Selah Dance Collective and Novus Contemporary Ballet – “Sorcière x Carmilla”

This Halloween, Selah Dance Collective and Novus Contemporary Ballet descend upon Center Stage Theater for Sorcière X Carmilla, a haunting double bill exploring witchcraft, desire, power, and the dangerous women who refuse to remain contained.

Featuring Sorcière, choreographed by Chloé Roberts, and the premiere of Carmilla, choreographed by Meredith Ventura and Angelia Lane, the evening brings together contemporary dance and ballet in two works inspired by the Gothic imagination and its enduring fascination with women who exist beyond the boundaries of acceptable femininity.

In Sorcière – French for “witch” – Roberts turns toward the figure of the witch as both threat and possibility. Through visceral contemporary movement, the work considers the histories, myths, and fears projected onto women whose knowledge, bodies, and power resist social control. The witch emerges not simply as a supernatural figure, but as an embodiment of transformation, rebellion, and feminine agency.

The evening continues with Ventura and Lane’s Carmilla, a new one-act ballet inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu’s groundbreaking 1872 Gothic novella. Published more than two decades before Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Carmilla introduced one of literature’s earliest female vampires: mysterious, seductive, and inseparable from the story’s undercurrents of queer desire.

Ventura and Lane reimagine Le Fanu’s tale through a contemporary ballet vocabulary, centering the charged relationship between Carmilla and Laura and the uneasy boundaries between intimacy and possession, attraction and danger, victim and monster. Rather than treating the vampire solely as an object of horror, the ballet examines the cultural anxieties surrounding female appetite, sexuality, and autonomy that have made Carmilla resonate for more than 150 years.

Together, Sorcière and Carmilla ask what happens when the women historically cast as witches, monsters, seductresses, and threats become the subjects of their own stories.

The production brings together dancers from Selah Dance Collective and Novus Contemporary Ballet as part of the organizations’ 2026–27 season. Founded in 2014, Selah Dance Collective creates original contemporary performance while cultivating opportunities for artists and audiences throughout Southern California. Novus Contemporary Ballet approaches ballet as a living contemporary form, with a mission to make ballet accessible, inclusive, and relevant today.

With an intimate theatrical setting, atmospheric design, and movement ranging from raw contemporary physicality to reimagined ballet, Sorcière / Carmilla offers a Halloween performance for audiences looking for something darker than the traditional fall repertory.