Sacramento Ballet at Human Scale

Beer & Ballet is ballet made easier — not because the dancing is less demanding, but because the format lowers the barrier around it. The pieces are short. The styles change constantly. The choreographers talk to the audience before or after their work. The room is allowed to respond.

That last part matters more than it sounds. A traditional ballet program can create a frame that discourages reaction. Beer & Ballet loosens that frame. At the May 29 performance, the audience stayed quiet when the mood was serious, laughed when the work was comic, and got openly rowdy when one male soloist gradually shed most of his costume to the crowd’s evident pleasure. The reactions felt earned rather than polite.

The format is simple: company dancers choreograph short pieces, perform in each other’s work, and speak to the audience about what they made and why. That act of explanation changes the evening. You stop watching a series of unrelated dances and start recognizing the dancers as individual artists with different tastes, histories, obsessions, and senses of humor.

The program opened with The Shape of Enough, choreographed by Isabella Morales and performed by artists from the Sacramento Ballet Second Company. It was bright and joyful — the right tone to open on. From there, the program moved widely: classical ballet, tap, Chopin, Laufey, Queen, Leon Bridges, contemporary work, a ballroom-inflected duet, and an all-male ensemble that defies easy categorization.

The variety is the selling point for a general audience. If one piece is not your register, the next one will be different.

The funniest piece of the night was possibly Tapsilog, choreographed by Victor Maguad — the all-male ensemble in basketball shirts, black jackets, open collars, and loose ties. Maguad explained in his introduction that tapsilog is a Filipino breakfast dish: marinated beef, fried rice, and egg. The name had nothing to do with the dance’s content, which only made it funnier. The piece leaned hard into comic masculine looseness, but the joke worked because the execution underneath the attitude was sharp. These dancers could look ridiculous on purpose without the piece going slack.

Any Way the Wind Blows, choreographed by Richard Smith to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, also exuded humor. The piece played with the theatrical excess already built into the music, including exaggerated macho gestures from female performers. The crowd laughed at the right moments without needing to be cued.

After the second intermission, the program moved into its most memorable stretch. The Bodies We Borrow, choreographed by Isabella Velasquez, shifted into slower and more meditative territory. Velasquez described working with creature-like movement and the image of 11 dancers creating a blur on stage. Beginning at the End, choreographed by Dylan Keane to Son Lux, drew from music he described as full of dynamic choices and unusual sounds. Ripples of Reverence, choreographed by Enrico Hipolito to Leon Bridges’ River, had a reflective frame. Hipolito spoke about grace, growth, and what it meant to make the piece as he approached his final performances with Sacramento Ballet.

Then came the context for that remark.

Pogi, choreographed by Julia Feldman, closed the program. It is a pas de deux for Hipolito and his wife, Sarah Joan Smith, the company’s resident married couple. Feldman explained that she had choreographed for the two of them when they first arrived in Sacramento in 2023 — their first show together was Beer & Ballet — and that this would be the last time, as Hipolito is retiring from the company.

Other dancers gathered at the sides of the stage to watch. That detail did most of the work. The room understood it was watching something beyond a closing number. The farewell was not announced so much as made visible.

Beer & Ballet succeeds because it lets ballet be several things in one evening: precise and goofy, intimate and theatrical, skilled and genuinely funny. It also lets the audience in on more of the process than a formal program usually does — the music obsessions, the costume decisions, the personal histories, the marriages, the retirements, and the choreographic instincts of dancers who usually appear under someone else’s name.

For regular Sacramento Ballet followers, it is a window into the company’s interior life. For people who find ballet remote, it is probably the easiest entry point Sacramento Ballet offers.

The show runs through May 31. It is absolutely worth going.