June and July 2026 saw a new staging of Carl Davis’ Alice in Wonderland from Ballet Wichita, choreographed by Katie Andrusak. The 100-minute ballet toured Canada and the United States, appearing at the Ottawa Memorial Auditorium, Wichita’s Friends University, Emporia’s Granada Theatre and the Grand Theatre in McPherson. Andrusak’s choreography drew on contemporary tap as well as classical and neoclassical gestures; the company also collaborated with Shocker Studios for a distinctive use of projections.
Alice in Wonderland was Davis’ second treatment of Caroll’s story, following his 1986 musical. A ballet ‘after Tchaikovsky’, Davis mined numerous works from the Russian composer’s output for the 100-minute score. As well as piano and chamber music, Davis turned to Tchaikovsky’s incidental music for Hamlet for its fanfares and marches, as well as the seldom-performed opera The Maid of Orleans and his symphonic fantasy on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The ballet’s grand waltz comes from the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5, and his 24 short piano pieces Children’s Album provided material for many of the solo sequences in the ballet. Davis recorded the score with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra in 2010.
Howard Quintero’s production of Alice in Wonderland made its Slovenian debut in the at the SNG Opera in Balet Ljubljana in April 2026, where it received ten performances; it also recently appeared in December 2024 with Portugal’s Companhia Nacional de Bailado at the Teatro Camões, Lisbon.
Alice in Wonderland debuted with English National Ballet at the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton in 1995, choreographed by Derek Deane. It has received over 150 performances since its creation, including visits to Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Hong Kong’s Grand Theatre with English National Ballet and in 2023 in the Hague with De Dutch Don’t Dance Division, in an MC Escher-inspired choreography by Rinus Sprong.