Two dances, infinite reach in Charlotte Ballet’s ‘Boundless’

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on February 23, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

by Lawrence Toppman

It takes guts to call a dance program “Boundless” when you offer just two pieces. You’d need a whole season, maybe many seasons, to show the range of what choreography in general and Charlotte Ballet’s dancers in particular can do. But the Winter Works evening at McBride-Bonnefoux Center for Dance comes as close as you can get with two winners, Nicole Vaughan-Diaz’s “On Three” and a reprise of Ohad Naharin’s “Kamuyot.”

One uses movement to inspire thought, one to induce giddy pleasure. One comes from a Miami native now based in Asheville, one from an Israeli-born man based in his homeland. She’s in her mid-30s, still making a name for herself as a choreographer with world premieres such as this. He’s nearly twice her age, a veteran whose work has been performed all over the dance world.

Neither ballet has a plot or a clear narrative arc, though “On Three” makes a specific point about our cruelly divided society. The divergent approaches give artistic director Alejandro Cerrudo bragging rights about Charlotte Ballet’s versatility and scope.

“On Three” begins in individual bursts of angry energy and works toward mutual understanding, ending in a simple gesture that touched me deeply. A spoken prologue, alluding to the United States today, asks, “Can we still hear the same counts? Can we still move together?” Vaughan-Diaz thinks we might, and the dancers fulfill her vision with unbroken precision.

Her dancers jerk and pinwheel, occasionally clenching fists and making a rude Italian gesture that would get you a punch in your fat panzone in South Jersey. A woman in a cranberry red dress tries a duet with a man in a blue shirt, but it breaks down. (This was the only polemic moment, and I didn’t mind it.) A man and woman have an erotic yet contentious duet in a chair, but someone yanks the chair away, and they break apart.

This may sound unsubtle in the telling, but it isn’t: It stirs up emotions, it’s briefly funny, and its rough energy eventually softens, as the dancers find common ground. A second red-blue duet lasts longer than the first, with moments of tenderness. Dancers move in unison, though apart from each other, as if slowly realizing what’s going on around them. At last comes unforced unity: E pluribus unum in motion, then in a stillness that left me moist-eyed.

I don’t remember much stillness in “Kamuyot.” The audience leaves the hall at intermission for half an hour, semi-listening to live music made nearly inaudible by chatter and looking at beautifully composed dance photographs by Quinn Wharton. Then they go back to find general seating on three rows of hard benches surrounding the stage. I’d enjoyed “Kamuyot” before, so I stayed on the third row, out of the reach of dancers’ hands extended to pull us into the mix.

I’ve decided Naharin was inspired by the idea of a communications satellite circling the Earth, picking up snatches from a hundred radio stations. That would explain the agreeable hodgepodge of surf rock, classical music, reggae, spacy electronic noodlings and other genres. The dancers wear white shirts, plaid skirts or trousers and polka-dotted dance tights, as if attending some interstellar sock hop in the 1950s.

Maurice Mouzon Jr. sets the high-energy tone at the beginning, with a solo full of gymnastics (including handstands) done at times on pointe. He starts and stops each time a dancer shouts “Eh!,” then draws all the other dancers onstage as if magnetically. Many of them eventually get brief solos, but the tight ensemble work impressed me most.

Can I explain why a woman darted around the square, unheeded by the grooving ensemble, shouting “Bobby? Bobby?” Or why a man turned his body into a percussion instrument, slapping himself and recoiling like a small planet being struck by tiny asteroids? Sure can’t.

Yet every time chaos or silliness threatens to overwhelm us, a wave of gentleness rolls through. Dancers hold audience members by the hands calmly and look into their eyes. They encourage us to come with them to vogue, to adopt poses vaguely like yoga stretches, to boogie relaxedly. We’re almost never this close to professional dancers, and Naharin humanizes them: You look at faces more than bodies for once, and you see them panting like thoroughbreds who have just run the Belmont Stakes.

Even the finale has an agreeable vagueness: We’re invited onstage for an all-in rave to pleasant electronic music. The piece doesn’t really end; audience members drift away one by one, until the hall empties. It’s as if a cosmic dance keeps going on eternally somewhere, and we can all step in and out whenever we choose. I guess that’s the meaning of “boundless,” after all.

“Winter Works: Boundless” runs through March 21 at McBride-Bonnefoux Center for Dance, 701 N. Tryon St. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays. A tip: Get there early, and you can park for free in the marked Charlotte Ballet lot on West Tenth Street behind the center.

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Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.

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