Ballet Austin is celebrating the 25th year of Artistic Director Stephen Mills — for his vision and artistic contributions to Austin’s creative identity. To begin, they staged a trio of his most seminal dance creations. As usual, the performance met the highest standards.
“I’m not really an anniversary kind of person,” said Mills, “but the team wanted to do something that would sort of work the milestone. Because 25 years is a long time. The goal was to do a little bit of looking backwards, but also do some looking forwards as well.”
Mills said the search was “really trying to find some marks of important work that to me felt like moments where we were as an organization – as a company in this community – making a big step forward or trying to do something that other people were not doing.
The performance at the Long Centre this past weekend, Series in Motion, forced Mills to choose carefully. “What would be the three works that I would want to revisit before putting them all away?”
Literal Glam is a work he made in 2008. “It utilizes the music of Philip Glass, who is to me the touchstone for my work, it has always been Philip Glass. The way he has defined the way we listen to music, whether you’re aware of it or not, is really present. So, he’s always been very important to me.
“The title liminal means that it sits in a space that’s neither classical ballet or modern ballet. The glam part is the glamorousness of the dancers, the way they look, the way they show themselves, the environment they’re in.”
“The middle work Four Mortal Men was the middle section of a work I made in 2018 called Exit Wounds, the premise of which was touching on moments in my life where I witnessed really supreme acts of courage and the way I watch people navigate. those difficult moments of their hearts.
“The music is by Claude Debussy. It is classified as impressionistic music: it is one of his string quartets. It is a piece of music that I heard maybe when I was 16, and I always remembered this music as being some of the most beautiful.”
The first work of this performance is Pink Confetti Dance. “I chose that because we didn’t perform it until 2022 because I prepared it to be shown at the end of March of 2020, but the pandemic shut us down, so we didn’t get to show it. So, it was the very first work we showed once we were able to come back and be in the Theatre: that was a real milestone for me.
“The music is by Johann Sebastian Bach: one of his most famous, maybe not his most important, the third Brandenburg Concerto. And I choose it because when I’m making dances, we always have tasks. We always have tasks that we’re working on, and we play games in the studio to get some movement ideas going.
“So in some of our tests we were thinking about cheerleaders and we were thinking about dabbing, which was a dance thing at that time. We were thinking about clowning. And so that’s really where all that movement came from.
“Additionally, I had an experience where I went to Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland. And there was an artist who had made these large totems that were square. They were all made of confetti, about 10 or 15 of them around the room, with confetti thrown on the floor. And in my mind, my impulsiveness was like, ‘I’m gonna run through this and I’m gonna get arrested in Basel specifically, and it might actually be worth it!’ So that idea stuck with me for a very long time until I was able to bring it back.
“It seems like an odd pairing, you know, with a very classical piece of music from the Baroque period and that weird sort of movement style and environment. But I thought it was fun, and, you know, we needed fun.”
My lead photo is from the curtain call of Pink Confetti, whose final movement ends with a lively romp through mounds of confetti: just the idea Mills wisely restrained himself from doing in Basel! The joie de vivre of the dance is infectious, and a delight to watch.
Literal Glam featured virtually the entire troupe of Ballet Austin dancers. I found the Glass music to be uncomfortably loud in the first movement, which primarily featured two couples dancing. The insistent music of the final movement nicely expressed the movement of the 5-man number, and the ultimate finale. A total of 17 dancers were featured here over the 3-day performance, with some in all three. A great performance, but I expected the costumes to be much more ‘glam.’ (second photo)
As I have already reviewed Four Mortal Men, I will refer the reader to my review from 2018 (below). Since this article is a tribute to Mills, I print here a portion of the text of his opening remarks to this dance, set to a video shown to the audience. It begins with his first arrival in New York City in the 1980s.
“I didn’t know anything about New York: it was a massive and strange place to me. But my best friend, Xavier, was originally from New York. He took me everywhere, and he taught me everything about culture in New York in the 1980s.
“In the background of all this wonderful opportunity that was having, there was an epidemic that was unfolding. It was a disease that was stalking people. And, you know, mysteriously people began to disappear. You didn’t know where the disease was coming from, so people were afraid to touch each other. and they were afraid to breathe the same air. They were afraid of touching sweat: you know all the things that dancers do in a studio.
“And the homophobia at the time, which was virulent, just became really intensified because there were a lot of Americans who held that belief that if those people had AIDS, well then, they got what they deserved.
“To explain to people the anxiety and the suspicion that was hanging in the air was like being chased in a dark forest by something that you couldn’t name, you couldn’t identify it and watching helplessly as people around you -these beautiful young, talented, exuberant people – just dying in their deathbed. Ultimately, my fear became so great that I decided to leave. And I don’t know if that was the right choice, but that was the choice I made. And I left, and I lived. And my friends stayed. And one by one, they died.”
Photo of Stephen Mills, courtesy of BalletAustin
other 2 photos by C. Cunningham
Ballet Austin will present the world premiere of
Marie Antoinette: Vampire Queen of Versailles, choreographed by Stephen Mills, at the Long Center on March 27–29, 2026. This production reimagines the historical figure as a supernatural creature of the night. Shows are at 7:30 p.m. on March 27-28 and 3:00 p.m. on March 29.
A SPECIAL EVENT:
Stephen Mills: A Tribute (April 23, 2026): One-night-only show at the Paramount Theatre.
For tickets: www.BalletAustin.org
Link to my review of Four Mortal Men