Ballet carries a long memory, and still it speaks in the present tense.
I was a ballerina before I was born. My mother, Gwynne Ashton, danced with me growing inside her, and I am certain I felt every plié, every rise of the music, every breath she took as she moved across the floor.
Years later, when I carried our daughter Seah, I danced too, and I believe she learned, before she ever opened her eyes, what it means to live inside the rhythm of something larger than oneself.
Pas de Vie’s Ballet’s mixed repertory program “Spotlight on Dance” returns to Fallon Theatre at FSU on May16-17, 2026.
That is what ballet has always been to me. The body, the music, and the soul, breathing together in a single pulse.
I have been told, more than once, that ballet belongs to another era. That a centuries-old art form built on French vocabulary, Italian technique, and Russian grandeur cannot speak to our moment. I have spent much of my life answering that question quietly, in the studio, where it tends to dissolve.
Ballet is one of the few places left where we still ask young people to be patient. To repeat. To listen. To be wrong a thousand times in pursuit of a single moment of grace.
In a world that prizes speed and noise, the studio asks something rarer of us: patient attention. A child who learns to balance on one foot also learns that effort can be a gift, that grace is the quiet residue of discipline, and that the body is capable of telling stories no screen can hold.
When my husband, Charles Hagan, and I founded Pas de Vie Ballet in 1988, we began with a handful of dancers in what was then the old Northwood Mall. We were two former soloists from the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre who had fallen in love, first with dance, then with each other, and eventually with this city.
We came to Tallahassee eager to share that passion in a new way: from the studio, teaching anyone who wished to learn.
Thirty-eight years later, our students range from preschoolers barely able to tie their slippers to dancers still finding new freedom at the barre well into their 70s and beyond. Some have gone on to dance professionally and carry the art form into the wider world.
Others have become engineers, nurses, teachers, and parents who carry the studio with them just as faithfully, in a way of moving through their lives with patience and attention. Both are testaments to what ballet can give a person.
This inheritance is the heartbeat of “Spotlight on Dance,” our mixed repertory program returning to the Fallon Theatre at Florida State University on May 16 and 17. The program holds, in one breath, the past and the present.
Pas de Vie’s comedic piece set to Czerny will be part of Spotlight on Dance May 16-17, 2026.
You will see excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty,” a work the world has loved for more than a century. You will see Charles’s Simian Line, set to the music of Genesis. You will see Giggling Rapids, danced to the brilliance of Duke Ellington, and a comedic piece set to Czerny. And you will see Flight, which follows a young girl as she steps away from the small, fierce shelter of her family and into a world of her own.
It is a piece I could not have made when I was younger. Watching our dancers grow, watching the children who once played the tiniest angels and soldiers in our Nutcracker return years later as principals, watching our daughter Seah, dancing with MOMIX, bring a few hours of wonder to audiences across the world: these are the quiet privileges of a life in ballet.
Pas de Vie means “step of life.” We chose that name because in every culture art runs through the community like a vein, carrying expression and growth wherever it goes.
Tallahassee has tended that vein with extraordinary care for nearly four decades, through the City, Leon County, the Council on Culture & Arts, the families who fill our seats, and the volunteers who sew our costumes by hand. That history belongs to all of us.
I hope you will take your place in it. Come to the Fallon Theatre at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 16, or at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, May 17. Bring a child, a parent, a friend who has never seen ballet before. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, $15 to $30, because no one should be priced out of an art that belongs to everyone. Reserve your seats at pasdevieballet.com.
Come, and remember with us why we still dance.
Natalia Botha, the artistic director of Pas de Vie Ballet, is taking the show to the Dixie in Apalachicola.
Natalia Botha is the Artistic Director and School Director for Pas de Vie Ballet.
If you go
What: Pas de Vie presents “Spotlight on Dance”
When: 10:30 a.m. May 16 for children’s performance; Opening night of the full length program is 7:30 p.m. May 16, with a final performance at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, May 17.
Where: Fallon Theatre on the campus of Florida State University
Tickets: Prices range from $15 to $30. Visit pasdevieballet.com.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Pas de Vie spotlights why ballet still matters in Tallahassee