Are you ready for a refreshing LIVE dance experience? We are! This May, Kansas City Ballet welcomes you to Starlight Theatre for a 70-minute performance uniquely designed to tantalize your sense of adventure. All ballets on the program are brand new works by extraordinarily gifted choreographers, including KC Ballet’s Artistic Director Devon Carney, KC Ballet Masters Kristi Capps and Parrish Maynard, Principal Dancer at Houston Ballet Melody Mennite, KCB II Manager Christopher Ruud, and KC Ballet Company dancers Emily Mistretta and James Kirby Rogers. These outdoor performances will be an exciting opportunity to experience live ballet on stage once again.

Kansas City Ballet would like to extend a very special offer to our community in celebration of essential and front-line workers with a FREE performance Saturday, May 22 at 2 p.m. as our way of thanking them for all their vital work this past year. Reservations are required and can be made online at kcstarlight.com or by calling the Starlight Theatre Box Office at (816) 363‑7827. FREE parking for the matinee performance is available. Use promo code: KCCARES

Masks, social distancing, and safety protocols will be required at all performances.

These performances are sponsored in part by BOK Financial, Missouri Arts Council, Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts.

Are you ready for a refreshing LIVE dance experience? We are! This May, Kansas City Ballet welcomes you to Starlight Theatre for a 70-minute performance uniquely designed to tantalize your sense of adventure. All ballets on the program are brand new works by extraordinarily gifted choreographers, including KC Ballet’s Artistic Director Devon Carney, KC Ballet Masters Kristi Capps and Parrish Maynard, Principal Dancer at Houston Ballet Melody Mennite, KCB II Manager Christopher Ruud, and KC Ballet Company dancers Emily Mistretta and James Kirby Rogers. These outdoor performances will be an exciting opportunity to experience live ballet on stage once again.

Masks, social distancing, and safety protocols will be required at all performances.

Tickets available at https://www.kcstarlight.com/events/event-detail-production/kansas-city-ballet-at-starlight/

Explosive energy dominates the work of Sarah Krepp and Olivia Petrides. Krepp locates a powerful gesture in found materials, in blown-out shredded tires which are gathered from highway debris. Blow-outs force the wires, embedded in the rubber, into writhing gesticulations of accumulated stress. Petrides utilizes simple tools and the basic element of drawing – the line — to enact roiling abstractions of overwhelming natural forces into baroque masses. Both artists see aggressive marking as an emblematic carrier of immense forces within urban and natural environments. Petrides and Krepp achieve a linear complexity, referencing turbulent atmospheres and tangled social workings, thus posing questions about the relationship between human actions and nature’s limitations.

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My drawings are immersive large-scale abstractions based on travels to magnificent natural phenomena such as volcanoes, icebergs, glaciers, caves, and the aurora borealis. I am interested in how nostalgic evocations of the transcendent resonate with contemporary social pressures on the environment: What is awe and wonder when saturated with guilt and regret? Me images utilize dramatic Romantic suggestions of the infinite and the sublime, which then collapse into shifting tensions that mirror our current uncertain engagement with nature. — Olivia Petrides

With these visually complex, sometimes compacted, sometimes expansive works, I strive for a different kind of communication where a poetic dynamic is felt before the content is understood. It becomes twofold. In some works, the bending and almost lyrical tire forms I couple with needlepoint stitches in the shadows and interstices. With this I look to set up an interplay between the brute/power of the road and the delicate/vulnerability of domestic handicraft. Retread blown-out tires are representative of the all-American landscape. I seek to question our indulgent contemporary society as well as present an aesthetically dynamic experience. — Sarah Krepp

Spectrum is a collection of artworks produced nearly entirely in Kansas City, Missouri over the last decade. This exhibition is intended as an immersion, a memoir, and a thank you to this place.

I have habitually brought the past into a contemporary context as an opportunity to reflect, to heal, and more often than not, as an American, to beg forgiveness. This thrilling moment we inhabit in history provides an opportunity for reconciliation with our collective story in order to imagine a future that functions more fully for every one of us. The newest work explores these same interactions in a more personal way. The pandemic forced a quiet space for deep reflection, forgiveness, and gratitude, as well as illuminating the path to an ongoing conversation around personal responsibility. — Christel Highland