Don Quixote 2026: A Message from the Artistic Director
A quarter to ten on Harden Street, in Five Points. Our new studio is a storefront, and the whole front wall is glass. Company class started fifteen minutes ago, a dozen or more dancers at the barre, our ballet master, Sergei Zolotarev, teaching.
I’m out on the sidewalk with my daughter, Summer, on my hip. People walk by and glance in. A little girl and her mother stop. The girl puts both palms on the window, wide-eyed. She doesn’t notice me.
Through the glass, I catch the eye of Irene, who built this with me. She comes to the door, smiling at the girl like she’s been expecting her.
“Do you want to come in and watch?”
The girl looks up at her mother. Her mother asks her the same thing. The girl doesn’t say a word. She nods.
They come in and stand by the door.
Halfway through the barre I look over. The girl hasn’t moved, and one foot under her is pointing. Her mother is watching her daughter the way you watch your kid take her first steps. It’s how I watch Summer. At fourteen months, everything she does is new, and all of it is a performance.
At four that afternoon, six-year-olds are at the same barre, in the same spots.
Tonight, the professionals that girl watched through the glass are on this stage.
That studio exists because this season, for the first time, the company and its school are under one board of directors, with one vision. The school trains dancers for this company, and the company is in that studio every morning showing them what they’re training for. Our board made it possible.
This company is more than thirty years old, and Harden Street is its first home of its own. Don Quixote is the first full-length ballet made there.
Valeri Salnikov is dancing Don Quixote. When I was a boy just starting out, I took class in his studio, down the same street, here in Five Points. Years later he put on his first production of Don Quixote, and I danced Basilio, the young hero.
The scenery on this stage tonight is the scenery from that production. I stood in front of it once. Tonight, our dancers do.
They came from Brazil, Kenya, the Philippines, Russia, Ukraine, New York, and South Carolina. Most of them moved their lives here while we were opening the new space, with a lot still uncertain.
Sergei Zolotarev set this entire ballet from scratch in four weeks. Every run-through went top to bottom. Everyone in this cast knows the whole ballet.
This Don Quixote is theirs.
Don Quixote is an old man who believes in the old stories so hard he sees a giant where everyone else sees a windmill. Two kids are in love, and the only grown-up who takes them seriously is the old man everyone is laughing at.
They win because of him.
People walk past that window all day. Some stop and look in. That morning, the girl stopped.
When I was about ten, I sat in the Koger Center and watched a young Cuban dancer named Carlos Acosta dance Don Quixote on this stage. He went on to become one of the greatest dancers in the world. That night he jumped and spun in the air, and the sweat flew off him like a sprinkler. I didn’t understand how a body could do that. It seemed impossible. I thought of that night when I saw her face.
Giants.
Any weekday morning at 9:30, the window. Bring a child. Stand by the door.
Come in.
Joseph Phillips
Artistic Director