Opening weekend at the Vail Dance Festival included a full performance Friday of the classic Balanchine ballet “Serenade,” along with a smorgasbord of short pieces introducing some of the festival artists and dance styles at the outset of the 10-day affair. On Saturday, the Dance Theatre of Harlem took over the Ford Amphitheater for an evening of ballet.
“Serenade,” from 1935, was the first piece George Balanchine created for a group of students he was molding into a company which later became New York City Ballet. Just as this production combined the forces of Colorado Ballet as corps for the performance (along with the summer pick-up group, National Repertory Orchestra, conducted by Michael Stern) while stars from American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet and others took the leading roles— Balanchine took a rag-tag group of young students and created a brilliant masterpiece. The opening, where strains of the familiar “Serenade for Strings” by Tchaikovsky accompany moonlit women in blue calf-length tulle dresses, a tableau offers the 17 women arrayed in a double diamond shape. They perform a simple series of gestures that exemplify simplicity. As Alastair Macaulay wrote in the New York Times in 2016, “These 17 women are devotees and as ballet leads them simultaneously to turn out their legs, feet and arms, they might be nuns saying their vows.” Isabella Boylston and James Whiteside from ABT, Unity Phelan and Chun Tai Chan from NYCB, and the independent artist Lauren Lovette (a NYCB Alum) performed the soloist parts with the familiarity of an old friend. Each has performed the classic work many times in their home companies and it showed.
The rest of the Friday lineup was a mixed-bag of styles and subjects. Sarah Mearns, one of the summer’s Artists-in-Residence, had her long hair streaming for the 4-minute Balanchine solo, “Elégie,” from 1966, accompanied by Tabitha Rhee on viola playing the music by Igor Stravinsky. Catherine Purloin and Aran Bell, from ABT, came out to offer some classical flash with the Act 3 Pas De Deux from “Le Corsaire,” performed with all the flying tricks and fouetté turns you could ask for. The evening opened with a “Jam Session” featuring Youba Cissokho, from Senegal playing the African instrument the Kora, along with a jazz quartet. Ballet dancer (and cousin of the Kora player) Adji Cissoko from Lines Ballet, tap dancers Michelle Dorrance and Amiko Nakagawa, ballroom dancers Denys Drozdyuk and Antonina Skobina, and Ron Myles, a Jookin’ dancer.
An 11-member contingent from Limón Dance Company offered the 1964 piece “Suite from A Choreographic Offering,” wearing bright colors and offering a history lesson in the old-fashioned modern dance choreography, inspired by “variations, paraphrases and motifs” from the dances of Doris Humphrey. Alexandra Hutchinson and Michael Bullard from Dance Theatre of Harlem offered a Helen Pickett duet “When Love” to music by Philip Glass. With a sound score including voices saying things like, “The old story of love—two lovers sat on a park bench holding hands in the moonlight…” Music from Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach” cast a modernist light on a classical pas de deux performed with precision by the two DTH dancers.
On Saturday, it was all-aboard the Dance Theatre of Harlem train. They travelled with 18 dancers, which is a commitment for a one-night stand at the Ford Amphitheater, far away from home in New York City. Their opener was Balanchine’s fiendishly difficult “Allegro Brillante,” set to Tschaikovsky,’s “Piano Concerto No. 3,” of which the choreographer himself said, “everything I know about classical ballet in 13 minutes.” Alexandra Hutchinson and Kouadio Davis were the lead couple. Hutchinson seemed stiff and rote in a role that Maria Tallchief — the ballerina on whom the bravura leading role was created — called “an expansive Russian romanticism.” The men of the company were strong in their group leaping and the pointe-work of the ladies was almost as quick and sharp as the dancers in the mother company (NYCB) but not quite. The recorded music used didn’t help sharpen the affair, it sounded muddy and unclear.
When “Nyman String Quartet No. 2,” the 2019 piece by company Artistic Director Robert Garland (a former principal dancer in the company and the organization’s first Choreographer-in-Residence) began, it seemed as if the group of dancers just seen valiantly attempting Balanchine choreography had been given a shot of tequila. Garland knows these dancers, their strengths and weaknesses, and also their unique gifts as Black artists, and he shows them off beautifully. Relaxed and committed, the dancers were completely at home in this work.
Nyman’s music, (he has scored many films, including Jane Campion’s award-winning 1993 film The Piano) does have the lush visual quality of a film, while Garland’s choreography combined classical technique with social dance moves. The simplicity of his repetitive rhythms and step-touches seemed to ground everything. Transitions in and out of ballet steps were surprising, as was the fact that the simpler prancing, pedaling and pulsing, was often more interesting to look at. A solo for the quirky dancer Keenan English, allowed him to dance like himself—a very good thing. I saw Justin Peck, Choreographer-in-Residence for the New York City Ballet, sitting on the lawn with his family and a few dancer friends—watching closely the work of Garland, who seems to bring a similar style of insouciance to the work of Peck, who often replaces pointe shoes for white sneakers and also explores pop music, not just Tschaikovsky or Bach.
“Blake Works IV (The Barre Project)” grew out of choreographer William Forsythe’s filmed pandemic project, a series of solos (and later duets) using a ballet barre and music of James Blake, a popular British musical artist who blends electronic music with influences from American soul. Well-lit by Brandon Stirling Baker, the piece was a fast-moving series of thrashing, full-out solo dances for 11, each overlapping in rapid succession. The dancers were virtuosic and sexy, and they looked great in the purple costumes by Forsythe and Katy A. Freeman. This is a company to watch.
