Lauren Lovette is having the kind of 2024 other choreographers only dream about.
The former New York City Ballet star turned dance-maker is finishing up her third commission for the Paul Taylor Dance Company, one of New York’s — and the world’s — most revered contemporary troupes. Soon, she will head to Germany to work with the Leipzig Ballet, creating an entirely new, full-length version of “Romeo & Juliet,” set to Sergei Prokofiev’s well-known score.
In between, she is collaborating with composer Kevin Puts on a piece for the New Jersey Ballet; fulfilling her duties as co-director of the annual Nantucket Dance Festival; and making a stop at this summer’s Vail Dance Festival, where she plans to polish up a new work on-site.
And before all that, she will premiere another dance she has just created for the Colorado Ballet. The work, titled “Three Views of a Mountain,” is part of the company’s annual “Ballet MasterWorks” program and premieres April 12 at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House.
At just 32, Lovette is at the top of her game and, she said in an interview last week, savoring each minute of it — even though every task she takes on adds to an already busy schedule.
“I think it’s hard to outwork me,” she said. “I love to work, and I put everything in every time.”
Making a new dance for a professional company is rarely easy, and Lovette’s creative process in Denver shows just how many moving parts there are in each piece. The choreographer has to find the music, design the movement, fit it into a performance space and make sure all the dancers nail their parts.
And every dance cannot feel like the last one; each needs to be customized for the time and place where it will premiere.
When Colorado Ballet artistic director Gil Boggs approached Lovette about building a fresh work for his company, she decided the piece should be a response to the regional geography. Perhaps not surprisingly, mountains, and the way people here embrace them, are central to her theme.
“I feel like people here are motivated — not to get a prize at the end or anything like that — they’re motivated just for the sake of being motivated, just because it feels good to make a healthy choice,” she said.
For the music, she chose a three-movement work by Kip Jones, a violinist and composer also known for his work as a member of the New York City-based, experimental string quartet ETHEL.
Lovette describes the composition as part contemporary and part traditional. It has some of the new musical moves of contemporary classical, but is rooted in solid melodies that give it wide appeal.
“The speed of the ideas that come are slightly more rapid than you would feel in an older piece of music,” he said. “But they stay true to their three movements. The middle one is slow. The progression is very much the same as in something that you would hear in an older piece.”
“Three Views of a Mountain” is 20 minutes long and begins with a burst of energy in the first movement.
“There’s immediate drive. The curtain opens and the music doesn’t ease you in. It hits you straight away,” she said. “It feels like how I feel every time I land in Denver with the altitude and you’re already fighting to breathe.”
The steady rhythm of the music evoked, for her, the pace of a long mountain hike, and she let that inspire the choreography. Her dancers hit the trail, going up and down a steep climb.
“These dancers are definitely on their own journeys. And they come in and out of them. They dance with each other. There’s competition,” she said. “It’s not necessarily romantic. It’s just ambition.”
For the second movement, when things calm down a bit, she moved the action entirely to a duet between a male and female dancer. They have reached the top of the hill and the steps reflect that unique connection with nature. “It’s a totally different view from there. You’re small, but you’re not sad about that. You just realize that you’re a part of something so much greater,” she said.
The high energy returns for the final movement, which completes the hike. Lovette describes the sound as a “downhill melody,” and the entire company re-enters the stage to end things with a bang.
The steady clip of “Three Views of a Mountain” should make it a good match for the other pieces on the “Ballet MasterWorks” program, which is presented annually and serves as Colorado Ballet’s yearly departure from its usual routine of producing story ballets.
The lineup features one of the most popular dance works of the 20th century, George Balanchine’s 1967 “Rubies.” The pulsating, ultra-contemporary piece is choreographed to the music of Igor Stravinsky.
There will also be a presentation of another splashy, and recent, work, choreographer Yoshihisa Arai’s “Boléro,” which was created in 2021 for the Joffrey Ballet. The music, by Maurice Ravel, is among the best-known compositions in classical music.
In all, there will be seven performances of the “Ballet MasterWorks” program, wrapping up on April 27.
Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelancer specializing in fine arts.
IF YOU GO
“Ballet Masterworks” will run April 12-21 at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in the Denver Performing Arts Complex. Info and tickets at 303-837-8888 or coloradoballet.org.
