For summers during the 1970s, Ballet West traveled to Aspen, Colorado for an artistic residency and festival that included a summer dance school in Snowmass Village. The experience anchored Ballet West’s steadily growing reputation as one of the most distinguished performing arts companies in the American West. It also led to the Ballet West Academy which became known for its own summer intensive training programs for up-and-coming dancers.
This week, Ballet West Summit Festival: Where Art Meets Elevation rejuvenates the tradition as a three-day cultural celebration (July 15-17) in Park City, which includes live performances featuring several principal artists from the company as well as dancers from Ballet West Academy as presented in partnership with artÉmotion, with a quartet of four world premieres from internationally renowned choreographers.
Additionally, with Park City Film as a sponsor, Raising Voices En Pointe (July 16) will offer a free, public screening of two documentaries at the Jim Santy Auditorium in Park City. About Face: Disrupting Ballet (2025, directed by Jennifer Lin) highlights two dance artists who have worked with Ballet West in recent seasons: choreographer Phil Chan, whose Amber Waves received its Utah premiere in 2024 at Ballet West’s Choreographic Festival VI: Asian Voices and Georgina Pazcoguin, a former New York City Ballet soloist who was guest artist in Ballet West’s production of Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story Suite this past spring. Chan and Pazcoguin established the organization Final Bow for Yellowface, which led to the American ballet world’s growing awareness of the necessity to transform and acknowledge the importance of greater Asian representation in choreography, composition and directorship.
The second documentary, Ten Times Better (2024, directed by Jennifer Lin) tells the largely unknown story of George Lee, a Chinese American dancer who performed for George Balanchine at New York City Ballet before spending decades as a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas. Chan and Adam Sklute, Ballet West artistic director, will participate in a post-screening conversation.
The festival will open July 15 with a dinner, From Root to Relevé, at Ballerina Farm in the Kamas valley, which was founded by former dancer Hannah Neeleman. The open-fire meal from guest chefs Micheál “Tiffin” Griffin and Avery Jensen will include seasonal produce, farm-raised meats, and fresh cheeses from their dairy and creamery. The evening will also feature a preview performance of works from the July 17 performance Ballet West at the Summit.
Chan is one of the four choreographers who has set new work for the culminating performance (July 17, 7 p.m.), which will take place in the Amphitheatre at the Canyons Village at Park City Mountain. In a 2024 interview with The Utah Review, Chan, who graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota in 2006, recalled how the outcome of a 2017 meeting with Peter Martins, then New York City Ballet’s artistic director, inspired him and colleague Pazcoguin to found Final Bow for Yellowface. Even prior to this meeting, Chan had been deeply concerned about other New York City Ballet productions’ portrayals of Asian characters. One was a loosely based adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, in which a Chinese servant, in stereotyped character and costume, was shoved to fall on the floor, drawing laughter from the audience.
Ballet West was among the first companies to sign the pledge to Final Bow to Yellowface, joining Washington Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem and Pacific Northwest Ballet. Today, scores more have signed the pledge. While the pandemic slowed efforts, Chan coordinated a virtual choreographic festival for Asian American Pacific Island Heritage Month during May 2021, featuring an AAPI dance artist daily. As the cost was essentially zero, Chan explained that it led to six ballet commissions, including five for Asian women artists. In 2024, Ballet West also performed Chan’s Amber Waves at the 10,000 Dreams dance festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Also setting a world premiere for the Summit performance, Ingrid Silva, who was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, is an internationally recognized Theater of Harlem principal dancer and choreographer. As with Chan and Pazcoguin, Silva also has been at the forefront in efforts to expand equity and representation in the arts, being involved in initiatives such as Blacks in Ballet, Dancers and Motherhood, and PodHer. Her history-significant pointe shoes were added to the Museum of African American History & Culture at the Smithsonian National Museum.
Another choreographer setting a world premiere for the Summit who will be familiar to regular Ballet West patrons is Garrett Smith, a Riverton, Utah native who started as a choreographer with the Houston Ballet. He has since created and staged his choreography with some of the most elite dance institutions in the world including Teatro Alla Scala, The Bolshoi Ballet, Mariinsky Ballet, Les Grands Ballet Canadiens, Ballet de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux and Norwegian National Ballet, among others. Sklute commissioned Smith’s Facades for Ballet West’s Innovations series, which later was reprised for one of the company’s Capitol Theatre productions.
The fourth choreographer to be featured at Summit will be Rex Tilton artistic director of artÉmotion, and a former principal artist with Ballet West where he danced for 14 years. With his wife Allison DeBona, the couple started artÉmotion in 2015 as a summer intensive program in Cleveland for ballet students and now has grown into a major ballet training and education institution in Utah, with some 300 students. Tilton premiered two works with Ballet West at the Utah Arts Festival in 2021. He also has premiered multiple works with artÉmotion as artistic director of the Choreographic Workshop, which he and DeBona designed as a bridge for young aspiring dancers to advance to their professional careers on the ballet stage.
In addition to the four world premieres. Ballet West at the Summit will include Principal Artists Katlyn Addison, Adrian Fry, Jenna Rae Herrera and David Huffmire in performances of Quattro a Verdi by Michael Smuin, L’air d’Esprit by Gerard Arpino, and After the Rain Pas de Deux by Christopher Wheeldon. Incidentally, all four principal artists will be dancing the Smuin piece for the first time in their respective careers.
In an interview with The Utah Review, DeBona, who also is principal of the Ballet West Academy Peggy Bergmann Park City Campus, said the Summit builds upon the legacy of those summers in Aspen and the goal is to make this an annual Park City residency. Planning began with a meeting in August 2025 with the Canyons Village staff. “They said their amphitheater was a great venue for dance and they wanted Ballet West,” she said, adding that artÉmotion had already scheduled July 17 as a performance to conclude the choreographic workshop. From there, the artistic residency blossomed into a full-fledged festival, as Sklute decided to bring in four of the principal artists and helped arranged the commissions with the quartet of internationally distinguished choreographers.
As for the work set on the dancers participating in the choreographic workshop, DeBona deferred to the instincts of the guest choreographers. I just wanted their natural diversity to shine through with the repertoire,” she explained. “It wasn’t very hard. Park City is a very diverse community and they certainly want to see themselves represented in the arts and having Ingrid [Silva], Phil [Chan], Garrett [Smith] and Rex [Tilton] just felt like the perfect combination of all of these ideas.”
For instance, Silva’s commissioned piece includes new music commissioned as well from the Brazilian composer Leandro Albuquerque, who has collaborated with the choreographer on other dance works including Intersections of Life, which parallels the movements of oceans, and Tears of the Green, which is inspired by the call to protect the Amazon ecosystem and was premiered at a recent Global Citizen: NOW summit in New York City. DeBona also joined Silva in founding the group Dancers and Motherhood.
DeBona said from the first day in the studio to prepare for the Summit performance, “everyone was already buzzing and the kids are just over the moon.” At the July 15 dinner, patrons will see a teaser featuring excerpts from each of the four world premieres.
This week’s artistic residency isn’t the only presence that Ballet West will have this summer in Park City. Next month, dancers from Ballet from Ballet West II with choreography by Michael Waldrop will perform in the Park City Opera production of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. This is another indicator of the extraordinary pipeline which Ballet West has established. Ninety percent of Ballet West’s main company dancers come from Ballet West II, and nearly half began their training at one of the locations for Ballet West Academy, whether it is in Park City, the two Salt Lake City campuses in Downtown or Trolley Corners and Utah County.
For tickets and information, see this Ballet West webpage.
