Cape Ballet Africa Presents Elysium, A Four-Work Ballet Programme

What changed

Cape Ballet Africa is presenting Elysium, a four-work programme at Cape Town’s Baxter until 10 October 2026. The bill opens with George Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante, includes a new work by Kenneth Tindall, and features Nacho Duato’s three-man ballet Remanso.

Tindall created We Met at the Moon, Briefly during two weeks with the Cape Town dancers. Its music moves between Bryce Dessner, Gustave Rudman and Max Richter, while barefoot beach exercises helped shape its physical language.

Why it matters

Elysium treats ballet less like a museum piece than a live argument. Balanchine supplies the precision: thirteen minutes of speed, control and classical grace set to Tchaikovsky. Tindall pushes that vocabulary towards something more fluid and contemporary, with sliding feet, extended legs and formations that keep the stage in motion.

That contrast is the programme’s real subject. The dancers are not being asked to choose between immaculate technique and emotional freedom. They are using the first to reach the second.

Tindall’s process also gives the new work an unusually grounded starting point. The beach exercises were not decorative research; they were a way of finding movement that felt organic before it was refined into choreography. The result, as staged, is athletic but not cold, sleek but still searching.

The title promises paradise, and the production appears most persuasive when it makes that promise physical. In Allegro Brillante, joy arrives through speed and ensemble precision. In We Met at the Moon, Briefly, it comes through lift, glide and the feeling that the dancers are reaching beyond the limits of the stage. Remanso, inspired by García Lorca and set to Enrique Granados’s Valses Poéticos, brings a quieter Spanish inflection to the bill.

The fourth work is not identified in the available details, but the programme’s shape is clear: Cape Ballet Africa is using one evening to show how classical ballet can keep changing without losing its power to astonish.