Wild Sweet Love
Sacramento Ballet’s Midseason Pulse Check
March 5–7, 2027
The Sofia
The title sounds soft.
The program probably is not.
Wild Sweet Love sits in the middle of Sacramento Ballet’s 2026/27 season, after the public holiday machinery of Nutcracker and before the classical-romantic weight of Giselle. That placement helps define it. This is the season’s emotional middle ground: less ceremonial than Nutcracker, less haunted than Giselle, and more immediate than a purely formal repertory program.
The program includes three works: Julia Feldman’s Hearts, the 20th anniversary return of Trey McIntyre’s Wild Sweet Love, and a new work selected by Artistic Director Tiit Helimets.
That is a strong combination. One work comes from inside Sacramento Ballet’s own recent creative life. One returns to a ballet that premiered with Sacramento Ballet in 2007. One points toward the taste and priorities of the company’s new artistic leadership.
This is not just “a program about love.”
It is a program about what ballet can do with feeling before feeling turns into sentiment.
At a Glance
Event: Wild Sweet Love
Company: Sacramento Ballet
Dates: March 5–7, 2027
Format: Mixed repertory
Program includes: Julia Feldman’s Hearts, Trey McIntyre’s Wild Sweet Love, and a new work selected by Artistic Director Tiit Helimets
Best for: people who want ballet with emotional range, contemporary energy, musical variety, and less holiday formality.
Why This Program Matters
A title like Wild Sweet Love could easily become vague. Love is one of the easiest subjects to flatten.
But this program has a better reason to exist than romance as a theme. It gathers three different kinds of artistic relationship:
a Sacramento Ballet artist’s choreographic voice;
a title work that began with Sacramento Ballet twenty years earlier;
a new curatorial choice from the company’s incoming artistic director.
That makes the program less generic than it first appears.
It is not simply “love dances.” It is a midseason test of tone. Can ballet be emotional without becoming precious? Can it use popular music without becoming shallow? Can it show affection, loneliness, humor, hunger, and disappointment without turning everything into a greeting card?
Those are good questions for a ballet company to ask in public.
The Three Pieces
Hearts
Julia Feldman’s Hearts gives the program a local and company-rooted opening.
Feldman is not an outside name dropped into the season for decoration. Her choreographic work has developed in relation to Sacramento Ballet itself. Hearts was her first full-work commission for the company, and its return gives the program a thread of continuity from the company’s recent past into its current season.
That matters because a ballet company should not only perform works that arrive from elsewhere. It should also grow artists from inside its own room.
The title Hearts may sound simple, but simplicity can be useful. A ballet about hearts does not need to announce a plot. It can work through pressure, closeness, repetition, impact, recovery, and the physical fact that feeling is not just an idea. It happens in the body.
Watch for: how the piece handles emotion without needing to explain itself.
Wild Sweet Love
Trey McIntyre’s Wild Sweet Love is the center of the program and the reason the page deserves attention.
The work premiered with Sacramento Ballet in 2007. Its return in 2027 is not just a repertory rental. It is a twenty-year return to a piece connected to the company’s own history.
The title work has a strange and useful musical world: Queen, Lou Reed, Roberta Flack, José Alfredo Jiménez, The Partridge Family, Mendelssohn, The Zombies. That list should not work neatly. It is too varied, too pop, too theatrical, too emotionally exposed.
That is exactly the point.
Love is rarely one register. It is not only lyrical. It is embarrassing, ecstatic, lonely, performative, sincere, comic, desperate, and sometimes ridiculous. A mixed musical score can make room for that instability.
Public descriptions of McIntyre’s ballet frame it as loosely narrative, centered on a woman’s search for love. That is a useful way in, but the better question is not simply “what happens?” The better question is how the ballet keeps changing the temperature of the search.
Does love look graceful?
Does it look awkward?
Does it look hungry?
Does it look like performance?
Does it look like control breaking down?
That is where the piece may become interesting.
