C♯ Street-B♭ Avenue

This fun and funky ballet is infused with a block party feel. Set to Ntozake Shange’s poem “I Live in Music”, lines like “I live on C-sharp Street; my friend lives on B-flat Avenue” play perfectly with the dancers’ speed, style, and colorful costumes. In this dazzling piece inspired by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's jazz-influenced childhood in Kansas City, Missouri, dance and music become one. Images of the street dances of the late 1990s merge with swing dances of the past, while her customary borrowings from Afro-Caribbean dance fuse into an overall flow of modern dance techniques. More abstract than Zollar’s social protest works, “it has the open-ended aura of a jam session infused with the dancers' sassiness and virtuosity,” praised The New York Times.