Oklahoma City Ballet and The Flaming Lips Fuse Ballet and Psychedelic Rock

It’s a technicolor rock fantasy: the first-ever ballet set entirely to music by The Flaming Lips, the psychedelic-rock band that Oklahoma City proudly calls its own.

In concert fashion, shifting colored light-beams will pulse to rock-and-roll beats as dancers—at times placed in the band’s trademark clear-plastic “space bubbles”—move against rotating set pieces that show a cosmic explosion of fuchsia, tangerine, and cerulean, then a trippy rainbow hovering over pink cotton-candy clouds.

Oklahoma City Ballet’s world premiere Flaming Lips: The Ballet is part of SHORTS, the company’s 2024–25 season closer. The program, running May 9–11 at Oklahoma City’s Civic Center Music Hall, also features Stephanie Martinez’s Otra Vez, Otra Vez, Otra Vez and George Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15.

OKCB artistic director Ryan Jolicoeur-Nye says that collaborating with the three-time Grammy-winning group, led by frontman Wayne Coyne, has inspired him to think differently. “He is so fearless and inventive and creative,” he says of Coyne. “Just looking at him as an artist, I feel more emboldened to take risks, knowing he’s not afraid to do that.” Jolicoeur-Nye hopes the band’s exuberant creativity will help give OKCB a new look and style that may change the way the company is perceived.

The idea for Flaming Lips: The Ballet came from a conversation with OKCB board members about bringing larger audiences to mixed-repertoire programs. The Flaming Lips came up, and Jolicoeur-Nye ran with it. (He has been a fan of the band since he was a teenager, playing the guitar and dreaming of becoming a rock star.) When he pitched the idea to the Lips, he says, they loved it.

To start, Jolicoeur-Nye revisited the band’s catalogue and compiled a playlist that spanned three decades of its music. He chose songs that revealed facets of an overarching theme: the oddity of human existence. “It’s both beautiful and scary,” he says. “It’s unexpected. It’s ridiculous.”

The piece invites audiences to experience emotions felt in different stages of life: how a naïve young person may reflect on a past choice they now regret, or how an adult, shouldering responsibilities, loses touch with their dreams. Or the heartbreak of emotional disconnection. It touches on the absurd with a tap number to the band’s 1993 freak-rock hit “She Don’t Use Jelly” and ends in what Jolicoeur-Nye describes as a full-cast cathartic release that’s “chaotic, imperfect, and wildly celebratory.”

At the ballet’s emotional core is “Do You Realize??” (Oklahoma’s official rock song from 2009–2013). The section features dancers from the company’s Dance for Parkinson’s program whose ages range from 55 to over 80. It’s a statement about who can dance onstage, Jolicoeur-Nye says, and, more broadly, the fleeting nature of youth and of life.

“After a diagnosis like Parkinson’s,” says Jolicoeur-Nye, “it must feel like the best parts of your life are behind you. I thought, The stage is a place for dancers, and what is dance? Dance is really a human expression, not necessarily just an athletic human expression. One day we will all get to a place where our body starts to deteriorate and we rely on others for help. We come into the world the same way, and we leave the world the same way.”

Jolicoeur-Nye agrees that Flaming Lips: The Ballet reflects a trend toward ballet and rock crossovers in recent years. When moving in this direction, he’s learned to walk a fine line. “I have seen people like Trey McIntyre and Twyla Tharp do rock music brilliantly, and I have seen other choreographers do it and it just sort of feels like a gimmick,” he says. “You have to be unpredictable, and also give the people what they want. You have to know what they want before they know it.”