Sacramento Ballet has a new artistic director with an eye on both the past and future

Tiit Helimets picked out a book from the stack on his desk inside his new office at the Sacramento Ballet.

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He held up Jennifer Homans’ “Apollo’s Angels,” a ballet history whose final chapter questions where ballet should be going.

“That is also a question of mine,” Helimets said.

Helimets, 49, will be looking for the answers to that as the new artistic director. The ballet announced in March that it had hired Helimets. He began his job Aug. 17, weeks ahead of the return of the first company of dancers for the 2026-27 season.

Helimets came to Sacramento following a celebrated career in dance, most notably for the San Francisco Ballet where he spent nearly 20 years as a principal dancer. He joins a company that has lacked long-term artistic leadership since the 2018 departure of married co-artistic directors Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda, who ran the company for roughly 30 years and helped professionalize it.

Cunningham, who died in March at 86, and Binda were succeeded by their former dancer Amy Seiwert, who led the company for two seasons. She was laid off due to the COVID-19 pandemic and now leads Smuin Contemporary Ballet in San Francisco. Seiwert’s successor in Sacramento, Anthony Krutzkamp, lasted roughly four years in a dual role as executive director before departing last year for Louisville Ballet.

If Helimets becomes the long-term artistic leader the ballet has lacked for several years, it will be with a respect for classical ballet and his belief that knowing it well can help lead to innovative technique.

Helimets’ career path

By standards of professional dance, Helimets had a spectacularly long career, close to 30 years on-stage.

Born in Estonia when it was part of the Soviet Union, Helimets began dancing professionally with the Estonian National Ballet in 1996. After meeting his wife, fellow dancer and American-born Molly Smolen in Estonia, Helimets started dancing for the Birmingham Royal Ballet in England in 1999. He arrived at San Francisco Ballet in 2005 where he would dance until his retirement in 2023.

Helimets spent most of his career as a principal dancer and gained a reputation as an exquisite dance partner.

“I’ve heard other dancers at San Francisco Ballet say that he is just their favorite partner,” said Lisa Le Lievre, a Sausalito-based filmmaker. She directed “Closer Than Yesterday,” a 2024 documentary that centered around Helimets.

Sacramento Ballet dancer James Griffen trained at San Francisco Ballet School and witnessed Helimets’ partnering abilities.

“You can really tell that he cares for the partner and he cares for the steps and he wants the partner to be as relaxed and comfortable as possible,” Griffen said.

Helimets’ reputation also preceded him among other Sacramento Ballet dancers. Company member Sarah Joan Smith grew up in South Carolina but had known who Helimets was since she was a child. She said Helimets was “a lot of people’s favorite candidate” to become the new artistic director.

“I think we were all really excited when it was a pretty unanimous decision to hire him on to lead the company,” Smith said. “I think people are really excited about his positivity and his devotion to ballet and his devotion to keeping the purism of classical ballet alive.”

Helimets favors the Vaganova teaching method. It is a detail-oriented, Russian-style dance instruction that teachers for the great George Balanchine used. During the hiring process for his job, Helimets gave a Vaganova-inspired class in February to Sacramento Ballet dancers, including Isabella Velasquez.

“He had a very nice presence and was just very respectful, which I appreciated,” Velasquez said. “And his class was from a ballet standpoint, very technically challenging, but really good. I feel like we would all improve a lot under him.”

A well-known name joining the Sacramento Ballet isn’t unprecedented for the company. Cunningham and Binda worked with the legendary Rudolf Nureyev at the Boston Ballet and Cunningham did freelance choreography for different companies before coming to Sacramento. Seiwert was a rising name as a choreographer when she was hired.

Unlike Cunningham, Helimets doesn’t intend to appear in productions in Sacramento. Instead, he has reached the point of his career where he can pass on his experience to others.

“When you work with the dancers, it becomes a sharing of your legacy,” Helimets said. “You share everything that you have learned, everything that has helped you to be successful.”

How Helimets approaches dance

Helimets has a gentle intensity and a commitment to dance that come through in a variety of ways. There are his thoughts, for one, on contemporary dance.

“My frustration with contemporary dance is that I love contemporary dance and I love watching contemporary dancers do contemporary dance,” Helimets said. “I don’t love watching ballet dancers do contemporary dance because for me, that is such a waste of talent. Because they are not utilizing the skills that they’re training every day.”

Helimets values classical training and sees it as foundational.

“I can dance all forms of dance,” Helimets said. “But the classical product is why I’m able to do it.”

He added, “You can’t train contemporary and then expect to dance classical. There is no way. That crossover never happens.”

