NEWS + REVIEWS
Below you will find the most recent critical reviews of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet performances as well as online versions of Ballet News, the quarterly newsletter of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. If you are looking for specific information about an upcoming ASFB performance, please check the Performances or Press Releases sections of our site.
ARTICLES
Outside Eyes
Impressions of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet
by Zachary Whittenburg
There are many ways to draw a portrait of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. A conversation with Artistic Director Tom Mossbrucker and Executive Director Jean-Philippe Malaty would tell you much about its history and even more about its future. Company founder Bebe Schweppe, having hand-picked Mossbrucker and Malaty in 1995 to create a professional dance company for Aspen, certainly has a handle on what ASFB does, is, and will become. Board members, performers and technicians all know the organization from the inside out. One could exit-poll audiences as they leave the theater.
Glance at a spec sheet for Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, though, and what will catch your eye is a list longer and more luminous than would seem possible to generate in a decade and change: choreographers who have come from around the world to create original work on the company's dancers. It is these artists who can -- and do -- paint pictures of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet as an incubator for inventive, au courant movement. Nearly forty dancemakers are represented in Aspen Santa Fe Ballet's repertoire, over a third of them by multiple pieces. Their careers began the story of contemporary dance -- George Balanchine, Paul Taylor, Antony Tudor, Jirí Kylián, William Forsythe, Twyla Tharp -- which continues today in the creations that Aspen Santa Fe Ballet commissions.
Prescience and confidence, along with the international dance community's tendency toward serendipity, led Malaty and Mossbrucker to order one, then two, and now six ballets from Nicolo Fonte, who has in the same span of time gone from storied performer to choreographer of international renown and astounding prolificacy. Fonte recalls embarking on his creative career in the late 1990s, "testing the waters by sending out videos of my work. Glenn Edgerton [then at Nederlands Dans Theater, now Artistic Director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago] informed me that Tom and Jean-Philippe were looking for choreographers and that I should send a sample. I've been told the video was still in the machine, playing, when they called me to work out the details for a new piece." On the tape was his first major work, In Hidden Seconds, which he is restaging for ASFB this season.
The liquid, intricate choreography of Jorma Elo has initiated a fruitful dialogue from Santa Fe to Oslo about contemporary dance vocabulary. In ballets represented by as many as ten companies per season, invisible threads connect wrists to backs of knees and ears to heels. In watching, one gets the sense that the web described by his movement has no boundaries; it includes not only the dancers onstage but the viewers in their seats. Elo's constructions, poetically avoiding lecture and overt symbolism, campaign for a sensitivity to the world's interconnectedness on a purely aesthetic plane- but when asked what keeps him coming back to ASFB he kids, "The skiing." Elo says it's difficult to describe. "I visit companies all over the world, and this is by far the most unique atmosphere in which to work. JP and Tom can give me the entire company all day long for weeks at a time." It's the arrangement a choreographer lives for. Momentum can carry on uninterrupted, creating a nest for fragile aesthetic experiments. Once sections of movement become set, time can be taken to run them through manipulations in search of a best fit in tempi and texture. From the dancers, some of whom have been in process with Elo on all three of his ASFB premieres, "a sense of humor, combined with respect and care for detail, comes so naturally. They really, truly love to dance, and they're able to be wonderfully different from one another as characters without compromising a feeling of unity. The creative process can be slow and vague at times, and yet their patience with, and understanding of it, is endless."
Aligning the stars for productive studio time, though, is only half the battle. Curating a successful catalogue of new and old work dictated by the shifting requirements of artists' availability, budget, licensing agreements, and duplication of repertoire is a puzzle whose solution requires incredible flexibility and resourcefulness. Nevertheless, ASFB has avoided many pitfalls common to young dance companies and made swift work of building a collection that speaks both to the individual spirit of the Rocky Mountain region and the transnational narrative of concert dance. New choreography can both define and upend this balance -- the troupe that can maintain it year after year becomes a hot commodity.
Venue-booking presenters who wade through hundreds of companies' fluctuating schedules in search of cohesive annual exhibits have found in Aspen Santa Fe Ballet a company that fits anywhere, the chic shoes that work with every ensemble. White Bird Dance, an Oregon-based presenting organization co-founded by Walter Jaffe and Paul King, assembles a calendar that brings blue-chip contemporary dance from around the world to the Pacific Northwest. Jaffe and King found kindred spirits in Malaty and Mossbrucker at a dinner occasioned by Margaret Selby, a longtime producer for PBS of the Dance in America series and president of Columbia Artists Management's Spectrum division. At the end of White Bird's ninth season, in May of 2007, White Bird gave Portland the opportunity to fall in love with ASFB.