Watch for: how popular music changes the dancers’ bodies, and how the ballet moves between sweetness and edge.
A New Work Selected by Tiit Helimets
The third work is still the least defined publicly, which makes it risky to overstate.
But its presence is important.
A new work selected by Artistic Director Tiit Helimets gives this program a forward-looking element. It is not only revisiting Feldman and McIntyre. It is also placing a new choice inside the same emotional frame.
That choice will matter because early programming decisions help an audience understand what kind of artistic director is arriving. Not through speeches. Through repertory.
What kinds of dancers does the new work reveal?
What kind of movement does it value?
What kind of emotional or musical world does it place beside Hearts and Wild Sweet Love?
Until more details are released, that is the reason to pay attention.
Watch for: what the new work says about the company’s next chapter.
What Kind of Night Is This?
This is probably the season’s best event for people who want ballet to feel current without requiring it to abandon technique.
It is a mixed program, so it should offer more variety than a full-length story ballet. It is emotionally accessible, but not necessarily simple. It includes popular music, but that does not mean it is lightweight. It includes local artistic continuity, but also a new leadership signal.
That combination gives the evening a clear identity.
It is not the obvious holiday outing.
It is not the grand classical tragedy.
It is not just an informal company showcase.
It is the season’s program about feeling in motion.
What to Watch For
The Difference Between Sweet and Sentimental
The program’s danger is sentimentality. The program’s opportunity is directness.
Love can become vague very quickly onstage. Watch for the moments when the movement avoids that problem: a sharp interruption, an awkward transition, a sudden burst of speed, a gesture that looks too human to be decorative.
The Use of Popular Music
Pop music changes the audience’s relationship to ballet.
When the music is already familiar, the viewer brings memory into the room. That can make the work easier to enter, but it can also create tension between what the song seems to say and what the body actually does.
The best moments may be the ones where the dancing does not merely illustrate the song.
The Company’s Personality
This program should show more than polish.
Look for individuality: who moves with attack, who softens a phrase, who finds humor, who makes vulnerability look specific rather than generic.
A program like this can reveal dancers as people with different emotional temperatures.
The New Work
Do not treat the new work as filler.
It may become one of the most revealing parts of the evening because it sits between company history and future direction. Watch how it changes the balance of the program.
Is This a Good First Ballet?
Yes, for the right person.
If someone wants the most familiar first ballet, choose Nutcracker.
If someone wants the most classical full-length story, choose Giselle.
If someone wants a varied program with emotional access, contemporary energy, and music that does not feel sealed inside a museum, Wild Sweet Love may be the better first choice.
It is especially good for people who are suspicious of ballet when it seems too polite.
This program should have more pulse than ceremony.
Who Should Go
Go if you want ballet with feeling
This is the season’s clearest emotional mixed bill.
Go if you like contemporary ballet
The program looks more current and flexible than a traditional story ballet.
Go if popular music helps you enter dance
The title work’s musical range gives the audience several doors into the piece.
Go if you follow Sacramento Ballet
The program connects Julia Feldman’s company-rooted choreography, McIntyre’s Sacramento Ballet premiere history, and new artistic leadership.
Go if you liked Beer & Ballet
This is not the same format, but it may appeal to the same curiosity: dancers, choreographers, personality, and work that feels closer to the present tense.
What Moves Sacramento Take
Wild Sweet Love may be the season’s most revealing middle chapter.
Nutcracker brings the broad public in.
Giselle carries the classical weight.
Beer & Ballet opens the company’s internal creative room.
Wild Sweet Love does something different. It asks whether ballet can stay technically serious while becoming more emotionally available, musically varied, and humanly complicated.
That is a useful question for Sacramento.
A city does not need dance only as seasonal ritual or cultural prestige. It also needs dance that can handle modern feeling: affection, loneliness, awkwardness, longing, humor, and all the strange ways people keep trying to reach one another.
That is the promise of this program.
Not that love becomes simple.
That it becomes visible.