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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

The glory of the trinity of art, dance and music: Two Utah premieres, Balanchine classic highlight Ballet West’s Pictures at an Exhibition

This week, Ballet West’s new production will give the trinity of art, dance and music a resplendent tribute fit for an empress. It will feature Utah premieres of works by two of the best-known international choreographers and a reprise of a Balanchine masterpiece that was the choreographer’s first work he set in America 90 years … Read more

Not the ordinary Gothic fiction fare for Halloween: Ballet West’s 61st season set to open with Val Caniparoli’s psychological thriller Jekyll and Hyde

Three years after Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published, Oscar Wilde, in his 1889 The Decay of Lying: An Observation, wrote, “the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet [the famed British medical journal].” As English literature scholar Anne Stiles explained in … Read more

Ballet West is staying in its blockbuster groove, as it prepares for its 61st season

Ballet West is staying in the blockbuster groove for its upcoming 2024-2025 season. After a 60th anniversary edition that brought record attendance not only for the season but also for three major productions, Ballet West is poised to continue the momentum with four Utah premieres, the return of Cinderella, and the 80th anniversary of The … Read more

Asian Voices front and center in Ballet West’s 6th Choreographic Festival, set for SLC June 5-8, and Kennedy Center, June 18-23

Ballet West’s 60th anniversary season has been simultaneously a celebration of its groundbreaking legacy in American dance and an exploration of fresh artistic possibilities going into the second quarter of the 21st century.  Phil Chan, an internationally known choreographer whose organization Final Bow for Yellowface initially engaged the ballet world’s artistic gatekeepers to resist treating … Read more