"We immediately became close with Tom and Jean-Philippe not only because they are genuinely decent people," Jaffe says, "but because their thinking aligns with ours. They've achieved amazing results running a very tight organization, working with some of the best choreographers in the world." King is quick to add a nod to ASFB's efficiency: "They're the model touring dance company. They travel literally -- and figuratively -- with a minimum of baggage. There's a purity to their goals and mission. They simply want to bring high quality dance, performed by outstanding dancers, to audiences with very little fuss. And they deliver."
The choreographers with whom I spoke all described a freedom from logistical pressure in the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet studios that put their creative needs first and sent distractions packing. Helen Pickett, a choreographer with interests in deconstructionist ballet (via a career as principal dancer with Ballett Frankfurt during William Forsythe's directorship) and avant-garde multidisciplinary theater (seven years with New York's The Wooster Group), added PETAL to ASFB's list of world premieres last year and is making a second new work for the company this season.
"Aspen Santa Fe Ballet is a special place that nurtures today's choreographers," Pickett states. “Upon walking into the studio to choreograph”, Pickett says, "I feel a readiness. I feel the air lights up with our first steps and we roll with the flow." The Aspen Santa Fe dancers "exude warmth -- they're excited to figure out new ideas and give their all. We work hard and play hard." Their availability to the process of creation is something Pickett finds invaluable. "Because they work with so many living choreographers," she says, "they have a different mindset from dancers who wait to be told what to do. They're immediately able to make brand-new movement their own, which allows us to bounce off one another, creatively, which then feeds the process and helps surprising things appear. Allowing space in the studio for surprise and chaos is of the utmost importance -- that's how a style is developed." It's a characteristic of ASFB's performers that's evident even over the course of a short visit. Notes Jaffe, "The dancers have a no-nonsense approach to dancing that we find hugely appealing."
The creation of Left Unsaid in 2003, (which has gone on to revivals at Sweden's Göteborg Ballet, Ballet Austin, and Oregon Ballet Theatre), is one Fonte describes as a truly collaborative effort with the Aspen Santa Fe team. "That ballet was one of the fastest-moving studio experiences I've ever had, and I can only attribute it to being completely in sync -- we reached a point of total creative complicity. I was able to explore, with the dancers, methods of making a dance that were completely new to all of us. Choreographing in that environment, and knowing through prior collaborations each of their strengths, is what made Left Unsaid the success it's become. Together, we cultivated a world we believed in."
It's something Elo feels as well. "The dancers and I know each other. We dive into the experience immediately and it flows from there." The fact that Mossbrucker and Malaty were both dancers assists enormously. Shared vocabulary and an understanding of the process makes cooperation logical. "I respect their point of view as artists. When we're near the premiere and I no longer trust my objective eye to the best solution, I can ask Tom to help with small but critical final decisions." In addition to receiving a blank slate on which to experiment freely as a choreographer, Elo says working with ASFB has often been a learning experience.
Whether transitory through live performance or carved into marble, affecting gestures expand the notion of what the senses can encounter. Dancemakers are driven to the studio, and audiences to the theater, in search of these affirming glimpses. Concert dance can be approached as a predictable ritual, but Aspen Santa Fe Ballet and its collaborators share an appreciation of art as hard work in good faith. Refined technique and nuanced musicality show high standards and dedication, but it's the calibration of everyone's skills to indelible scenes that walks the walk.
Boulder, Colorado native Zachary Whittenburg is the Dance Editor in Chicago for Time Out, a weekly culture magazine published in 43 cities worldwide. He has been covering art and performance since 2005 for print and online publications in Chicago and New York. Zachary entered the dance scene as a performer, joining Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet in 1998. His dancing career later brought him to North Carolina Dance Theater, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and BJM Danse Montréal. He is a teacher of ballet for professional dancers and has presented choreography around Chicago and in Canada.
REVIEWS
ASFB AT NYC's JOYCE THEATER
ASFB returned to NewYork City's Joyce Theater in February, below is Claudia La Rocco's review from The New York Times.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Evening of Adventuresome Premieres
By Claudia La Rocco
February 19, 2009
Given all the hand wringing about the dire state of contemporary ballet, it is good to be reminded that new work is being made all the time and that much of it is of at least some interest. Genius choreographers might not come around very often; choreographers with potential do.
