REVIEW: Aspen Santa Fe Ballet dancers shine at home

Dance · Reviews
Tuesday evening at the Aspen District Theatre was an adults-only affair, in a wonderful way. Local heroes Aspen Santa Fe Ballet rolled out a three-part program of notable sophistication and artistic distinction. The attentive audience, fortunate to co-habit a beautiful Rocky Mountain city with a world-class ballet company, took it in thoughtfully—it’s something you feel ...

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet takes on Cayetano Soto 2

Dance · Reviews
You’re seated amidst a smallish audience in a theater in the middle of the country. You’re not in New York, you’re not in London. But you’re watching an advancement the art of classical ballet. It’s the premiere, this past weekend in Aspen, Colorado, of a new work by Cayetano Soto for Aspen Santa Fe Ballet ...

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s alluring avenue-advertisements

Dance
Just arrived in beautiful Aspen, Colorado, for a week-long critic’s residency with the nearly 17-year old Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. This weekend the adventurous company will perform on its home stage before traveling to Saratoga Springs, New York, for shows at the historic summer dance festival there.  Cruising the avenues of Aspen, we were delighted ...

Chillin’ with a ballerina by a babbling brook

Dance
  Diaghilev hung around Venice’s Lido Beach with Lifar. Balanchine cooked Sunday dinners for his favorites. Ballet impresarios need down time. If they genuinely enjoy their artistic charges, they hang around with them on their day off. Here’s the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet artistic and executive director duo, Tom Mossbrucker and Jean-Philippe Malaty, on a ...

Jorma Elo’s smart-looking “Overglow”

Dance
We haven’t seen “Overglow” yet. It was created just this past summer in the mystical terrain of Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, superstar choreographer, Jorma Elo, sculpted “Overglow,” set to music by Beethoven and Mendelssohn, on the bending human pretzels of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, located outside Washington ...

Twyla, Laura, and me 7

Dance · Reviews
When American women demanded, and then seized, social and sexual liberation in 1970, I was an intense 15-year-old high-school girl in suburban Pittsburgh. Feminism hit me hard and it formed me. I entered young womanhood with the lovely delusion that life would deliver every achievement and pleasure I sought. Five years later, having already burned through ...