Breckenridge – The Aspen Santa Fe Ballet is on a roll.
In March, the company made its second appearance at the Joyce Theater in New York City, garnering another round of laudatory reviews.
Earlier this month, it appeared at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Mass., one of the nation’s most important summer dance series.
With these appearances and its regular cross-country touring, the 10-year-old company’s national and even international profile just keeps growing.
Such success is hardly happenstance. Directors Jean-Philippe Malaty and Tom Mossbrucker have assembled a top-flight group of 11 dancers who perform with polish, personality and purpose.
Equally as important, the two have a knack for finding or commissioning choreography that challenges the dancers, appeals to audiences and gives the company a lively, forward-looking identity.
All these elements were on display last weekend as the company returned to its home state for performances Friday and Saturday evening in the Riverwalk Center.
With a rudimentary stage that has little in the way of wings and tent-covered seating that slopes so gradually that it provides poor sightlines for dance, the facility was hardly ideal.
But with the help of some supplementary sound and lighting equipment, the company made the best of it. And once the performance began, the potency of the dancing made the theater’s deficiencies easy to forget.
To keep the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s offerings fresh, the two directors constantly reinvigorate the company’s repertory: Just one work from the company’s November appearance in Denver recurred on the weekend’s lineup.
Featured were selections by three internationally known, veteran choreographers who all have or have had their own companies – Lar Lubovitch, David Parsons and Twyla Tharp – and a fourth piece by Edwaard Liang, a New York City Ballet soloist.
The program, reviewed Saturday evening, opened with Parsons’ “Wolfgang,” which the company premiered in February. The piece for six dancers draws much of its energy and ebullience from the familiar music it uses by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – hence the title.
With its beautiful pirouettes and classical touches, the work was easily the most balletic of the evening. At the same time, Parsons adds cantilevered bodies, bent torsos and floor combinations that break with the form’s codified traditions.
Next came a pair of psychologically charged duets. Lubovitch’s “Fandango,” which was seen last year in Denver, came across much stronger when paired in this context with Liang’s ideally complementary “Flight of Angels.”
“Fandango,” set to Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero,” offered some of the evening’s most intense, athletic movement, with taut, highly intricate partnering seamlessly executed by Seth DelGrasso and Lauren Alzamora.
Equally strong were two of the company’s stars, Katie Dehler and Sam Chittenden, in “Flight of Angels.” This challenging piece possesses a discomfiting obsessive quality, with sudden shifts in mood from soft floor patterns to the dancers manically clutching each other.
Rounding out the evening was Tharp’s “Sweet Fields,” a work for 10 dancers her company premiered in 1996. Set to a series of 18th- and 19th-century hymns, it suggests different congregants’ response to God with geometrically stylized and sometimes highly acrobatic movement.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