Helen Pickett is one, judging by “Petal,” which had its New York premiere on Wednesday at the Joyce Theater courtesy of the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. The small company (just 12 dancers) has adventuresome tastes, sampling from a range of choreographic languages. Though sometimes ragged, in both style and endurance, the performers gamely threw themselves into the disparate works with admirable verve.
“Petal” combines a sophisticated sense of spacing with a resonant exploration of emotional discovery. Eddies of social groupings swirl within a stage bounded by large white screens and suffused by Todd Elmer’s gorgeously lush lighting design of Easter-egg yellows, pinks and oranges. A sense of restless female desire pervades the choreography, which sets intimate duets and solos within more formal group patterns, much as pockets of tenderness bloom within the relentless music by Philip Glass and Thomas Montgomery Newman.
There are many styles in play here, including Twyla Tharp’s tough, sexy female athleticism and, most strongly, the aggressively buckling, rippling movement language of William Forsythe, in whose company Ms. Pickett danced for many years. But Ms. Pickett looks to be finding a voice of her own.
This is a good thing, as Mr. Forsythe has far too many pale imitators, and none who manage the pacing and intelligence of such works as his pas de deux from “Slingerland,” performed handsomely on Wednesday by Sam Chittenden and Katherine Eberle. Here the push-and-pull drama of two dancers, isolated in a darkly illuminated world, serves as both a rich metaphor for relationships and a deconstruction of ballet’s reliance on that metaphor. Combining the theatrical and the theoretical, it’s a neat Forsythian trick.
Tricks too abound in Jorma Elo’s dances. But they too often seem cheap. “1st Flash,” another New York premiere, had many of his hallmarks: the manic, slapdash phrasing; the busy, gesture-laden choreography, full of set pieces designed to momentarily wow; the haphazard connection to music. (Here Sibelius’s romantic, windswept vision is spliced, to little effect, with passages danced in silence.) There is lots going on, but little to hold onto (though Jordan Tuinman’s varied lighting design deserves a nod). While the eye scrambles to keep up, the imagination yawns.
A more intriguing world is suggested in Itzik Galili’s “Chameleon,” a third New York premiere. In between preening and posing, five women present a smorgasbord of tics and twitches, accompanied by the meditative, moody John Cage work “In a Landscape.” They do so seated in a row of bright green chairs at the front of a mostly darkened stage, as if waiting for an audition or for someone to notice them.
There is something terribly sad about these creatures, dressed in slinky black outfits and offering their brittle, pin-up smiles. (On Wednesday, Lauren Alzamora was particularly poignant in navigating a public-private tension.) The longer they remain on display, the more you see the cracks in the facade.
ASFB'S 2008 SUMMER PERFORMANCES
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet made its debut at the American Dance Festival in July and its fourth appearance at Jacob’s Pillow in August. Below are reviews from these performances.
THE NEWS AND OBSERVER
Young ballet company impresses at ADF
July 4, 2008
DURHAM - At this weekend's American Dance Festival, audiences may come for the ever-popular Paul Taylor Dance Company but will leave more impressed with the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet.
This young company, just into its second decade, brings exciting vibrancy and striking precision to its ADF debut. True, its two selections are from choreographer Twyla Tharp's top drawer, but the dancers go beyond mere replication, their joy and verve making the pieces their own. "Sinatra Suite," is Tharp's 1984 showpiece about a ballroom dance couple's brief attraction, interaction and disconnection over the course of five songs from "Ol' Blue Eyes." Katie Dehler in an elegant Oscar de la Renta dress and Seth DelGrasso in standard tux, move seamlessly together, first in sharp tango steps, then in sensuous lifts and close-contact turns.
Dehler rivets with spectacular control, balancing in near-impossible positions. DelGrasso gets his due in a poignant solo of regret soothed over with alcohol.
Before that jewel-like performance, the full company energizes the stage with "Sweet Fields," Tharp's 1996 piece to Shaker hymns. The dancers are seductive in their lingerie-like white costumes, countered by their uplifting, reverent responses to the mesmerizing singing.
Their movements are sometimes ritualistically solemn, sometimes exuberantly blissful. The piece has a wonderful dichotomy of old/new, light/dark, simple/complex. The dancers' geometric exactness and palpable warmth give the performance thrilling impact.
