Ballet Collective San Diego is bringing its dancers back to La Jolla for a single day of performances on September 19, when the company stages its late-summer showcase ‘REVEL’ at The Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center. Tickets for the 5 pm and 7:30 pm shows run between $50 and $95, and the event is open to all ages. The program will feature San Diego dance artists performing to live chamber music inside the venue’s intimate Baker-Baum Concert Hall.
The showcase is organized by Ballet Collective San Diego, a non-profit run by co-directors Jenny Asseff and Emily Miller that gives local professional dancers free studio time and creative freedom during their off-season, according to the San Diego Museum of Art. As reported by KPBS, ‘REVEL’ includes choreography from Holly Curran, Holly Meacham, Angela Rebelo, Maxime Guenen, Tylor Bradshaw, Emily Miller and Katie Spagnoletti, with a special guest choreographer still to be announced. The dance lineup features Katelyn Cecil, Sophia Dimmick, Whitney Edwards, Sona Jaeger, Ruby Mather, Natalie Matsuura, Haley Mauldin, Leah McCall, Meacham, Natasha Rader, Timothy Ruelas, Jaxon Smith, Preston Swovelin and Samantha Schmidt, dancing to music by Antonio Vivaldi, Max Richter and Ruben Gonzalez. Ballet Collective San Diego has confirmed the performance will include live music, though the specific musicians have not yet been named.
A Company Built for the Off-Season
Several of the choreographers listed for ‘REVEL’ belong to The Rosin Box Project, a contemporary ballet company founded in San Diego in May 2018 by Artistic Director Carly Topazio, per the Presidio Sentinel. The overlap underscores how tightly San Diego’s independent dance scene is woven together outside the traditional company season. The Rosin Box Project moved its permanent studio in April 2021 to the Dorothea Laub Dance Place in the Arts District at Liberty Station, according to the Times of San Diego, giving many of the choreographers featured in ‘REVEL’ a shared home base for rehearsal.
Guest choreographer Holly Curran brings outside credentials to the program. She is an active dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet at Lincoln Center in New York City and has previously performed with Ballet Austin and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, according to Studio Roxander. Her involvement continues a pattern for the company: co-director Emily Miller previously choreographed a piece called “Four Seasons,” set to composer Max Richter’s recomposed Vivaldi score, for the ensemble’s September 2023 showcase “Heartbeats.” Richter’s music appears again on the ‘REVEL’ program, suggesting the company is revisiting a score that has proven fertile ground for its dancers before.
An Annual Late-Summer Tradition
‘REVEL’ is not a one-off. The event continues a series of late-summer showcases Ballet Collective San Diego has presented at The Conrad, following its September 2025 production ‘IDIOMA’ and its September 2024 production ‘RESONANCE.’ For ‘RESONANCE,’ the company paired its dance works with live accompaniment from the Hausmann Quartet and pianist Phillip Matsuura, an arrangement that established the model of local chamber musicians performing alongside the dancers each year.
The venue itself has become a fixture in that tradition. The Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center opened in April 2019 following an $82 million capital campaign to serve as the permanent home of the La Jolla Music Society, as Hoodline has previously reported. Inside, the 513-seat Baker-Baum Concert Hall is engineered with acoustics directed by Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics, the same firm behind the acoustics at Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall, according to the La Jolla Music Society. The hall was designed by Epstein Joslin Architects with an acoustically permeable wooden grillage sometimes described as a nest, surrounded by motorized curtain systems that let the space adjust its reverberation for amplified music, film, dance, theatre and lectures, per DPR Construction.
What to Expect Inside Baker-Baum
That adjustable architecture is part of why the hall has built a reputation as an intimate performance space with superb acoustics, well suited to pairing live chamber instruments with dance in close quarters rather than a sprawling proscenium stage. Event organizers note that the schedule for ‘REVEL’ is subject to change without notice, so ticket holders should confirm performance times closer to the September date. For now, the two September 19 performances stand as the latest entry in a company tradition that has quietly become one of La Jolla’s recurring late-summer dance dates.
