opens the way for Twyla Tharp’s 1986 supernova, In the Upper Room. It launches the audience into an ecstatic, driven, glassy (as in Philip), and transcendent (as in the Bible) realm of light, fog, and perpetual, perhaps eternal, movement. —Laura Jacobs

Photo: Kosmas Pavlos