In 2017, when Ballet West launched its choreographic festival, Adam Sklute, artistic director, told Dance Magazine, “We want this festival for choreography to do what the Sundance Film Festival does for film—create a hub for creativity in dance.” Judging by the exceptionally enthusiastic response from the opening night audience, this week’s Choreographic Festival VI: Asian Voices has clinched the gold standard for artistic innovation, with marvelous works by four internationally known choreographers performed by Ballet West and the Columbus, Ohio-based BalletMet.
Exhilarating and inventive at every turn, Asian Voices is multidimensional in exploring choreographic storytelling through uplifting themes of nostalgia, the liberating energy of youth, migration, universal journeys of love and relationships and the certainty of historical and natural time cycles. Two world premieres by Asian female choreographers and two Utah premieres by Asian male choreographers electrified the stage at the Jeanné Wagner Theatre in the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts.
Capping an outstanding 60th anniversary season for Ballet West, the stupendous Asian Voices production sizzles with the precise cinematic-like emotional energy that makes such festivals a must-attend destination for dedicated arts audiences of all intellectual and demographic stripes. In each work, as noted in a preview published at The Utah Review, Asian artists effectively draw on techniques that have been practiced for centuries while they also incorporate their own interconnected sense of identity, to forge their creative futures that are ingenious and resonate with the foundations of their own heritage.
A world premiere for the opener, Caili Quan’s Play on Impulse, nostalgically inspired in part by her quest for personal and artistic freedom as a teenager in Guam, put the spontaneous burst back in pop music classics, reminding us of why these songs became hits when they arrived on the airwaves. The 12 dancers found their groove immediately with Quan’s choreography, clearly telegraphing the meaning of the songs on her eclectic mix tape. In the opening section, the dancers captured the essence of Björk’s Human Behaviour, as teens who understand each other but could never abide the drama or nonsense of adults around them. From 1990, Deee-Lite’s most commercially successful song, Groove Is in The Heart, became a sassy, funky dance club on stage, which rightly tickled the audience. Likewise, the dancers proved the point of The Cardigans’ Lovefool perfectly, not only showing off the pop rock song’s upbeat, sunny vibe but also the not-so-cheery, desperate-sounding essence of its lyrics: “love me, love me,” “fool me, fool me” and “leave me, leave me.”
Two duets captured the highs and lows of young love. Katlyn Addison and Hadriel Diniz did full justice to Quan’s choreographic interpretation of the venerable pop standard Blue Moon, as sung by Elvis Presley. Meanwhile, Jenna Rae Herrera and Vinicius Lima were simultaneously poignant, introspective and ravishing in their dance to The Velvet Underground’s After Hours. Quan’s choreographic connection to this song’s sense of escaping from reality was unforgettable. A night with a favorite person after the club can be so vibrant that we want so desperately to preserve it by “never having to see the day again,” a sentiment that resonated in Herrera and Lima’s performance. Quan’s Play on Impulse is a treasured refuge from reality, rendered splendidly in her finely articulated choreographic language.
Receiving its Utah premiere, Phil Chan’s Amber Waves, a duet performed with utmost sincerity by Emily Adams and Hadriel Diniz, provided the evening’s most touching moments. Chan’s Amber Waves was first performed at the Oakland Ballet’s Dancing Moons Festival in 2022. The work is set to a Meditation on America the Beautiful by Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo, which was commissioned by Min Huang, as part of reinterpretations of America the Beautiful themes from 75 composers.
Ruo’s meditation for solo piano is classic minimalism crafted through repeated phrases and motifs, some of which suggest water freezing and then melting and darkness replaced by sunshine. Nicholas Maughan performed and shaped the music with commendable sensitivity. The metaphorical connections to the immigrant’s alternating cycles of hope and success against apprehension and disappointment are clear, as Adams and Diniz move repeatedly in and out of light. Chan’s poetic choreography lines…
Read More: Asian Voices sets gold standard for artistic innovation – The Utah Review