Aspen Santa Fe Ballet: Doing something right

With its home in Aspen, a season in Santa Fe and a healthy touring schedule, the 16-year-old Aspen Santa Fe Ballet is as good a role model as any ballet company could follow.

Bebe Schweppe originally founded the company as Aspen Ballet Company and invited two young Joffrey dancers, Jean-Philippe Malaty and Tom Mossbrucker, to help her create the professional company, which became Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. The company now operates two schools in Aspen, one in Santa Fe and a year-round Mexican Folk Dance outreach program in Colorado.

The most notable thing about Aspen Santa Fe is that neither Mossbrucker, the artistic director, nor Malaty, the executive director, claims to be a choreographer (although they did choreograph one ballet together— Romeo and Juliet, which remains in the repertoire). This circumstance eliminates egoistic infighting in matters of artistic taste; on the other hand, the two directors must carefully recruit and commission choreographers capable of molding a style for them.

They look to Americans like Nicolo Fonte, David Parsons, Dwight Rhoden, Martha Clarke and William Forsythe, the Czech and Finnish choreographers Jiri Kylian and Jorma Elo, and the Canadian Edwaard Liang, among many others, for a contemporary but not too idiosyncratic look.

When squares multiply

I first saw this company in 2010 at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, where its performances of Fonte's In Hidden Seconds (1999), Forsythe's Slingerland (2000) and Elo's Red Sweet (2008) bowled me over. While the Pennsylvania Ballet has Forsythe and Elo in its rep, it has yet to commission Fonte. Aside from costs, one wonders why the Pennsylvania Ballet doesn't give its audiences more up-to-date ballets.

But Ballet X has— and consequently Philadelphians will have an opportunity to see his work again in June. And Philadelphians who like new work can see a new ballet next week (April 4-6) by River North Dance Chicago, commissioned by Dance Celebration at Annenberg from Frank Chaves. It's titled Eva, inspired by (and set to the music of) the late singer and guitarist Eva Cassidy.

At Arizona's Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts this month, I saw three more outstanding works danced by the 11-member company.

Square None was a commission to the young but highly regarded Filipino choreographer, Norbert De La Cruz III, a Julliard alumnus who was raised in Los Angeles. In it, seven dancers pose glyphically in squares lit on the stage floor. The squares multiply or subtract in number while the dancers take turns slowly half turning in demi-plié, twisting their ankles en crosse.

The men— Craig Black, Paul Busch, Sam Chittenden and Joseph Watson— are bare-chested in powder-blue slacks; the women— Katherine BolaÓ±os, Samantha Klanac Campanile and Seia Rassenti— wear darling little bustiers with ruffles over the pelvic bones, designed by Project Runway alum Austin Scarlett. Très romantique!

The music begins with Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto and winds through Handel and Aphex Twin— quite a wide swath. But the changing tempi and eras work. Three of the men join the female trio, breaking into duets and later dancing like wind-up toys. Another mood change swings from full cast to solo woman and the rest running in, each finding his or her square.

Centipedes crawling backwards

In Jiri Kylian's remarkably contemporany-looking 1983 piece, Stamping Ground, Seia Rassenti slips through a curtain of black plastic ribbons, dancing a demanding solo with flexed hands and feet going in the opposite direction of her torso and legs. In turn, Nolan DeMarco McGahan, Katie Dehler, Sadie Brown and Watson each enter and disappear back through the ribbons or off to the flys after soloing with extremely angular geometric and contortionist moves.

They are often very funny as they wrap hands around their own waists or thighs, crouch like amphibians, or gooseneck each other offstage. In one sequence, they line up their legs like centipedes crawling backwards.

Sweet enough to eat

Aspen Santa Fe commissioned Over Glow by Jorma Elo and premiered it in 2011 at Wolf Trap. The soon-to-retire, long-time company star, Sam Chittenden (who's only 36), opens this lighthearted dance to music by Mendelssohn and Beethoven. The tableau was beautifully lit in spumoni colors by Jordan Tuinman; and with the women in pistachio mini dresses with deep flouncy hems by Nete Joseph, the whole scene looked sweet enough to eat.

Peter Franc joined BolaÓ±os, Campanile, Chittenden, Dehler and McGahan to form three pas de tross, marked by stuttering footwork and lifts in stag-leap. One woman seems to pass out and not even prodding by the foot of another wakes her. But the first bar of the Beethoven could wake the dead, and it brought her back to the dance and us to the end of a lovely evening of ballet by a company of spectacular dancers.