Patricia Delgado and Lauren Lovette in Lovette’s Angels of the Get-Through at
Christopher Grant, Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia in Peck’s Lincoln Square. Photo by
NOW: Premieres. Photo by Erin Baiano.
Erin Baiano.
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS TILER PECK
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ellow New York City Ballet Principal Tiler Peck’s long-standing relationship with the Vail Dance Festival has proved key to the ballet superstar’s endless well of artistic potential. Guided by Woetzel, Peck has debuted roles in Vail from her earliest days at the Festival when she danced Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra Suite with Woetzel himself; she moved onward to explore repertory by titans Martha Graham, Jose Limon and Paul Taylor, and to take on important new roles including George Balanchine’s Duo Concertant and Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun. Through it all, Peck has been a fearlessly musical artist. The New York Times summed up Peck’s Vail connection last year: “She’s a star at New York City Ballet, but each year at the Vail Dance Festival she stretches into new territory as a dancer.” Such command of the stage seamlessly translates into her authority at the front of the studio. During the NOW: Premieres performance of last year’s Festival, Peck made her choreographic debut in which she performed with rising dancers of New York City Ballet, Roman Mejia and Christopher Grant. The New York Times recounted the breakout work as “remarkably musical, seeming to grow from the score.” Impressive but not surprising, her first work accomplished “more than many mature choreographers have mastered.” This summer again provides Peck the opportunity to step up as choreographer, who says that “now is the time to just go for it.”
MORE THAN ONE MICHELLE DORRANCE
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ichelle Dorrance is an artist for the 21st century: sophisticatedly sampling history
while tenaciously stomping forward into the future. Dorrance, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, has helped bring tap as a purely American art form back into the country’s consciousness and serves as its most ardent ambassador abroad. She’s already enjoyed world tours, a three-part co-commission by the Vail Dance Festival and American Ballet Theatre, and been appointed as an inaugural Creative Associate at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City. And she’s not slowing down.
personified. Her first group piece created for the Festival involved an impressive amalgam of dancers from different traditions titled we seem to be more than one—for Dorrance, the whole is indeed always greater than the sum of its parts. If an ideal world model were to exist on stage, it is Dorrance whose heart and mind could create it. Only in Vail could a cast so expansive be present.
TALKING IN DANCE PAM TANOWITZ
M “One of the most imaginative tap choreographers working today.”—The New Yorker Dorrance is as much a dancer who makes music through movement as she is a musician who uses her body to produce sound. The New York Times declared, “Ms. Dorrance was in torrential form, a nonstop source of cascading rhythm,” and she’s lauded as “one of the most imaginative tap choreographers working today” (The New Yorker). Though she could very well appear as a one-woman band, the percussive tap dancer prefers plurality to singularity or sameness. It is clear that Dorrance thrives off of the energy of others. Her ensemble works are exhilarating accomplishments of coexistence
odern Choreographer Pam Tanowitz is quick-witted and rigorous. She redefines tradition through careful examination, subtly referencing those who came before her, yet never yielding to perceptions stuck in the past. Her recent work inspired by the poet T.S. Eliot’s sublime meditation on time and timelessness, Four Quartets, was celebrated as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.” (The New York Times) “I see myself in a continuum of history, not as an isolated artist,” Tanowitz says. “I create work that incorporates history and asks questions of that rich history.” The complex weaving of deconstructed classical and modern movements renders Tanowitz’s work uncannily familiar while being brand-new. “Tanowitz’s choreography devises its own language, idiosyncratic yet entirely consistent” (Indyweek). Tanowitz returns to Vail this summer to collaborate with Leonard Bernstein ComposerIn-Residence Caroline Shaw. Tanowitz has created five works using Shaw’s scores since first hearing her dynamic, architectural compositions. “I feel simpatico with her,” Tanowitz says of Shaw. “It’s personal, surprising, beautiful. It’s accessible in the best sense of the word.”
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