Ballet West

From the Artistic Director Welcome to Ballet West’s fourth annual Choreographic Festival. This Festival is designed to showcase new, world premiere choreography for the ballet stage. It is a program where the choreographers and the audience are emersed in the creative process and given the opportunity to take chances both creatively and as an audience. Last year we had to cancel our planned festival due to the pandemic, so it is with great joy that we are now able to bring it back. Over the past few years we have been featuring Ballet West as well as companies from around the world. However, for this program I decided to keep things closer to home and bring the Choreographic Festival back to our earlier “new works program” model – Innovations. So, in the style of Innovations, we are presenting four world premieres by company Artists and one world premiere by a renowned guest choreographer. As with all the programs for this season, the show is presented succinctly without intermission – only the briefest of pauses between works. Making Festival ‘21 particularly noteworthy is three of the new creations have musical scores specifically commissioned for, or created incollaboration with the choreographers. We open the program with Matthew Neenan’s The Solo Year. Matthew’s is a unique and fascinating voice in American dance today. Classically trained, he is the co-founder of the contemporary ballet company Ballet X, and has choreographed for companies around the world. In 2014, he created The Sixth Beauty for Ballet West, which received wonderful notice both here in Salt Lake City and in New York City when I included it on our tour to The Joyce Theater later that year. This new creation is a look at relationships and feelings through a baroque prism. Filled with texture and filigree and modulating between highly stylized classical form and nuanced modern movement, Neenan elegantly explores the emotional challenges of this past year with this stunning work for two quartets of dancers who intricately weave a tapestry through dance. Next is the premiere of former Ballet West Demi Soloist Trevor Naumann’s Resist Much, Obey Little. The cerebral and visceral qualities of Trevor’s work make it so interesting to me. Movement appears to happen in a seeming random fashion but is actually strictly choreographed. For this work, Trevor collaborates again with composer Boaz Roberts whose almost improvisational jazz-infused score guides a work that deals with the challenges of humanity. The ballet is 10