About the work
"Visionary Dances" is a triple bill by the Vienna State Ballet, which premiered on 28 March 2026 at the Vienna State Opera. It unites three choreographers who have each found an individual approach to the academic dance tradition and taken classical ballet into new dimensions: Justin Peck, Wayne McGregor and Twyla Tharp. The three pieces are choreographed to music by Bohuslav Martinů, Leonard Bernstein and Philip Glass respectively, spanning four decades of contemporary ballet.
Plot
Justin Peck's "Heatscape" is inspired by the differing "temperatures" of human relationships and the energetic streets of Miami; together with street artist Shepard Fairey, Peck fuses ballet and street art. Wayne McGregor's "Yugen" – after Leonard Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms", made in collaboration with the ceramist and writer Edmund de Waal – explores, with eleven dancers, a mysterious, profound grace. The evening closes with Twyla Tharp's "In the Upper Room", to music by Philip Glass, which celebrates its fortieth anniversary in 2026; Tharp was among the first to unite the classical and modern dance worlds.
Cultural significance
"Visionary Dances" gathers three of the most influential choreographic signatures of the present and the late twentieth century – the American neoclassicist Justin Peck, the British innovator Wayne McGregor and the pioneer Twyla Tharp. With "In the Upper Room", one of the most famous works of the modern dance repertoire, and two more recent pieces, the evening shows how classical ballet has been continually reinvented since the 1980s. For the Vienna State Ballet the programme marks a connection to the international cutting edge of contemporary ballet.