For thirty-five years, a vampire has been keeping an unlikely appointment in Columbia. "Dracula: Ballet with a Bite," South Carolina Ballet's gothic retelling of Bram Stoker's novel, premiered in 1991 and has been revived so often that it now functions less like a seasonal novelty and more like a civic ritual — the moment each fall when the state's largest professional ballet company trades pointe-shoe propriety for fog, fangs and a rock-and-jazz score. It returns to the Koger Center for the Arts on Greene Street on October 23 and 24, 2026.
The production is the creation of William Starrett, the company's artistic director and chief executive, who conceived and choreographed it and shares the libretto credit with Robert Kemsley and composer Thomas Semanski. Starrett's fingerprints are on nearly every chapter of the company's modern history. He first appeared as a guest artist with Columbia City Ballet in 1977 and worked his way through the ranks — artist-in-residence, associate director, premiere danseur — before being named artistic director in 1986. He is only the second artistic director in the organization's 65-year history, and he has now led it longer than its founder, Anne Brodie.
Starrett arrived with a dancer's pedigree that made a vampire ballet seem less like a stunt than an inevitability. In 1979 he won the bronze medal at the first USA International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Mississippi — the first bronze awarded in the United States, at an event the dance world treats as its Olympics. Dance Magazine, profiling him in 1984, described a "fully free-lance dancer jetting to and from cities like some people drive to the drugstore," a man who had been "whisked off the stage after a matinee in Detroit and flown to Atlanta for a performance that same night." He has since performed in 29 countries and all 50 states, on stages including Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, the Metropolitan Opera and London's Sadler's Wells. By the time he turned to choreographing full-length story ballets, he had spent more than a decade as one of the most traveled dancers in the country.
What he built with "Dracula" was deliberately not a museum piece. The engine of the show is Semanski's original score, which blends orchestral writing with driving rock and jazz rhythms — music that pushes the drama rather than merely accompanying it. Semanski was a prolific ballet composer whose catalogue included "Beauty and the Beast," "Frankenstein" and a sequel, "Dracula's Revenge," as well as a score for Bruce Steivel's "Peter Pan" commissioned by Nevada Ballet Theatre. He died in September 2007, which means the music heard at the Koger Center this October is a living revival of a composer's work rather than a new arrangement of it.
The staging carries its own signature. Barry Sparks designed the original lighting, sets and scenic elements, and the production's gothic-castle aesthetic — opulent costumes, dramatic lighting, a stage that seems to breathe fog — is a large part of why it has outlasted so many other Halloween offerings. The choreography folds classical technique into contemporary movement, and the emotional center is a series of pas de deux between Dracula and his victims, in which the interplay of power and vulnerability does the work that dialogue would do in a play.
That the ballet has traveled is part of its story. The company tours annually to Savannah, Charleston and roughly eight other cities around the region, and "Dracula" has gone with it, playing venues across the Southeast and, at various points, nationwide. The ballet has been staged so many times that touring presenters have taken to counting: one engagement billed itself as the 33rd production of the work. In Beaufort, it has been a recurring date on the USCB Center for the Arts calendar. For a company that spent its first decades known as Columbia City Ballet, the show became a calling card — proof that a regional ballet troupe could produce an original, evening-length theatrical work with its own score and its own visual identity, and then keep selling it for three decades.
The company itself has changed shape around the ballet. In 2023, after years of touring and growing recognition statewide, the board rebranded Columbia City Ballet as South Carolina Ballet to reflect a reach that had outgrown the capital's city limits. The legacy name still has its own website, preserved as an archive. And this year the company marks its 65th anniversary; in March 2026, during the anniversary performance at the Koger Center, Starrett received the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina's highest civilian honor.
All of which makes the October dates something more than a Halloween outing. The Koger Center sits on the University of South Carolina campus at 1051 Greene Street, a short walk from the university's historic Horseshoe, and the ballet's return there is a homecoming of sorts for a work that has spent its life on the road. The company is explicit that this is not a family show: it is recommended for mature audiences, rated PG-13, and the seduction and menace in Stoker's story are staged rather than softened. Audiences should expect thrills and chills in the literal sense — the production leans into suspense, and the title's promise of a "bite" is not entirely metaphorical.
Tickets for the Koger Center performances are sold through the venue and the company, with pricing listed around $35 for the evening performance. For longtime Columbia audiences, the appeal is partly nostalgic: dancers who saw the ballet as teenagers now bring their own children, and the score has become as familiar as any holiday music. For newcomers, the pitch is simpler. This is a ballet that argues, loudly and with a rock band's worth of percussion, that the form can be bold, contemporary and genuinely fun — a case Starrett has been making in Columbia since the year the Soviet Union dissolved. Thirty-five years on, the count is still rising from the coffin.