Yavapai Ballet Theatre debuts August 23, with three Arizona Philharmonic musicians playing live

In ballet, the révérence is a sequence of bows extending gratitude and respect to the audience for sharing in the artistry and storytelling the dancers present onstage. Yavapai Ballet Theatre has taken the word for the name of its first gala, and put it at the beginning. Sunday, August 23 at 4:00 pm at the Elks Theatre, 117 E. Gurley St. in downtown Prescott, YBT makes its public debut alongside three Arizona Philharmonic musicians playing at floor level a few feet from the dancers. The afternoon marks the public start of a partnership that runs through YBT’s 2026-27 season, with live accompaniment planned across its productions.

YBT launched in January 2026 as a nonprofit performance and education organization rather than a studio. Founder and Artistic Director Emily Sosangelis Tylecote trained at The Rock School of Philadelphia and the Yale Ballet Company, and she works as a freelance dancer and local ballet instructor. She has built the company on a partnership model in which dancers keep training at their home studios and come together for YBT productions. For years, Yavapai County’s most serious dancers have looked to Phoenix or out of state for advanced work. YBT was founded to give them access to those same professional opportunities closer to home. Its first full-length production, The Nutcracker, follows December 12 and 13 at the Ruth Street Theater.

The gala program is drawn from the most influential works in the classical ballet repertoire, curated to show the range, technique, musicality, and artistry of YBT’s dancers and the stories these works tell. Local dancers will perform the Entrance of the Shades from Minkus’s La Bayadère, two excerpts from Adam’s Giselle, the Act III variation from Glazunov’s Raymonda, Quiteria’s fan variation from Don Quixote, a variation from Paquita, the grand male variation from Satanella, and the wedding scene pas de deux from Delibes’s Coppélia.

For anyone who loves this music, the format is a gift. Full-length classical ballets run two and three hours and demand a trip to Phoenix or farther. This program delivers their high points in sequence, each one a few minutes long, with the choreography the music was written to carry. Delibes’s Coppélia music and Glazunov’s Raymonda variation are among the most beautiful pages composed for the ballet stage, and hearing them beside the Minkus and Adam excerpts makes the differences between these composers unusually easy to hear.

Playing that music are Grace Templeton, piano, Luke Hill, violin, and Wesley Skinner, cello. Hill and Skinner will be recognizable to anyone who follows Arizona Philharmonic’s chamber concerts, and the two return to Prescott on February 14, 2027 for a piano trio program of Handel, Fazıl Say, and Tchaikovsky. Their presence changes what the dancers have to work with. Recorded accompaniment holds one tempo regardless of what happens onstage. A violinist who can see a preparation can wait a fraction of a second for it, and a dancer who hears a phrase being shaped in the room can answer it.

Arizona Philharmonic believes a thriving arts community is built through collaboration, and the orchestra has worked with organizations across Yavapai County to create performances no single group could produce alone, among them Yavapai College, Prescott Chorale, Yavapai Youth Choirs, Sharlot Hall Museum, and Embry-Riddle’s planetarium. Yavapai Ballet Theatre is the newest of those partners.

VIP guests receive premier seating, including the Elks’ opera boxes, and admission to a post-show reception in the Crystal Hall ballroom with an open bar and hors d’oeuvres. The reception is a chance to meet YBT dancers and leadership and learn more about the organization’s charitable programs. General admission tickets start at $33, with youth tickets at $13.

Live dancing and live playing, in the same room, both held to a professional standard, is a combination Prescott audiences get to experience rarely. This one comes with a bow at the end and a season’s worth of work ahead of it.

Tickets and event information for the Révérence Gala are at YBTheatre.org.