Dance of all Kinds

New TITAS/Dance Unbound season brings international debuts to Dallas

The 2026-2027 TITAS/Dance Unbound season will include 10 performances, including French company Hervé Koubi.

Photo by Sharen Bradford

The 2026-2027 TITAS/Dance Unbound season will once again have an international feel, featuring nine companies from four different countries that will include four Dallas debuts.

Now entering its fifth decade, TITAS strives to showcase diverse, exciting, and unexpected dance work from around the world.

According to a release, the 10-performance season will kick off with a co-production from Broadway at the Center's recently-announced season, Dance Me - The Music of Leonard Cohen from Ballets Jazz Montréal.

Developed with the personal blessing of singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, Dance Me is a translation of a legend’s soul into physical form. Through movement, they capture the mood and essence that made Cohen such an icon.

There will be three performances on September 18 and 19, 2026 at Moody Performance Hall.

November brings the return of Pilobolus, last seen in Dallas in a 2023 outdoor performance at Nasher Sculpture Center.

This visit, taking place on November 6 and 7, 2026 at Moody Performance Hall, will be with Trips, featuring a journey through gravity-defying feats, explosive athleticism, physical poetry, and sly humor.

Alonzo King Lines Ballet pays an encore visit to Dallas on December 19, 2026 at Winspear Opera House.

Choreographer King infuses classical ballet with new expressive potential, and draws on a diverse set of deeply rooted traditions and cultural collaborations to create something fresh, powerful, and unforgettable.

Making its Dallas debut will be Step Afrika!, coming to Moody Performance Hall on January 15 and 16, 2027.

Stepping started in the early 1900s on historically black college campuses, and Step Afrika! has drawn on that tradition in their jaw-dropping, creative, and joyful performances.

Next up will be Alan Lake Factori(e), presented as part of the TITAS/Unfiltered series on February 5 and 6, 2027 at Moody Performance Hall.

The Canadian company will perform Orpheus, in which choreographer Lake, explores the redemptive power of art through an immersive world where image, movement, light, and physical materials all come together.

The TITAS/Unfiltered series features bold, progressive work that challenges expectations, enthralls audiences, and sparks conversation.

Another company making its Dallas debut will be Argentina's Social Tango Project, performing at Moody Performance Hall on February 26 and 27, 2027.

With 10 dancers, five musicians, and the meaningful participation of local tango communities in every city they visit, Social Tango celebrates not just the beauty and complexity of tango, but the heart and spirit behind it.

The French company Hervé Koubi will present What the Day Owes to the Night on March 27, 2027 at Winspear Opera House.

Koubi’s signature work blends capoeira, martial arts, urban dance, and contemporary movement into something entirely its own, featuring 12 male dancers flipping, flying, and seemingly defying gravity - and expectations - at every turn.

The U.S.-based Yue Yin Dance Company will makes its Texas debut on April 2 and 3, 2027 at Moody Performance Hall.

Founder Yue Yin uses a movement vocabulary she calls the "FOCO Technique," a contemporary dance language rooted in Chinese classical and folk traditions and shaped by the layered influences of the immigrant experience.

Wrapping up the season will be the Dallas debut of Philadanco! on May 8, 2027 at Winspear Opera House.

Founded in 1970 by Joan Myers Brown, The Philadelphia Dance Company - aka Philadanco! - is celebrated for its creativity and fresh ideas, bringing people together through dance.

Additionally, TITAS/Dance Unbound will put on their annual Command Performance on April 24, 2027 at Winspear Opera House.

The special event features artists from leading companies and commissioned works created specifically for this gala performance by some of the world’s leading choreographers.

Throughout the season, TITAS will make direct-access learning available to the public through pre- and post-performance Q&As, master classes, lecture/demonstrations, student matinees and Big Barre outdoor dance classes.

Season subscriptions, which range from $213-$760, are on sale now and can be purchased by phone at 214-880-0202 and online at attpac.org/titas.

Subscribers receive special perks, including a 20 percent discount on single tickets, free ticket insurance, discounted parking rates, and seat assurance all season long.

Single tickets for TITAS/Dance Unbound, ranging from $14-$140 at Winspear Opera House and $30-$80 at Moody Performance Hall, will go on sale on a TBD date in summer 2026.

dance dance unbound season performing-arts

A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

dso luisi ring wagner recording concerts music symphony

Dance of all Kinds

New TITAS/Dance Unbound season brings international debuts to Dallas

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Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

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