On Saturday, May 3, Bwog Publisher Ava Slocum attended the Columbia University Ballet Ensemble (CUBE)’s performance of Paquita in Harlem at the Victoria Theater, part of the historic Apollo Theater.

After getting in the holiday spirit with the CUBE’s The Nutcracker last semester, I was excited to end the school year with the spring semester show, Paquita. Unlike The Nutcracker, Paquita was a ballet I didn’t know anything about before CUBE’s performance. It turns out there’s a good reason for that: CUBE’s Saturday night production of Marius Petipa’s Paquita, premiered in 1846, was one of only a few times this ballet has ever been performed in its full form in the United States.

As CUBE’s artistic director Charlotte Vaccaro (BC ’25) and executive director Brianna Han (CC ’25) explained in their introduction to the show, excerpts from Paquita have been a staple at American ballet competitions for decades. However, modern ballet companies almost never perform it in its full length with the story intact.

CUBE’s production pays homage to the—very dramatic!—original story of the three-act classical ballet. During the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, the Countess d’Hervilly’s son, Lucien, is engaged to Serafina, daughter of the Spanish nobleman Don Lopez. A group of Roma people perform a series of dances for the nobles, and Lucien falls in love with the beautiful orphan Paquita. When Don Lopez and the Roma leader Iñigo plot to poison Lucien, Paquita overhears and switches their glasses of wine so Iñigo dies instead. At the Countess’s grand ball, Paquita discovers that she is a long-lost d’Hervilly relative. Now that Paquita and Lucien are part of the same social class and nothing stands in the way of their getting married, the ball becomes a wedding.

A program note explained that “CUBE has chosen to preserve the integrity of the original 1846 narrative of Paquita while acknowledging its harmful stereotyping of Roma people.” The ballet definitely does represent the Roma characters as socially inferior to the French and Spanish nobles, and Iñigo is evil and scheming, keeping Paquita in the dark about her true heritage. The story also implies that Paquita is superior to the rest of the Roma community in which she grew up because she’s actually related to the noble d’Hervilly family. However, CUBE’s production handles the stereotypes by emphasizing the villainy of Iñigo as an individual character and distinguishing him from the rest of the Roma dancers in the first act, while also highlighting the Spanish Don Lopez as another evil character and showing Don Lopez and Iñigo scheming together to kill Lucien.

Like a lot of nineteenth-century literature and theater, Paquita also revolves around social class as the main barrier separating the young lovers, and there can only be a happy ending once it turns out that Paquita has been part of the nobility all along. But the rags-to-riches storyline makes Paquita feel like a Cinderella-esque fairy tale, which Petipa’s glittery, romantic music complements beautifully.

Besides being the only one of Columbia’s ballet groups that performs full-length story ballets, CUBE prioritizes inclusivity, featuring dancers of all skill levels from complete beginners to professionals. The choreography ranged from larger ensemble pieces like the Roma group’s pas de sept in the first act to the lovely pas de deux between Paquita (Fiona Witty-Daugherty, CC ’28) and Elias Re (GS ’25) in the third.

Witty-Daugherty’s dancing was precise and technically perfect throughout the complicated choreography for Paquita (and I was even more impressed when I learned that she’s a first-year!). Re is a Columbia GS student as well as a professional ballet dancer at the Dance Theatre of Harlem. He was the Sugar Plum Fairy’s cavalier in CUBE’s Nutcracker last semester, and it was nice to see him in a larger role with more time onstage as Lucien. Re performed Lucien’s difficult choreography—including multiple pirouettes and lifts in the pas de deux in the third act—with aplomb. I’ve always imagined it would be challenging to act while dancing ballet, but Re and all the other cast members did a beautiful job of dancing and acting out the story with facial expressions, especially Aiden Hurff (CC ’25) who was an impressive dancer and appropriately scary as the villain Iñigo.

Other highlights included Act I soloists Simone Snow (BC ’28) and Madalina Stoicov (BC ’27) and the Act III wedding pas de trois, with lovely performances from Naomi Roth (BC ’28), Eirik Hanawa Peterson (CC ’26), and especially Lorelei Gorton (CC ’28). The large group dances in Act I featuring the Roma characters in colorful, flamenco-inspired costumes with long skirts and headdresses were an interesting contrast to the smaller, more intimate dances in the ball/wedding scene in Act III, where all the dancers onstage wore light-colored costumes and tutus in white, gold, and silver shades and the dancing had a more formal, ceremonial quality. The smaller dances, including the pas de trois, featured individual solos from some of CUBE’s more experienced dancers before the dancers all united onstage for the final dance at the end with Paquita, Lucien, and Paquita’s bridesmaids and wedding guests. After the more plot-oriented first and second act, the resolution with Paquita and Lucien’s engagement comes early in Act III, leaving a lot of room for the rest of the ballet to focus only on the gorgeous dancing.

Funnily enough, by pure chance, I was already familiar with some of Paquita’s music. Last Thursday, three days before CUBE’s show, I got a last-minute $30 Under 30 ticket for Innovators & Icons II at the New York City Ballet. The first part of the program was some excerpts from Paquita, including the famous pas de deux, pas de trois, and solos from the wedding scene set to the beautiful music in the third act. It was nice to see these dances again in the context of the rest of the story in CUBE’s performance, since Paquita is usually only performed in excerpts like the individual dances at the NYCB.

The set was sparse but pretty, with projected background paintings of the field where the Roma dancers perform for the nobles, Paquita’s home where she saves Lucien from being poisoned, and the d’Hervilly ballroom to set the scene for Acts I, II, and III. CUBE’s dancers all wore period costumes (donations from professional dancer François Perron). Aside from a few small technical difficulties with the sound, Paquita was a lovely showcase of not only the amazing student dancing but also the hours that CUBE’s board clearly poured into putting the show together.

CUBE performed to a completely packed house at the Victoria Theater, next door to Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater, which felt like the perfect venue to bring one of the few full-length US productions of Paquita to life.

Dancers at Paquita and Lucien’s wedding via Simone Snow