Tulsa Ballet: Casanova
Tulsa Performing Arts Center
March 29, 2026
As someone who remembers a time when it was considered risky for Tulsa Ballet to show two men partnering each other onstage, I was ecstatic to see Casanova hit the TPAC last weekend, complete with marketing that didn’t apologize for but leaned into the ballet’s sex appeal. Family-friendly productions are bread and butter for ballet companies, but there’s room for so much more. As it gets ready to perform five already-sold-out shows during its first-ever appearance at London’s Royal Opera House in May, Tulsa Ballet is taking “more” seriously.
How can an elite historic organization performing an elite historic art stay connected with today’s audiences? Like this: by reimagining what the art form can do for them. TB is gambling that people want to see something real now and then in a story ballet, not just fairy tale fantasies. It’s a smart move on several levels, as the company reaches toward audiences it maybe hasn’t reached before, and gives regular customers something that feels fresh, provocative, and personal, on a grand scale.
Tulsa Ballet has been experimenting with big, bold narrative ballets for years now, and in British choreographer Kenneth Tindall they’ve found a strong partner who’s built a repertoire for his own company, Northern Ballet, that reimagines old stories in new ways, with visual effects and set designs that rival Broadway’s best. Casanova, created for Northern Ballet in 2017, hits a sweet spot here with a period piece that brought the sensual dimension to the front. And Tulsa was ready: the applause at the end of Sunday’s performance went longer and louder than I’ve heard at the ballet in quite a while.
The promised sexiness of Casanova wasn’t a stunt or a tease but something very tangible, set in an 18th-century Venice I could almost smell, with huge columns of tarnished gold and costumes in shapes and colors that I wanted to run my hands all over. Monks and priests and nuns were as heat-inducing here, in their sleeveless robes, as the courtesans in their crinoline cage skirts and saturated stockings. (It wasn’t just apples getting tasted on those tables in Act Two.) European history is not a pure and holy place; it’s more often impure and unholy, and Casanova, based on a biography of the man himself, invited us to look at that head-on. In the world of this ballet, religious institutions harbored corruption. Society exploited the labor of women and sex workers, among many others. The powerful silenced the vulnerable to protect the privileges of their own cabal. This is part of European fine art's heritage, just as much as Sleeping Beauty is.
The hums of pleasure I heard during intermission conversations weren’t mainly about the dancers locking around and spilling over each other in every possible configuration, the hungry eyes and thighs and biceps. They were about the show’s theatrical, world-evoking alchemy: the costumes and sets by Christopher Oram that played with every glint of Alastair West’s jaw-dropping designs for light and shadow; the simple movable architecture that created moods from menace to ecstasy as the pieces shifted; the thrumming cinematic score by Kerry Muzzey; the movement that drew ballet technique into forms that looked like something from a music video, fluid and grounded and full of specific motifs (especially for hands and feet) that helped our eyes track ideas throughout the performance. Tulsa Ballet has a wonder on its hands in Rebekah Peddy, who as Director of Production kept all these elements perfectly titrated in a liquid landscape.