Tulsa Ballet: Creations in Studio K
Tulsa Ballet Studio K
September 13, 2026
“We’re a restless organization,” Marcello Angelini said in an introductory video before Creations in Studio K, which runs through this weekend to launch Tulsa Ballet’s 70th season, his last after more than three decades as artistic director. It’s fitting that this company’s headquarters—the home of the 295-seat Studio K—sits right on Tulsa’s Restless Ribbon, between the gleam of downtown and the sprawl of the suburbs, just as Tulsa rumbles in the middle of America’s great dance hubs.
The Shawnee-Peoria ballerina Moscelyne Larkin and the Polish premier danseur Roman Jasinski traveled the world as dancers before doing the most incongruous thing imaginable: starting a ballet company in Oklahoma in 1956. This year’s Creations in Studio K program, showcasing three contemporary works newly created for Tulsa Ballet, gives a nod to the full range of what the company is bringing with it into the future. These are all new pieces, but that restless history shines through them in a way that gives them depth and dimension.
I’m temperamentally disinclined to like a Route 66-themed ballet, but Ma Cong’s Route 66 won me over, in part because of the real-life story of its creator. Cong arrived in Tulsa from China in 1999 and spent 21 years with Tulsa Ballet, where he was beloved as a dancer and choreographer and is still remembered with affection, as signaled by the audience’s happy murmurs of recognition as he appeared onscreen in a pre-performance video. He’s gone on to become an American citizen and artistic director of Richmond Ballet, living in Virginia with the man he married here and their two sons. Sometimes dreams really do come true on the Mother Road.
Route 66 feels like a love letter to the dance of life that passes through Tulsa, ranging from sassy kicks from a passel of fellas (“King of the Road”) to deep-welling emotion (“At Last”) to a loose-limbed line-dance shuffle set to the wind-it-when-we-feel-like-it watch of “Tulsa Time.” Signature elements of Cong’s choreographic voice bloom like roadside primroses across this ballet: a main couple up front as other couples drift in and out behind them; formations that merge and blow apart with ease; limbs that fling out from a warm-hearted center. In jeans and gingham skirts, the dancers have believable fun with this work, whose Oklahoma-sky-inspired lighting by Julie Duro starts with a full-spectrum sunrise and ends with the company in silhouette, still dancing under a violet dusk.
The history of American ballet is studded with reflections on American life, from Billy the Kid and Filling Station and Rodeo (all of which Tulsa Ballet used to perform) to Paul Taylor’s Company B and Justin Peck’s millennial-coded The Times Are Racing. Route 66 fits comfortably into that lineage: it’s a crowd-pleasing romp, but it’s also a vibrant and emotional bit of storytelling by someone whose life was actually changed in this place.
In the middle of this year’s Creations program sits Yury Yanowsky’s (in-TER-stiss): industrial, architectural, equal parts night sky and concrete alley. The dance lineage here tracks back to William Forsythe and Wayne McGregor, with atmospheric notes of Blade Runner and a score full of whooshing whip cracks, synthy techno beats, and hints of thunderstorms and voices by Cologne-based artist Senking.