Read the program essay by Lauren Earline Leonard for The Four Seasons Reimagined, debuting this week at our Festival at Highmark Mann, Jun. 4-5.
To hear her tell it, Christine Cox’s most powerful and human life experiences have been in and with nature. BalletX’s Artistic & Executive Director says that this profound relationship inspired The Four Seasons Reimagined, debuting at the company’s Festival at Highmark Mann. Cox describes the full-length work as a “physical love letter to Mother Nature…a full four-course meal of creativity, perspective, and unique choices.” Four visionary choreographers have each put their signature on our human experience of summer, fall, winter, and spring. “When we talked in the beginning, there was this idea of the cyclical nature of things, the cycle of the seasons, the beauty of rebirth and renewal,” Cox says.
The Four Seasons Reimagined is set to original compositions by Baltimore-based electronic musician and performer Dan Deacon, with sets and costumes by Emma Kingsbury. Deacon collaborated with BalletX in 2023 on Justin Peck’s Become a Mountain and expressed in conversation with Cox—someone with whom he feels a creative kinship—an eagerness to work together again. Deacon didn’t grow up loving Vivaldi and was hesitant to create yet another version of his well known masterpiece. He found his entry point into the music by imagining the world in which Vivaldi lived and how his compositions have been heard by generations across centuries. The resulting compositions are unique, but bear traces of the original. Deacon and his eight-person band will play live for all seasons except “Winter,” which will feature a solo player piano.
The show opens with “Summer” and closes with “Spring,” a necessary deviation from Vivaldi’s composition to time our current season with the premiere, as well as the sense of possibility so many of us associate with pushing bulbs and flowering trees: The program is part of a 20th anniversary season that is, yes, a retrospective—but also a harbinger of creativity and new life to come.
The choreographers of The Four Seasons Reimagined had full autonomy to create their dances, though Cox requested that some include pointe work to highlight the deep technical ability of the company. She also encouraged them to find their own storylines. Morgann Runacre-Temple’s “Summer” gives us blossoming flowers and growth. Penny Saunders explores the withering and change inherent to Fall. Jamar Roberts explores shapes of isolation, breaking branches, and pushing through the weight of snow in “Winter.” Finally, Trey McIntyre contemplates individuality and the randomness of nature through prompts that invite improvisation and playfulness in “Spring.”
Despite working independently, the choreographers managed some wonderful symmetry among the seasons. In “Spring” and “Summer,” for instance, there are pairings, lifts, and touches that look to Cox like “sisters of Mother Earth coming together.” She describes elsewhere in the work a flutter of hands that looks like “leaves or birds trickling down off a tree,” and movement resembling “a prayer to the sky…just beautiful, simple and complex choices.”
When I visited Cox at the BalletX studios in mid-May, Saunders was conducting afternoon rehearsal on her first day in the studio. The three other seasons were complete. The creative and production team will have come together at Highmark Mann just days before opening to do run-throughs and see how the seasons pass and transition into one another.
As a venue, Highmark Mann challenges BalletX to present the intimate work it’s known for in a bigger space—compared to the 362-seat Suzanne Roberts Theatre on South Broad Street, the Mann has 4,500 covered seats and a total capacity of 14,000 including the lawn—for a broader audience. What felt like a risk last summer now delights Cox. She’s feeling “ignited…everyone is here. It’s right.”
All tickets to the Festival are $25. For Cox this bigger, broader series is part of the company’s commitment to the city of Philadelphia. The value in removing a cost barrier, she says, is “the hope that people will bring their friends and leave with something that they may never forget.”
In addition to being part of BalletX’s 20th anniversary season, The Four Seasons Reimagined coincides with America’s semiquincentennial. In Philadelphia—the epicenter of the celebrations—the moment has led to feelings of pride, but also deep reflection on our history, solemnness about our present, and worry about our future. We have the attention of the rest of the nation and the world at a time of great upheaval—of cultural, political, economic, and environmental uncertainty—a time where we need artists and cultural institutions to shine light in the darkness and remind us what’s possible.
The Four Seasons Reimagined will premiere after the first forecasted heat wave of what will likely be a long, hot Philadelphia summer. According to the Department of Environmental Protection, by mid-century, the average temperature in Pennsylvania is expected to increase by 6.7°F. Predictions are that heat waves will become more frequent and more intense. It will rain less frequently, but when it does, it will pour. From the Delaware River to Lake Erie, coastlines will erode as water levels rise. Here and across the nation, the seasons that have for centuries ordered our lives are being altered. The cyclical beauty of Cox’s mantra of “rebirth and renewal,” is always with us, a fertile place from which artistic expression sprouts. We cannot control the world, but we can choose how we move through its seasons.
The next phase of this grand American experiment will test our values, ideals, and infrastructure, as well as our relationships to one another, and with Mother Nature. The opportunity, the invitation, offered by BalletX this summer at Highmark Mann and beyond, is to be present. To share in the ephemerality of our collective experience. “To live life together,” says Cox, “in a moment that will never come back again.”
The world premiere of The Four Seasons Reimagined debuts June 4-5, 2026 at BalletX’s Festival at Highmark Mann. Co-commissioned with ArtPhilly’s What Now: 2026 Festival and Highmark Mann, in honor of America250. Supported in part by Saratoga Performing Arts Center.
