All the Ballet in New York City Center’s 2025 Fall for Dance Festival
This year’s Fall for Dance Festival kicks off New York City Center’s ballet-heavy season with a bang. Running September 16–27, the multi-genre dance festival offers five unique programs that, together, span classical ballet to contemporary, tango, and jookin’. Every seat in the house is only $30, an attraction for new audiences interested in a diverse sampling.
Ballet fans can look forward to several New York and U.S. premieres, as well as appearances by dancers from New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Paris Opéra Ballet, Ballet BC, Dutch National Ballet, The Stuttgart Ballet, and more. (For both POB and DNB, Fall for Dance offers a taste of each company before their respective NYCC tours later in the fall; The Stuttgart Ballet is scheduled to tour John Cranko’s Onegin to the Kennedy Center October 8–12.) The full 2025 Fall for Dance program is available on the NYCC website.
Program 1, which runs September 16–17, opens with Jamar Roberts’ contemporary Dance Is A Mother, which includes Sara Mearns and premiered at her Artists at the Center program in April. In addition, San Francisco Ballet presents the New York premiere of Akram Khan’s Dust, which the company performed for the first time last February. The somber 23-member ensemble piece, commissioned by SFB artistic director Tamara Rojo while she was leading English National Ballet, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I at its London debut in 2014.
“Dust is a piece that recognizes the role of women during that time,” says Rojo. “How they took on running the household, the factories, the farms, the country. It kind of reverses the stereotypes of traditional ballet, in that it is mainly a female group. And it is a strong group.” Toward the end of the piece, when the men return from war, Rojo says there’s an exploration of what happens when two people who had a previous relationship meet again but are completely changed: “Is it possible to start again after something so traumatic?”
In Program 3 (September 20–21), Paris Opéra étoiles Hannah O’Neill and Hugo Marchand will perform Jerome Robbins’ neoclassical fixture Afternoon of a Faun. (Marchand will return to New York City Center in July 2026 as a curator and lead performer for his Artists at the Center program.) The following week, Ballet BC opens Program 4 (September 24–25) with the U.S. premiere of Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber’s Obsidian, a contemporary work about human connection that premiered in Vancouver last May. Set to an anthology of 1920s piano works by George Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann, the six-dancer piece was the choreographic duo’s first work for Ballet BC.
“I think audiences at Fall for Dance often look for discovery and intensity,” says Medhi Walerski, Ballet BC’s artistic director. “Obsidian is the right match because it’s powerful, it’s visceral, and it’s deeply human. It reflects the duality of strength and vulnerability in intimacy—Bobbi said it’s about love, and that’s not simple at all. In the end, we’re all trying to make sense of it, our need for it, and our loss of it.”
Dutch National Ballet principals Olga Smirnova and Jacopo Tissi will continue Program 4’s theme of love and relationships with the New York premiere of Rudi van Dantzig’s Romeo and Juliet balcony pas de deux. And in Program 5 (September 26–27), The Stuttgart Ballet performs Three for Hans, a three-part showcase of Hans van Manen’s neoclassical choreography featuring his Two Pieces for HET, Trois Gnossiennes, and Solo.
Walerski is excited for Ballet BC’s dancers to share the stage with a diverse group of performers. “It’s the buzz of having, for a short period of time, that special kind of connection between people across the dance world,” he says.
Rojo, who looks forward to showcasing a new range in SFB’s dancers and repertoire, agrees: “Fall for Dance is an opportunity to be inspired and see what other dancers, other choreographers, other companies are doing.”
