Vail Dance Festival, directed by Damian Woetzel, a former star at New York City Ballet who, in his spare time, runs the Juilliard School, offers two weeks of top-notch dance programming at 8,000 feet altitude, on an outdoor stage in a luxe ski village in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. With his NYCB connections (he is also married to legendary Balanchine ballerina Heather Watts) Woetzel attracts both stars and up-coming talent from that company, as well as an interesting blend of ballet dancers from the American Ballet Theatre, Miami City Ballet, even the Royal Danish Ballet. The gala performances on evenings like August 2, which I attended (it was called International Evenings of Dance III) also feature performers from some of the companies appearing during the Festival (this year there was A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham Company, Paul Taylor Dance Company, Alonzo King Ballet, Michelle Dorrance and her tap group, and Ballet X) as well as an eclectic blend of other dancers, like street dance icon Lil Buck, the modern dancer Melissa Toogood, even ballroom dancers Denys Drozdyuk and Antonina Skobina.
Woetzel brings all this talent together to perform, but also to collaborate. NOW: Premieres, which took place on August 4, featured all new choreography from the likes of Pam Tanowitz, Bobbi Jene Smith, Justin Peck, Clifton Taylor and Robert Battle, all dance luminaries. There is a sense of play at work throughout the festival. Woetzel will put veterans on stage with junior dancers (often the stars of tomorrow) and gives performers and musicians from different backgrounds a chance to learn, experiment, and sometimes fail, all in the name of the creative process. It is a format which continues to attract top stars, all of whom are somewhat free from the usual burdens of company rank, professional reputation and the pressure cooker life in New York (and other cities). In Vail, there is a summer camp atmosphere, and although there are kids being taught, the campers are mostly professional dancers.
I took in three performances; one of the Ballet evenings, the performance by A.I.M. (Kyle Abraham’s group) and the evening of premieres. It was almost too much to take in—the NOW: Premieres program, for example, featured 13 brand new dances. I dutifully took notes, but perhaps because of the relaxed vibe at the outdoor venue, the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheatre (Abraham performed at the indoor Vilar Performing Arts Center in nearby Beaver Creek) with its backdrop of flowers and river and chilly night air, it seemed more important to open myself to all that dance– in so many variations– than to pick out winners and losers.
At the International Evening of Dance III, Ballet X got things up to date with “Big Wig (excerpt)” with its banging techno score by Popof and Maura Somm, skin-baring costumes and athletic choreography. With a cast of 16, it reminded me of one of those competition groups that post their championship routine on Instagram, with a batch of hyped-up high school dancers doing millions of fouetté turns, walkovers and splits in perfect unison. Act Two featured newlyweds Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia from NYCB dancing Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant” for the first time together, and a premiere by Pam Tanowitz, “secret story ballet,” featuring Isabella Boylston and Calvin Royal III from ABT, as well as Melissa Toogood, a Cunningham dancer, and Spencer Lenain, a distinctive-looking, very young dancer with a social media following (TikTok @spencerdancerrr and Instagram @spencerdancer.) Tanowitz, who creates eccentric, well-regarded dances informed by ballet technique, had an opportunity to play with these thoroughbred dancers, and the result was fresh, true-to-herself, and quirky. Two NYCB veterans, Sara Mearns and Robbie Fairchild, teamed up for “La Sonnambula (excerpt)”, and the sight of the beautiful, mature Mearns as a sleepwalker boureeing all over the stage in a nightgown and cascading hair, protected by a loving, now-retired cavalier, Fairchild, was sweetness personified.
A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham took to the stage at the Vilar Performing Arts Center on August 3. Abraham’s work has been called a “postmodern jumbo.” The company, which presents works by choreographers such as Bebe Miller, Doug Varone and Trisha Brown in addition to dances by Abraham, who won a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius grant”) in 2013, is informed by African-American culture and music as much as by the traditions of modern and classical dance, but has a more up-to-date look than other groups, such as the Alvin Ailey Company, which still performs repertory dances from the 1960’s. While the four recent Abraham pieces (plus a premiere by choreographer Jermaine Spivey) each offered designer lighting and technically challenging movement, there was an overall sense that Abraham looks for a soft note in his dances—a departure from what could be called the cliché of urban edge and hip-hop language. “Motorrover” (2023) was choreographed as a response to Merce Cunningham’s 1972 piece, “Landrover” and was performed by Jamaal Bowman and Mykiah Goree in complete silence. Their movements were solos then duets, the movement language abstract and Cunningham-like but also offering a hint of the personal, a competitive undertone suggested by looks, and walks and dancing that broke out of the austere language of Cunningham without dissing it.
