Ballet Manila
dance company in the Philippines
Ballet Manila is a classical ballet institution and dance company in the Philippines. It currently highlights more than fifty highly trained dancers in the highly rigorous Russian (Vaganova) method of classical ballet. Locally the company has performed in 47 cities holding more than 4,100 performances. The company has done tours in Asia, Europe and North America, where it has held more than 140 performances. The company is most notable for its in-house creative director, principal dancer and prima ballerina Lisa Macuja-Elizalde. Along with Ballet Philippines and the Philippine Ballet Theatre, Ballet Manila is one of the three major ballet companies in the Philippines. It regularly held its performances at the Aliw theater and Star Theater which were damaged by a fire in 2019, which are both located within Star City at Pasay. The concept of a ballet company by the dancers, of the dancers and for the dancers was the idea of Lisa Macuja-Elizalde when she, along with ballet master Osias Barroso and ten other dancers established Ballet Manila in 1995.
Repertoire
Ballet Manila has featured full-length performances of Swan Lake, Don Quixote, The Nutcracker, Giselle, La Bayadere, Romeo and Juliet, Carmen, Le Corsaire, and other classical staples, as well as contemporary Filipino ballet pieces by some of the Philippines most distinguished choreographers. Ballet Manila has also performed non-classical pieces such as the major production piece Tatlong Kuwento ni Lola Basyang (The three stories of Grandmother Basyang).
“Ballet Manila” enters the record as dance company in the Philippines. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ballet, Manila and dance can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4851640. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ballet Manila” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.