What’s New at the VAIL DANCE FESTIVAL 2025
“
By Sarah Silverblatt-Buser
The Vail Dance Festival is all about the mix and how we always keep growing,” Artistic Director Damian Woetzel says regarding the extensive amount of new work, people and collaborations that draw world class artists to the Festival each summer. “We’re like a company,” he says, “where adding new voices has an immediate effect, but from there it quickly becomes all about what we’re able to do together.” That artistic alchemy not only creates innovative new works for Vail audiences to witness, but it transforms the artists who join the mix, preparing them for new challenges as their careers continue to blossom beyond the Rocky Mountains. This year, the Festival boasts an impressive roster of up-andcoming dance stars and company premieres, and a wide array of new works made by today’s leading choreographers and composers. These debuts and world premieres, which will be in collaboration with returning Festival favorites, are central to the Vail ethos of enriching tradition while carrying dance into the future.
New Artists For the first time, the critically acclaimed contemporary dance company A.I.M, led by Princess Grace and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Kyle Abraham, will energize the Rockies with a full evening of sublime dancing. A.I.M’s powerful dancers give life to Abraham’s rich choreographic style, which blends ballet, contemporary, and social dance with emotional, thought-provoking storytelling inspired by Black culture and history. “As a movement practitioner and maker,” Abraham told Gagosian, “anything I experience—whether I’m looking at my friends at church camp… doing whatever they consider to be social dancing—I might put in a dance.” This intuitive creative process makes his works intimate and exquisitely layered. In Vail, A.I.M will dance If We Were a Love Song, Abraham’s homage to Nina Simone, which paints her music into a series of poetic vignettes as a reflection on community, love and one’s self. In addition to other recent works, A.I.M will perform the celebrated solo Show Pony, a piece that questions the pressures of performativity and being on display.
26
VAILDANCE.ORG
Chloe Misseldine in Swan Lake. Photo by Emma Zordan, courtesy of American Ballet Theatre.