This is in stark contrast to Taylor's "Changes," made for the San Francisco Ballet earlier this year. The piece uses 1960's music from John Phillips, John Hartford and Lennon/McCartney, with dancers in bell-bottoms, headbands, and tie-dye. The choreographer's notes equate that earlier period to today's, with the same need to question political decisions.
Given Taylor's darkly intriguing pieces about the U.S. (think "Big Bertha" or "Company B"), "Changes" disappoints. Expectation of something provocative or enigmatic is unfulfilled in what seems a mere recreation of period dance moves layered with references to drug use and free love.
Only the incongruous "Dancing Bear," in which Francisco Graciano in footed pajamas is comforted in a dream by bearskin-clad James Sampson, gives off some emotion and character. Otherwise, the dancers seem imprecise and underspirited. Taylor's 1956 "3 Epitaphs" still amuses with its hooded, mirrored creatures struggling towards some higher purpose but failing in their bumbling listlessness. And his 2002 "Promethean Fire" is Taylor at near best, the swirling patterns and architectural groupings beautifully matched to orchestrated Bach, with a gratifying underpinning of triumph against adversity.
This program is definitely a crowd-pleaser, if not the most satisfying to dance mavens looking for meatier fare. Kudos to Taylor for longevity and to Aspen Santa Fe for joining the ADF elite.
THE BOSTON GLOBE
In varied program, troupe gets its kicks
August 15, 2008
By Janine Parker, Globe Correspondent
BECKET - The annual summer-long festival of dance that Jacob's Pillow delivers is bound to invite comparison to the Olympic Games. All of those international companies, all of those fabulous dancer/athletes. So be it: This week it's the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, a terrific troupe of 11 dancers who are doing us proud in an excellent program of four dances that show off the company's versatility.
Artistic director Tom Mossbrucker and executive director Jean-Philippe Malaty are committed to presenting contemporary classical dance with an emphasis on commissioning new works. Helen Pickett's "Petal," which premiered in February, solidly affirms the importance of such sponsorship.
The title is apt for such a sunny piece, though fortunately there are hints of mystery and tension among the four couples. For instance, in the partnering, the women are never prettily presented like fragile dolls in need of assistance. When offered, they manage to convey both wariness and a shrugging acceptance, willing to investigate how an extra hand can exploit and heighten their movements. The women frequently kick at their partners (gently, but even so), mostly at their shins as if to trip them, but once, memorably, at head level.
The movement is drawn largely from ballet vocabulary, and Pickett chooses well. Indeed, "Petal" and the pas de deux from William Forsythe's 2000 "Slingerland" are the most overtly balletic - the women wear pointe shoes in both pieces. Ironically, given the "Ballet" in the company's name, it's in these pieces that the company's few technical issues emerge.
The men exhibit a weakness in their extremities: pirouettes executed with arms extended suffer because there's no reach through the forearms to the fingertips; more complex jumps like cabrioles lack sharpness both in the spring from the ground and the shape of the feet. Although the women have plenty of dynamic attack, their pointe work is gummy, possibly from the soft, beaten shoes that the company apparently prefers.
The five women in Israeli choreographer Itzik Galili's "Chameleon" are barefoot and, at times, bare-souled. This funny, strange "dance" - the dancers remain mostly rooted to their green folding chairs - is a keen commentary on the exhausting expectations that can be placed on women. Affecting various poses and exaggerated facial expressions, they conjure lascivious vamps, innocent little girls, or back-slapping best buds. At one point the women raise their legs up, splay them, turned in and feet flexed; then, with perfect comic timing, cover their crotches demurely with their hands.
Jorma Elo's 2003 "1st Flash" is a reminder that the young Finnish choreographer has already developed an unmistakable style. The stage is eerily lit, partially by the large rectangle that hangs upstage right (stark industrial lighting is another trademark). Elo's quirky movement - awkwardly yet appealingly vulnerable, like an adolescent who hasn't grown into his limbs yet - is often agitated. At times the dancers rush onto the stage as if late to work, and then hurl themselves into a phrase as if to overtake the clock. But suddenly a dancer will sweep languorously through a turn and it seems, comparatively, that time has slowed . . . for just a moment, and then the twitching resumes.
It's fairly manic, and it could be too much, but as for me, I wish it would never end.