In Cunningham’s time choreographing works for Sacramento Ballet, the company sometimes put on works that were an enjoyable mix of dance styles, such as his original ballet for “Carmina Burana.” By contrast, Helimets said he plans to put on seasons “75% honoring ballet technique and then the 25% will be for contemporary or new works.”

Helimets said he might work with composers to score original music for works, something he’s done before. Creativity in ballet starts for him with music. Although he doesn’t choreograph much himself, he enjoys working with composers.

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“I speak the vision of what form of music I would love and they usually create exactly for my vision,” Helimets said. “It’s fantastic. I love working that way.”

Helimets might shy away from works with theatrical appeal, which were a regular and popular part of Cunningham’s era, from “The Great Gatsby” to “Peter Pan.”

“I love theatrical stuff,” Helimets said. “The biggest problem right now, when I see a lot of theatrical stuff, it looks a little bit like a Broadway dance. So there’s very little dancing for dancers. And yes, there’s a lot of pulling faces and funny jokes and shiny costumes, but not much technique. So I can’t justify bringing something like this in when I’m trying to uplift the company standard.”

The potential shifting of styles is no problem for Velasquez, who has danced under Cunningham and Binda and their successors Seiwert and Krutzkamp in her time in Sacramento.

“With every single artistic director that’s come in, the style of the company has shifted a little bit and that’s kind of what tends to happen, with their vision,” Velasquez said. “I think in general, just a new vision will be really nice for the company and like a more solid direction.”

Helimets comes with a deep love for dance’s history. Sacramento Ballet has long worked with the George Balanchine Trust to stage works by the legendary choreographer and in October will again perform his 1946 ballet “The Four Temperaments,” a favorite for dancers.

Helimets intends to keep staging Balanchine’s work. He also wants to keep staging the work of Jerome Robbins and said he “would love to get de Mille into the mix.” Beyond this, he’d like to restage works from choreographers such as Jiří Kylián, Maurice Béjart, John Cranko, Frederick Ashton and Birgit Cullberg.

“I’m trying to restore that kind of idea of staying true to the history, but also curiosity of where it’s gonna go,” Helimets said.

Those close to Helimets have noticed his approach.

“He takes the history of classical ballet and all of its roots and founding and brings it into kind of the modern world that we live in,” Le Lievre said.

What to expect

Helimets has found a place to live in Natomas and said he enjoys the short commute. His wife and his daughter, Chloe Helimets were two days from returning to France, where the younger Helimets, a promising dancer with a sizable Instagram following, trains at Paris Opera Ballet School.

It isn’t easy for Helimets to be away from his family, he said. But he sees potential in Sacramento.

“It’s like a really healthy seed that you know is going to sprout any moment,” Helimets said.

He already has had work to attend to in the early going. The second company started Aug. 17, the same day that Helimets began his job.

Helimets brought in his best friend Vitor Luiz, who he had known in both Birmingham and San Francisco, to begin serving in recent weeks as interim director of the second company. (The previous director of that unit, Rhodes Elliott departed, along with his wife, former rehearsal director Elise Elliott, for roles with Cincinnati Ballet.)

Luiz is on sabbatical from his job as a professor of dance at University of California, Irvine and will work with Sacramento Ballet until December. He said he was confident about what his friend would be able to achieve in Sacramento.

“I can’t say enough that this is the best choice that Sacramento Ballet could have had,” Luiz said.

Helimets has also taken early steps with Le Lievre about her making a documentary about his first season in Sacramento. The ballet’s board is working to find a venue to screen the previous documentary as a way to introduce Helimets locally.

The first company returns Sept. 14 and Helimets will work with dancers he didn’t audition or hire. Sacramento Ballet Executive Director Kiera Anderson, who was hired in January, explained that contracts for the season go out months in advance.

Programming is also set for the ballet’s 2026-27 season, which is titled “Legacy in Motion” as a nod to the ballet’s past and present. But that hasn’t stopped Helimets from thinking about future programming, Anderson noted.

“We’ve been daydreaming about what the possibilities are for upcoming seasons for the last several months,” Anderson said. “Because of his connections and his network and also just his artistic vision, really the sky is the limit for what we could do. I think it’s just a really exciting time for Sacramento Ballet in terms of building on our legacy and growing as a company.”

Helimets said he had a long-term view on what it would take to be successful.

“I have my vision for this company and that is that this company… in five years is going to be really competitive and a high performing in classical medium,” Helimets said.

He wasn’t worried about quickly winning over his dancers.

“In this process of the dancers getting to know me, the ones who don’t feel like it’s a right fit are going to just slowly move away because they don’t feel like it’s going to fit with what they want to do,” Helimets said. “That’s just natural.”

Those who stay will get to work with an artistic director with a focus.

“I am forever going to try to find a way to bring ballet technique into the 21st century,” Helimets said. “I will die trying until my final breath, until I get there.”

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