Get ready to dance into the New Year as Segerstrom Center for the Arts presents the Winter Dance portion of their 2024/2025 Dance Series featuring four remarkable dance performances in Segerstrom Hall.
These performances include the groundbreaking work of the Martha Graham Dance Company celebrating 100 years of riveting performances, the innovative choreography and breathtaking energy of Alonzo King LINES Ballet, and the honoring of a dance legend with Twyla Tharp’s 60th Anniversary, commemorating six decades of her extraordinary contributions to the world of dance featuring a cast of over 100 performers.
Tickets for Winter Dance performances start at $44.07 and are available for purchase online at www.scfta.org, in person at 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, and by phone at (714) 556-2787.
Martha Graham Dance Company | January 18, 2025
Known as one of the most influential forces of the 20th century, Martha Graham presented her first performance on April 18, 1926. Since that date, considered to be the launch of the Martha Graham Dance Company, Graham’s groundbreaking and uniquely American style of dance has influenced generations of artists and continues to captivate audiences worldwide.
To celebrate its Centennial, the Company is organizing an extensive series of programs and events exploring the diversity and depth of Graham’s extraordinary artistic legacy. GRAHAM100 will feature performances, new productions, exhibitions, film screenings, and more activities that build on the Company’s legacy of innovation and its present and future vision.
GRAHAM100 continues in 2024–25, curated under the theme Dances of the Mind, focusing on Graham’s psychological works, multifaceted women characters, and longtime artistic partnership with renowned visual artist Isamu Noguchi. Works to be presented—including “Phaedra” (1962), “Errand into the Maze” (1947), and “Herodiade” (1944)—foreground Graham’s command of complex ideas illustrated in movement and augmented with modernist sets and original scores. Graham’s long and fruitful collaboration with Noguchi will be explored on stage and through audience engagement.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | February 7, 2025
Alonzo King LINES Ballet pays tribute to the iconic Alice Coltrane—spiritual leader, composer, pianist, and harpist—and the imaginative storytelling of Maurice Ravel in Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) through King’s electrifying choreography.
Since childhood, King has been captivated by Coltrane’s music, even choreographing one of his first pieces to her work. Now, he’s diving back into her legacy to create a ballet with Coltrane’s masterpieces, including Journey In Satchidananda—recognized as one of Rolling Stone’s greatest albums—A Monastic Trio, Universal Consciousness, and Ptah, the El Daoud, continue to inspire.
Additionally, the program highlights King’s recent collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony, where dancers explore Ravel’s enchanting 1912 suite Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) with a fresh twist. “I’m not trying to recreate Mother Goose fairy tales,” King explains. “My goal is to uncover the deeper allegorical meanings behind them and bring those to life through dance.
Twyla Tharp 60th Anniversary | February 15 & 16, 2025
Showcasing Tharp’s uncanny and witty use of music to create work of startling originality and beauty, these two performances once again ensure Tharp’s place as one of the great artists of our time. Don’t miss this groundbreaking evening of stellar dancing and phenomenal musicianship. The first and only choreographer to take on the intensely demanding and demonically complex “Diabelli Variations,” Tharp makes visible the elegant humor and depth of the composer’s layered genius. With each section of the Beethoven piece, unique in mood and texture, Tharp’s response—tender, teasing, transcendent, cheeky—commands all of its performers’ technical prowess and energy as they change effortlessly from ballet to jazz, to modern, with unexpected bits of social and street dance for good measure.
Almost two centuries later, in years and spirit, is Philip Glass’s “Aguas da Amazonia,” arranged and recorded by members of Third Coast Percussion in close collaboration with Tharp and performed on a unique collection of custom-designed percussion instruments. This groundbreaking evening is not one to be missed and is sure to dazzle audiences with its stellar dancing and phenomenal musicianship.