“NOW: Premieres” on August 4, raised questions for this viewer: how much rehearsal time was each piece given, and how long did the choreographer have to create each dance? Ten days in the mountains, even with the top dancers in the world, is probably not enough time to fully develop and teach a new work. Some choreographers, like Justin Peck, would surely never agree to presenting their work in public in a raw state. Most likely, these works were created, sometimes on other dancers in other cities, before the choreographer ever arrived in Vail to teach it to the dancers-in-residence. But there was also a sense that some of this came together rapidly—the evening sometimes felt like watching a batch of first drafts.
Tiler Peck (no relation to Justin Peck) the NYCB ballerina, has received positive reviews of late for her own choreographic work. “Concerto for Two Pianos,” her first commissioned piece for her home company, found New York Times critic Gia Kourlas glowing: “Peck does a wonderful job of staying true to herself and true to her vision of ballet, which has more in common with City Ballet’s lineage of repertory than many recent contemporary works at the company that lose their way, that become static. She also shows the dancers as themselves — but bigger, with greater expansiveness. Set to Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, the ballet flows like a physical manifestation of musical notes. Its steps are rooted in classicism with careful attention to detail, but not full of fussy details. It moves, and it’s legible.” (NY Times 2/2/24).
At Vail, Peck presented a new piece, “Variations for Three,” featuring Takumi Miyake, from ABT, and Daniel Guzman and Elijah Geolina, both 2025 Scholars-in-Residence at the Festival and dancers with the ABT Studio Company. Peck showed a dancer’s visceral understanding of music (by Paganini here) and played, choreographically, with the conceit of a virtuosity competition between the two juniors vs. one pro. Miyake held his own, the young dancers were clearly having fun, and the piece exemplified the kind of experimentation on display all night.
“faux pas,” was one of three premieres by Pam Tanowitz, a modern dancer working in the classical ballet realm these days, of whom the Times of London wrote, “Tanowitz reshapes the classical lexicon in ways that keep it fresh and unpredictable.” Tanowitz’s “faux pas” and “All My Trials” were both presented as solos for NYCB principal Joseph Gordon. He is a superbly unaffected dancer, all the better to present the unique shapes, phrasing and unusual combinations of steps dreamed-up by Tanowitz. While her unadorned work can sometimes make the Balanchine-style ballet NYCB specializes in look fussy, Gordon morphs into and thrives in both. He was a solid partner throughout the festival, but here, by himself, was a young man intent on movement without artifice. In “faux pas,” with Ted Hearn’s “Nobody’s” played live by Brooklyn Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen, Gordon moved through Merce Cunningham-style flailing arms and tilted lunges with panache. “All My Trials” used the Joan Baez song with the same title, sung by guitarist/performer Kate Davis. Here, the folksy music and sadness: “Hush little baby, don’t you cry. You know your mama was born to die. All my trials, Lord, soon be over,” reflected emotion: a mother singing to a child. Gordon, still young, made the music and movement communicate an untold story of a boyhood surrounded by trials and sadness. His conviction to the choreography made this storytelling simple and the unpredictable inevitable.
The other Peck –Justin, choreographer-in-residence for New York City Ballet, arrived in Vail fresh off the winning of another Tony award for Best Choreography on Broadway, his third, for this season’s “Buena Vista Social Club.” His festival premiere was “Carve Curve Curl(y) Queue” with music by Joel Wenhardt. Peck, a San Diego native, alludes, in the title, the costuming and a certain insouciance found in the choreography, to an influence from the world of surfing, something he may or may not have excelled in during his youth, but was, no doubt, exposed to by the ubiquitous beach culture of his native city (I speak as a fellow San Diegan).
A gang of five young dancers, a blend of Juilliard grads, cast members from “Illinoise,” (Peck’s award-winning experiment turning Sufjan Stevens album into a Broadway show) and a NYCB dancer (KJ Takahashi) wore cut-off jeans, flannel shirts around their waists, t-shirts, knee pads and tennis shoes. Peck has been restoring the sneaker to its proper place in high culture for years now (although Twyla Tharp had her dancers in white tennies decades ago). The piece explored, as Peck is want to do, dancing as community, with the emphasis on movement phrases built around casualness itself. The dance is no masterpiece, but it does offer an interesting and unusual quality–surf attitude–a beach-town California mellow vs. the pointe shoe virtuosity and New York edge he has been living and working in for a few decades. What may have been a journey in nostalgia for the choreographer translated, at Vail, into another stylistic departure from the company brand. However, so many Peck ballets have by now been created for the company, that the company is beginning to look more like Justin Peck and less like Balanchine every year—with a little help from Alexie Ratmansky. Sneakers are now and forever.
Michael Wade Simpson
