A Sensory Prelude to a Larger Mexican Tale | Kyle Davis & Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan NEXT STEP 2025

By Leah Terada

Ballet has always been more than movement; it is memory, mood, metaphor. But in Pas de Deux from an Unnamed Story, choreographers Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan and Kyle Davis invite audiences to go even further. They ask us to taste and smell, to feel, and to remember. Set in 1800s Veracruz, Mexico, this duet, premiering June 13th as part of PNB’s NEXT STEP program, ushers us into a world that feels at once intimate and expansive, quietly ambitious in its simplicity and scope.

The set is modest: a corridor of light slices through the stage, a scrim backdrop shifts with atmosphere, and warm candlelight hues evoke a sacred hush. But don’t mistake this minimalism for lack of detail. This piece is anything but bare. Every corner of this piece has been chosen with care, born from a reverence for place, history, and story. The sparseness becomes a kind of offering and a clearing for something special to emerge.

At the core of the work is an entirely new story, a rare ambition in ballet, crafted by Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan, of direct Mexican descent, alongside longtime PNB dancer and choreographer Kyle Davis. Inspired by the traditions of Día de Los Muertos, the ballet explores love, separation, and reunion through the perspective of two lovers in the port city of Veracruz. The pas de deux we see is the emotional climax of a larger full-length ballet in progress, an echo of what’s to come, and a stand-alone moment in a tenderhearted story.

The magic and brilliance of a simple set often lies in the use of lighting. From the first spotlight, the sensory world is unmistakable. The lighting becomes both stage and storyteller, casting the sacred glow of marigolds and ofrenda candles across the dancers. You can almost smell the copal incense, taste the warm spice of mole shared at a family’s ofrenda. These aren’t just aesthetic nods to tradition, they are cultural threads woven into the ballet’s fabric. Touch is perhaps the most tangible sense in this work. The pas de deux is a dance for two, but it’s also a farewell, a reunion, and perhaps, a memory lived again through movement. Their bodies speak before any story is told. Embraces linger and steps ground. Port de bras ripple like wind through papel picado (colorful perforated paper cutouts made to accompany an ofrenda and guide the deceased back to their family). The movement, though performed by classically trained ballet dancers, draws from the gestural rhythm of Mexican folk dance, creating a vocabulary that feels both traditional and new.
Even the unseen is felt. Though food never appears on stage, the ballet evokes the flavors and aromas of Veracruz, its coffee, its citrus, its stews and sweets, through suggestion and ceremony. These impressions live in the background, in the imagined lives of the characters, in the rituals they’ve known and the ones they’ve lost.

And then, of course, the music. The soul of this piece pulses in the works of Mexican composers Manuel M. Ponce and Macedonio Alcalá. Their melodies guide the movement not just in tempo, but in spirit. Ponce’s sentimental “Estrellita” (“Little Star” in English) and Alcalá’s waltz “Dios nunca muere” (“God Never Dies”) become the quintessence of the pas de deux. Ponce and Alcalá’s scores offer music that calls, music that waits, and music that remembers.

What Sarah-Gabrielle and Kyle have created isn’t just a pas de deux. It’s a proposition. That ballet can tell stories we haven’t yet seen on stage and that honoring culture is not about adornment, but depth. That heritage and innovation can hold hands. That we can sense, through performance, not only what happened, but what still lives. Pas de Deux from an Unnamed Story is an opening to a longer ballet, a personal lineage, and a shared history.

NEXT STEP has one performance only on June 13. Click here to get tickets.