BalletX opens its 20th season

A new beginning

In the beginning, there were three Pennsylvania Ballet dancers creating the new company: Cox, Matthew Neenan, and Tara Keating. Cox remembers dancing the angel trio with them in Neenan’s Frequencies: “The music [Jump Little Children’s “Cathedral”] just really hit at my heart—holding their hands and running forward as a trio with these beautiful angel wings on our backs. It just felt really special and unique.” There’s a lot of Neenan on the program. Cox says his choreography was integral to helping put the company on the map.

A dance we won’t see is Neenan’s 2008 Rights to Spring, but we can’t leave out this pivotal moment. Cox was nine months pregnant then, and she recalls “this profound, deep memory imprint of complete joy, that I was having a baby and I was getting to dance.” That year Cox commissioned Still@Life from choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. “We were the first company to commission Annabelle in America [and] she is now one of the biggest choreographers in the world.” Ochoa was part of a triple bill that featured Cox and Helen Pickett in a program of women choreographers, and the company continues to commission half of its new works from women as part of a diverse repertoire.

Cox retired from choreography and dance to concentrate on family as a new mom and growing BalletX, and it was still an up-and-coming company in 2009 when Edwaard Liang gave them a vote of confidence by creating Largo for them. “He was choreographing works all over the country,” Cox said, and he believed in them.

Neenan’s Sunset o639 Hours marked another landmark—a full-length story ballet about the tragic crash of the first Pacific airmail flight in 1938. “As a director,” Cox told me, “a great memory was producing Matt’s Sunset o639 Hours. I remember we were on the corner of Broad and Spruce and Matt said, ‘Would you be interested in producing this idea that Rosie [composer Langabeer] and I have. And I was, okay. That’s what drives me, being able to say, “Yes, let’s make this ballet together.”

The pandemic changed everything

The second program opens with an excerpt from Trey McIntyre’s Big Ones, a piece that explores the music of Amy Winehouse. Cox said, “we were pushing it, we were pushing costume development [with tall pleather bunny ears]. We were pushing the idea of representing an icon’s music.”

But the defining moment for the company came with the pandemic, when the company pivoted to film and the program includes the original film version of choreographer Amy Hall Garner’s New Heights, created in collaboration with Mural Arts. That was the company’s 15th season, and it felt like the world was coming apart, Cox said, “we were all unsure how to navigate the future.” With in-person arts shut down, the company created its own film infrastructure and commissioned ten short films to stream on the new BalletX Beyond platform. Choreographers created in their living rooms and worked with the company via Zoom. Putting their hope for the future on the line, the company also commissioned five in-person ballets. And the jobs paid—maybe just someone’s rent for the month, Cox said, but “we felt art was still something we were creating.” Dwight Rhoden’s We the People is a reminder of the moment when audiences and dancers finally came together again, outdoors at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts.

The pandemic was a pivotal moment in the company’s history, and Cox said it changed them for the better, by turning their focus on the community. But it isn’t all looking backward. The evening ends with a new work, Resilire by Keelan Whitmore, the company’s rehearsal director and community liaison. “I want to support as many artists as possible,” Cox said, “And I wanted to support someone who I believe is a great choreographer.”

Featured image: BalletX opens its new season this week. (Photo courtesy of BalletX.)

Image description: A dancer in an all white top in a portrait shot against a blue backdrop.