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Some of Kansas City’s busiest musicians are rarely seen by the public eye. They are in the studio and the orchestra pit, the classroom and the school gym, matching arpeggios to pliés, connecting crescendos to grand jetés, and playing music of all styles to accompany twirls and kicks.
These are the musicians of the Kansas City Ballet and their ballet school.
“One of the big challenges about accompaniment for dance,” says Devon Carney, Kansas City Ballet artistic director, “is that you have to understand dance as well as music and be sensitive to what the dancer is doing at that particular moment, and be aware of them. You can't just put your nose into the score and play.”
Along with KCB music director Ramona Pansegrau, there are two full-time, and 20 part-time musicians. They work with the main company and KCBII, Kansas City Ballet Academy, KCB’s school outreach program R.O.A.D. (Reach Out and Dance), their Summer Intensive, and a new program, Dance for Parkinson’s. That means that nearly every rehearsal, every class, and every performance has live music. That’s increasingly rare in the dance world, only found in some of the best companies in the country.
Pansegrau joined KCB 19 years ago, when the ballet rehearsal space only had three small studios and “the Kauffman Center was just a hole in the ground,” she says.
“When I came, the school had two accompanists. The company had one that pretty much just played some rehearsals, but mostly class,” remembers Pansegrau. “And so that's what I came into: two and a half accompanists, besides myself.”
KCUR’s Julie Denesha interviewed Pansegrau in 2013, just three years into her tenure and a few years after the company moved into the Todd Bolender Center for Dance and Creativity in the Crossroads.
Jordan Voth joined the music staff part time in 2015, becoming full time in 2022. He got his start playing for dance classes at UMKC, where he earned his doctorate. Voth is now the KCB Company Pianist/Principal Academy Pianist, performing for company classes, rehearsals and performances. He also helps Pansegrau manage the musician schedule for the Academy and prepares parts for the Kansas City Symphony musicians.
“It's lovely having Jordan now because we can have two studios running simultaneously with live music,” says Pansegrau.
In a given class, Voth says he might play upwards of 25 different pieces, choosing repertoire from a variety of genres, including Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze,” piano reductions of Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s piano concerti. In performance, he’s played pieces like Johann Sebastian Bach’s Italian Concerto, works by Alexander Scriabin, Igot Stravinsky’s “Capriccio” [for George Balanchine’s “Rubies”], and Sergei Prokofiev’s “Cinderella.” He is looking forward to performing Aaron Copeland’s “Rodeo” with the ballet in March 2026.
Playing for rehearsal and performance is not that straight forward. Flexibility is as important at the keyboard as it is on the stage. Each dancer moves differently and each show has multiple casts, which means the musicians have to observe closely and be ready with up to five different versions of the same piece, according to Voth.
“Finding the optimal tempos for each step,” he says, “requires extraordinary precision and consistency as the margin for error is usually one or two beats a minute.” Voth and the other dance musicians also learn to recognize a large vocabulary of steps by sight and write them into their score as a ballet is choreographed.
The company’s newest full-time musician is Jacob Thomas. He started with KCB part time in 2022 and became full time in 2024, but he’s been fascinated with playing for dancers since he was a freshman at Kansas State University. He plays for daytime and evening Academy classes and is the primary pianist for R.O.A.D.
“One of my favorite things about playing for dance is the way it truly feels like a conversation, or a constant transfer of energy, between what I see as a musician and how dancers respond to what they hear,” says Thomas.
He also plays percussion, improvises and composes (he earned a master’s degree from UMKC Conservatory). When he accompanies dancers, he might play anything from Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird” or Antonin Dvořák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me” to video game music by Koji Kondo and Toru Minegishi. For KCB’s recent New Moves performance, he transcribed music recorded by choreographer Joseph Boswell’s father, performing the works with the company dancers.
Having worked with companies that use live music and others which primarily use recordings, Carney appreciates Pansegrau’s dedication to live music and knows the value it adds to a dancer’s experience.
“We're dealing with a live art form and it is so much more fully engaging,” he says. “It challenges you to focus more on the musicality of what you're doing and it inspires you more because every time you hear it, it might be slightly different. And that's exciting as an artist, as a dancer, as a student.”
More information about the Kansas City Ballet, their Academy and R.O.A.D. program can be found at kcballet.org.
