Ten years is a long time in the life of a ballet company — long enough for a work to pass from novelty to memory, and long enough for the people who made it to change. When Ballet Tucson opens its 40th season at the Temple of Music and Art the weekend of Oct. 23-25, it will do so with the return of "Spirit Garden," the Chieko Imada ballet that has not been a regular part of the repertoire in recent years. It is the centerpiece of a program called "Spirit Garden and Other Works," and its revival is the kind of thing regional companies do rarely and deliberately: bring back a piece that belongs to this desert, this holiday, and this particular choreographer.
The timing is not accidental. The performances land just over a week before Día de los Muertos on Nov. 2, the holiday when families build ofrendas and welcome back the dead. "Spirit Garden" is built around that idea. The ballet follows a family moving through the space between life and the joyful reunion of long-lost loved ones in the afterlife — grief on one side, celebration on the other, with the border between them treated as porous rather than final.
What makes the piece unusual is how many Tucson hands are in it. The score draws on the music of Calexico, the Tucson band that Joey Burns and John Convertino founded in 1996 and that has spent nearly three decades turning the Sonoran borderlands into sound — brass, mariachi inflections, twanging guitars, a sense of two countries leaning against each other. For the original production, Burns sat with Imada and helped her sift through the band's catalog to find the songs that would carry the movement. Flamenco guitar by Misael Barraza-Diaz threads through the whole.
The visual world came from Lawrence W. Lee, the Southwest artist whose paintings supply the production's imagery, including the catrinas — the skeleton figures in bright costumes, playing guitar and shaking castanets, that are among the most recognizable characters of Día de los Muertos. Lee's involvement gives the ballet a painterly, gallery-like quality that distinguishes it from the usual storybook ballet. It is not "The Nutcracker" with sugar skulls; it is a locally made artwork with a locally made score, built by people who live here.
Imada's biography explains why the piece feels so rooted. A native of Japan, she danced professionally as a soloist with Inoue Ballet of Tokyo and served as ballet mistress there before performing across Europe, Korea, the Philippines, Australia and the South Pacific. In the United States she danced with Arizona Dance Theatre and Ballet Arizona and was a principal dancer with Ballet Tucson, and she has supported the company and its school for more than 30 years, first alongside founder Mary Beth Cabana and now with artistic director Margaret Mullin. In 2022 she was named the company's resident choreographer, a recognition of three decades of original work. Her catalog includes full-length classical stagings — "Swan Lake," "The Sleeping Beauty," "Cinderella," "Giselle" Act 2, "La Bayadère" — alongside contemporary pieces and an annual world premiere made in partnership with the Tucson Desert Song Festival. "Spirit Garden" sits at the center of that second body of work: a ballet made for this city's calendar and this city's musicians.
The rest of the program is built to show range. Kiyon Ross's "[NO HOLDS] barre'd" returns by popular demand — a tutu ballet with a twist, in the company's description, and a piece Tucson audiences have seen each season since 2022. Ross is a familiar name in the ballet world: trained at the Baltimore School for the Arts and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School, he joined PNB as a dancer in 2001 and retired as a soloist in 2015, choreographing for PNB, its school, the New York City Ballet Choreographic Institute and Spectrum Dance Theater, and serving as resident choreographer at Ballet Arkansas before becoming PNB's associate artistic director. His work first came to Tucson in 2022, and it has been back most years since.
The program also carries a genuine premiere. "Ovation" is a new collaboration among the company's three artistic leaders — Imada, Mullin and Brik Middlekauff — written to celebrate 40 years of classical ballet in Southern Arizona. It is set to Bach's Concerto for Oboe and Violin, and the company previewed it last summer with the St. Andrew's Bach Society, giving audiences a first look before the full staging arrives. Rounding out the bill is an encore of Maya Hughes's "The Storm Before the Calm," which appeared in the company's Steps Forward emerging-choreographer showcase at the Berger Center in September.
That 40-year marker is worth pausing on. Ballet Tucson was established in 1986 by Mary Beth Cabana, who set out to build a professional company and school in a city that did not have one, and it remains Southern Arizona's only professional ballet company. Mullin, who grew up training at the School of Ballet Tucson on scholarship, danced fourteen seasons with Pacific Northwest Ballet and took over as artistic director in spring 2022 — a Tucsonan coming home to run the institution she came up in. The season she and Imada have assembled is, in that light, a statement about continuity: a revived local ballet, a returning audience favorite, a new piece about the company's own history, and a slot for a young choreographer.
There is also a practical gesture toward access this year. Ballet Tucson has introduced Community Nights, offering $15 Bronze and Copper Circle tickets for Saturday evening performances of "Spirit Garden and Other Works" and two later programs, "Carmen and Other Works" and "Appalachian Spring and Other Works." Standard tickets run $27.50 to $76.50.
Performances are at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 23; 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 24; and 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 25, at the Temple of Music and Art, 330 S. Scott Ave. The company notes that most of its programs run about two hours with one or two 15-minute intermissions. Tickets and details are at ballettucson.org.
For anyone who saw "Spirit Garden" a decade ago, the draw is straightforward: a second look at a ballet that was built here, out of a Tucson band's records and a Tucson painter's images, and then set aside. For anyone who did not, it is a chance to see what a regional company can do when it stops renting its imagination from elsewhere.