Adam Sklute

A twin bill of glorious proportions: Ballet West enthralls, enchants audiences in Les Noces, The Dream

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Offering a twin bill that any ballet company would deem difficult to pull off successfully, Ballet West was unfazed on opening night, presenting equally glorious performances of Sir Frederick Ashton’s The Dream, a Victorian-era adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces (The Wedding). The Dream was enchantment par excellence. Ashton’s … Read more

A twin bill of wedding celebrations and magical delight: Ballet West production of Nijinska’s Les Noces, Ashton’s The Dream set for Nov. 7-15

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Not wasting any time after concluding its superb production of Romeo & Juliet, Ballet West will open a twin-bill Nov. 7, with weddings as centerpieces in both works.  A delightful gem, Sir Frederick Ashton’s The Dream, a Victorian-era adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, blends classical ballet with theatrical comedy, including a male dancer … Read more

With spellbinding gusto, Ballet West’s Romeo & Juliet delivers emotionally stunning performances across the board

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“Only one who knows English in its Elizabethan fullness, who can ride with gusto the Elizabethan winds of rhetoric, lyric, and vituperation, who puts no bounds to the theater’s mirroring of nature and release of imagination, can bring to Shakespeare’s plays their merited acceptance with open arms and heart,” the American historian Will Durant wrote, … Read more

Ballet West’s 62nd season set to open Oct. 24 with lavish production of Michael Smuin’s Romeo & Juliet set to famous Prokofiev score

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The historical significance of Ballet West’s 62nd season opener, Romeo & Juliet, for the company cannot be overstated.  As early as the late 18th century in Italy, ballet versions of Shakespeare’s famous play were being staged and in the first decades of the 1800s, versions cropped up in Denmark and Russia. But it was Sergei … Read more

Works from Within, Ballet West’s newest program, set to premiere this week, featuring world premieres choreographed by five company dancers

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When Adam Sklute joined Ballet West as artistic director in 2007, it had been nine years since the company had last produced any new work. But, that would change dramatically. For example, between 2011 and 2016, Ballet West presented 16 Utah premieres of works by past and present choreographers. By 2016, the company’s Innovations program … Read more

A must-see Stravinsky triple bill: Ballet West set for The Rite of Spring production opening April 4

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The facts about the revolutionary character of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring are well known. Capitalizing upon the triumphs of The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911), Sergei Diaghilev commissioned The Rite for The Ballets Russes. A dream team had been assembled for its premiere and rehearsals had proceeded without incident: Vaslav Nijinsky developed the … Read more

Ballet West’s Family Classic Series revives Aladdin this weekend in three performances

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For this weekend’s Ballet West revival of Aladdin as part of the company’s Family Classics Series, audiences will have an excellent opportunity to see some of the rising stars of ballet’s newest generation. For example, in 2018, when Aladdin was last presented, it featured many current Ballet West artists in early roles, including Principal Artist … Read more

Like a perfectly fitted glass slipper: Cinderella showcases Ballet West at the heights of its artistic strengths

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“Out of old tales, we must make new lives,” the great literary scholar Carolyn Heilbrun once wrote. For London audiences still feeling weary after World War II, the Cinderella fairy tale took on a spectacular new life in the ballet choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton to the music of Sergei Prokofiev.  Seventy-seven years later, Ballet … Read more

New sets, costumes for Ballet West’s third staging of historical masterpiece, Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella, set for Feb. 7-16

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Few stories have been so versatile for adaptation than Cinderella. There have been versions for children’s theater, pantomime, opera, comic theater, vaudeville, burlesque, melodrama, risqué sendups, Christmas shows, rock music adaptations with Cinderella as antiheroine, television productions, mainstream and art films in many languages (more than 140 versions just of the fairy tale) and the … Read more

Ballet West’s triple-bill Pictures at an Exhibition is absolutely breathtaking from start to finish

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From 1910, in his seminal art theory book, On the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian painter who was one of the greatest early abstract artists, envisioned the concentric trinity of the visual arts, music and dance as separate in that each “has its own strength which cannot be substituted for another,”  but also … Read more