The debut of these commissioned works showcases a variety of choreographers, embodying the heart and soul of the Festival
New works and collaboration characterize the ethos of the Vail Dance Festival. Through Artistic Director Damian Woetzel’s thoughtful casting and deep well of trust, spontaneous genius springs from the cross-pollination of artists otherwise divided. The Vail Valley is fertile ground, and NOW: Premieres is the evening to experience the newest results of this creative incubator.
Last year’s NOW program celebrated women choreographers in recognition of the need for fostering creative potential without barriers. In continuation of the Festival’s mission to nourish new voices and radically disrupt the status quo, this year, six choreographers— the majority of whom are women— will create works ranging from neoclassical and contemporary ballet to tap and modern dance. Pulitzer Prize-winning Composer-in-Residence Caroline Shaw and Gabriela Lena Frank, named one of the 35 most significant women composers in history by the Washington Post, will compose new scores commissioned by the Festival.
Tiler Peck: The Collaborator
Tiler Peck is a dancer whose speed and finesse stretch time; her meticulous musicality melds movement into sound. Peck has been described by The New York Times has described Peck as a “paragon” of dance, and Vail as where the “prima-ballerina’s ever-increasing versatility has been most evident.” Fittingly, Vail will again provide the backdrop for Peck to take her next artistic step into the role of choreographer.
“Damian has always pushed me out of my comfort zone as a dancer and individual,” says Peck. “If it wasn’t for him, I am not sure I would have taken the leap.”
Peck dabbled in choreography as a young girl, and has created professional works in collaboration with others, such as Time It Was with Bill Irwin created for the 2015 Festival. For her first true solo choreographic work, Peck said she will consider herself to be in collaboration with her dancers.
The ballet world often maintains a strict separation between choreographer and dancer. Peck’s consideration of her dancers as collaborators welcomes a collective puzzle-making process that encourages dancers to become active participants in the creative process. “Sometimes the steps you make on yourself don’t end up looking the same on someone else,” Peck says, “so you have to see what is in front of you and be flexible.”
Lauren Lovette: The Nonconformist
As a dancer, Lauren Lovette has been described as a free spirit. In choreography, the New York City Ballet principal dancer likewise proves herself a nonconformist, naturally progressing ballet forward to better fit into the 21st century.
Lovette makes work with a message. In last year’s NOW program, she choreographed a ballet for four women, including a pas de deux on Patricia Delgado and herself, featuring spoken word by the genderqueer Boulder-based poet Andrea Gibson. “I feel like we fell in love with each other onstage,” Lovette told Dance Magazine of the untraditional partnership.
Most recently, Lovette created a lush pas de deux for two men in Not Our Fate, her second major work for New York City Ballet. The dance was described by The New York Times as “startling and wonderful…a tender, athletic display of desire.” Lovette, who describes herself as being “in a constant flow of information, desire, emotion, and connection with people,” draws inspiration from the powerful personal experiences that move her.
Lovette’s intuitive approach to dance-making renders her work radically relevant without seeming preachy or put on. She simply senses her world— our world—and synthesizes it through movement and music to comment on issues relating to gender and sexuality, race, and sexual harassment. “I want to let out a lot of things that have happened that aren’t necessarily sparkly,” she says, “I don’t want to hide the struggle.”
Claudia Schreier: The Hybridizer
Claudia Schreier is an independent neoclassical choreographer whose burgeoning career climbs skyward. Schreier’s works are free from narrative, allowing for pure interpretation and nuanced expressiveness. This summer will mark Schreier’s third ballet for the Festival, which has kindled her career since she began as an intern ten twelve years ago, during Woetzel’s first year as Artistic Director.
Schreier dives into rhythmically charged music to create ballets that synthesize classical ballet with a distinctively grounded and spiraling style, an impulse that takes on deeper meaning for her latest NOW premiere. She will choreograph a duet for two dancers of Ballet Hispánico, a company that intimately involves music as a means of expressing the varied richness of Latino culture and identity. The work will co-premiere alongside a new score by celebrated composer Gabriela Lena Frank, who has been described as “something of a musical anthropologist.” Frank draws upon her multicultural heritage— she is of Peruvian, Chinese and Lithuanian Jewish descent— mining from traditional Latin American idioms to create hybridized forms for the 21st century.
Frank’s reference to a “genetic memory of culture” as responsible for Peruvian music “sifting” through her compositions resonates powerfully with Schreier, who is of Jamaican and Jewish descent. Schreier’s impulse to create dynamically layered works infused with undulations and twists is fueled in part, she says, “by the exuberance of the Jamaican spirit” that she inherited from her mother. “My choreography is rooted in the cleanliness and rigor of classical ballet technique,” Schreier says, “but I have a visceral response to music that moves me in less traditional ways and makes me want to dance with abandon.”
Michelle Dorrance: The Choreography Chemist
In last summer’s NOW: Premieres program, tap heroine Michelle Dorrance showed the symbiotic benefits of creative conspiring in her premiere of we seem to be more than one. As Choreographer-in-Residence, Dorrance was given free reign to let her wild imagination run and merged the Festival’s myriad styles—including ballet, contemporary, tap, modern, flamenco, and even vaudeville— together. The artistic alchemy confirmed Dorrance’s remarkable ability to coalesce detailed rhythmic and spatial patterns regardless of the movement language.
The accomplishment, witnessed only once in Vail, lead to the co-commissioning of three new works premieres by the Festival and American Ballet Theatre this year: a small gala work to premiere at ABT’s annual spring season at the Met, a group piece in Vail, and a final, larger-scale work for the Company’s fall season in New York.
“The gala piece will be a shorter work, but a foundation for what happens in Vail, which in turn could be a foundation for what happens in the fall,” Dorrance told The New York Times. “But in Vail, the range of the dancers’ styles and the collaborative nature of the Festival means that crazy things happen, and there are likely to be elements that might just stay in Vail.”
Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener: The Shape Shifters
Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, former members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, return to Vail this summer to create a new work on a cast of modern and ballet dancers, including Lovette. Such interdisciplinary work is nothing new for the duo, who are intrigued by multiplicity. In art and in life, the pair work to incorporate the particularities of the individuals and spaces they find themselves working with and within.
“It’s exciting that we’ll be working with Lauren [Lovette],” the pair says of their collaborative artistic process. “She is a woman making ballet, which is so rare; it’ll be interesting to have that potential perspective in our work.”
While the pair’s work may at first seem purely abstract, it is, in fact, deeply rooted in experiences of the lived world. “Our work is actually very political, but in a frame of abstraction,” Mitchell explains. “We’re constantly engaging in what it means to be a human, the ambiguities, the constant shifting, and how art can activate and change value systems around definitions of beauty. We aren’t neutral.”
Now: Premieres will take place on Monday, August 6th at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater.