Inspiration and collaboration come together in explosive new works
Now has always been the time for new works at the Vail Dance Festival. This summer’s roster of choreographers and composers restates the Festival’s commitment to innovation by encouraging these exceptional artists to take critical steps forward in their careers through fresh collaborations and explorations into new artistic territories. NOW: Premieres is the evening to witness the creative evolution.
The August 5 evening of world premieres features choreography by Artist-In-Residence and New York City Ballet Principal Lauren Lovette, New York City Ballet Principal Tiler Peck, modern choreographer Pam Tanowitz, tap-innovator Michelle Dorrance, and new music by Pulitzer-Prize-winning Festival Composer-In-Residence Caroline Shaw. The evening also features an encore performance of Alonzo King’s first Festival-commissioned work involving four LINES Ballet artists and four New York City Ballet artists dancing to a new score composed and performed by Jazz pioneer Jason Moran.
Having It All: Lauren Lovette
Lovette initially appeared at the Festival in 2012 for her first foray into soloist roles. The chance to step out of the corps de ballet and into the spotlight is a memory that burns brightly in the ballerina-slash-choreographer’s mind. Lovette describes the encouragement from Woetzel as a turning point that was “essential for my own artistry to be able to appear as my own entity.”
That first summer in the mountains empowered her to dive into developing her voice as a dancer and soon after as a choreographer. And the dance world is listening. Last winter, Lovette was awarded the Virginia B Toulmin Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU and was commissioned by American Ballet Theatre to create a work for their 2018 fall gala.
Lovette is deeply invested in her developing career as a choreographer, and as profoundly involved in her dancing. “The truth is, I am a ballerina and I love to make movement on people. That’s just it.” Lovette affirms that the two artistic identities of dancer and choreographer flow from the same sources: “I am inspired and shaped personally by what my mind absorbs and digests throughout any creative process.”
It is with such love for multiplicity that Lovette synthesizes the world around her into movement.
Onwards and Upwards: Tiler Peck
Fellow New York City Ballet Principal Tiler Peck’s long-standing relationship with the Vail Dance Festival has proved key to the ballet superstar’s endless well of artistic potential. Guided by Woetzel, Peck has debuted roles in Vail from her earliest days at the Festival when she danced Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra Suite with Woetzel himself; she moved onward to explore repertory by titans Martha Graham, Jose Limon and Paul Taylor, and to take on important new roles including George Balanchine’s Duo Concertant and Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun. Through it all, Peck has been a fearlessly musical artist. The New York Times summed up Peck’s Vail connection last year: “She’s a star at New York City Ballet, but each year at the Vail Dance Festival she stretches into new territory as a dancer.”
Such command of the stage seamlessly translates into her authority at the front of the studio. During the NOW: Premieres performance of last year’s Festival, Peck made her choreographic debut in which she performed with rising dancers of New York City Ballet – Roman Mejia and Christopher Grant.
The New York Times recounted the breakout work as “remarkably musical, seeming to grow from the score.” Impressive but not surprising, her first work accomplished “more than many mature choreographers have mastered.”
This summer again provides Peck the opportunity to step up as choreographer, who says that “now is the time to just go for it.”
More Than One: Michelle Dorrance
Michelle Dorrance is an artist for the 21st century: sophisticatedly sampling history while tenaciously stomping forward into the future. Dorrance, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, has helped bring tap as a purely American art form back into the country’s consciousness and serves as its most ardent ambassador abroad. She’s already enjoyed world tours, a three-part co-commission by the Vail Dance Festival and American Ballet Theatre, and been appointed as an inaugural Creative Associate at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City. And she’s not slowing down.
Dorrance is as much a dancer who makes music through movement as she is a musician who uses her body to produce sound. The New York Times declared, “Ms. Dorrance was in torrential form, a nonstop source of cascading rhythm.” She is lauded as “one of the most imaginative tap choreographers working today” (The New Yorker). Though she could very well appear as a one-woman band, the percussive tapper prefers plurality to singularity or sameness.
It is clear that Dorrance thrives off of the energy of others. Her ensemble works are exhilarating accomplishments of coexistence personified. Her first group piece created for the Festival involved an impressive amalgam of dancers from different traditions titled we seem to be more than one – for Dorrance, the whole is indeed always greater than the sum of its parts. If an ideal world model were to exist on stage, it is Dorrance whose heart and mind could create it. Only in Vail could a cast so expansive be present.
Talking in Dance: Pam Tanowitz
Modern choreographer Pam Tanowitz is quick-witted and rigorous. She redefines tradition through careful examination, subtly referencing those who came before her, yet never yielding to perceptions stuck in the past. Her recent work inspired by the poet T.S. Eliot’s sublime meditation on time and timelessness, Four Quartets, was celebrated as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” (The New York Times).
“I see myself in a continuum of history, not as an isolated artist” Tanowitz said. “I create work that incorporates history and asks questions of that rich history.”
The complex weaving of deconstructed classical and modern movements renders Tanowitz’s work uncannily familiar while being brand-new. “Tanowitz’s choreography devises its own language, idiosyncratic yet entirely consistent” (Indyweek).
Tanowitz returns to Vail this summer to collaborate with Leonard Bernstein Composer-in-Residence Caroline Shaw. Tanowitz has created five works using Shaw’s scores since first hearing her dynamic, architectural compositions.
“I feel simpatico with her,” Tanowitz says of Shaw. “It’s personal, surprising, beautiful. It’s accessible in the best sense of the word.”
Curiosity to Creativity: Caroline Shaw
Leonard Bernstein Composer-in-Residence Caroline Shaw is insatiably curious. The Pulitzer-Prize winning musician pays no heed to the confining borders of genre. She is a vocalist, violinist, pianist, composer, and producer whose range of work is astounding. Shaw has composed for the Grammy Award-winning ensemble Roomful of Teeth, Renée Fleming and the LA Philharmonic, has produced for hip hop artists Kanye West and Nas as well as contributed to the records of alternative rockers The National and Arcade Fire, to name just few of her impressive projects.
For last summer’s NOW: Premieres performance, Shaw produced a song in collaboration with Memphis jooker Lil Buck and shaped a new work for the celebrated choreographer Justin Peck.
“With dancers, I love trying to think about music the way that they often do,” Shaw says in anticipation of her collaboration with Tanowitz for this summer’s evening of premieres.
“How does she think about movement and form, and how does she make decisions? If I could give her the tools to construct music, what would she come up with? How would she interact with musical modules and phrases and textures, and would it be similar to how she choreographs with dancers?”
With more questions than answers, Shaw taps into unexplored reservoirs of creativity.