When choreographer Garret Ammon was named Artistic Director at Ballet Nouveau Colorado in 2007, he and his wife, Associate Director Dawn Faye, wasted no time in updating the company’s approach to both performance and marketing.
Classical music? Fugetabadda. Ammon sets his ballets to rock ‘n’ roll. He also fosters collaborations with artists from other disciplines -- poets from Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, for example, and musicians from local bands like Paper Bird. As for marketing, he keeps his audiences abreast of upcoming performances via Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and YouTube videos.
He must be doing something right; In his first two years as BNC’s AD, 61% of his audiences were first- time attendees at a ballet performance -- no mean feat considering the results of a nationwide study by the National Endowment for the Arts which pegged dance right behind grand opera as the least popular art form in America. By Ammon’s second season, the company was seeing a 33% jump in ticket sales.
The son of an Arizona crop duster, Garrett Ammon grew up in Tucson, where he sang Broadway show tunes in his junior high chorus, and studied hip-hop moves on MTV. For his 14th birthday, he asked his mom for a year of dance lessons. She enrolled him in a once-a-week jazz class which, quote, ‘Totally blew my mind.’
He went on to study ballet fundamentals with former ballerina Kim Swimmer, who one day said to him ‘there’s nothing more I can teach you, Garrett.’ She sent him on to Ballet Etudes in Mesa for more advanced study. There he took ballet lessons five days a week from 3:30 to 9:00 pm, and all day on Saturdays. ‘It became a complete obsession for me,’ he says. ‘It was what I lived for.’
After a six-week summer intensive in Richmond, Virginia, Ammon began auditioning for a place in the ballet school of a major company. ‘That’s how it works,’ he says. ‘You find the company you want to work with and try to get into their school. That’s the most direct route.’
Virtually every school he auditioned for -- American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet/Seattle, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, and Houston Ballet Academy -- wanted him. Ammon chose Houston because, as he says, ‘Male dancers were in demand there and they were offering a full ride – scholarship, housing, air tickets, the works.’
At seventeen he became the youngest dancer at Houston. Two years later, he was hired as an apprentice, and then as a member of the company's corps de ballet.
But there is, as Ammon was soon to discover, no job security for a young dancer in a big troupe like Houston. ‘One day, three young guys showed up who’d been training since the age of five,’ he remembers. ‘They were huge, built, and very advanced.’
Ammon was sent packing.
‘I was devastated,’ he says, ‘but in the end it turned out to be a good move. Large companies like Houston with 48 members was not a good fit for me. It’s a machine, and you’re a cog.’
That season he was hired by Oregon Ballet Theatre in Portland, with a cast of fourteen, 'which meant that everybody got to be part of the creative process.' Added bonus; Trey McIntyre, whom Ammon had known in Houston, became the company’s resident choreographer.
‘He saw my potential and invited me to learn his work,’ Ammon says. ‘I got a lead role in a major new McIntyre ballet, which was a big deal for me. McIntyre opened my eyes to my own potential as a choreographer.’
The following year, Ammon joined Ballet Memphis where, on his own initiative, he choreographed a series of short pieces he called Interior Works. It wasn’t long before he was creating dances for the main stage and getting serious attention in the dance world.
‘It was at Memphis that I really began thinking in movement,’ he says. ‘Movement became my vocabulary, my medium, my language for expressing what was going on in my head and heart. My dances are about less-than-perfect relationships and being stuck with an imperfect self and learning to be ok with that and in the end to revel in your imperfection and to embrace it. Those are the ideas that are compelling and worth exploring for me.’
His work at Memphis brought him to the attention of the powers-that-be at Ballet Nouveau, which is how he ended up here. His genius has not gone unacknowledged in the Mile High City. Last month Garrett Ammon was awarded the prestigious Livingston Fellowship by the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation.
Better hurry; tickets are going fast for this season's finale, a collaboration with Paper Bird called Carry On, scheduled for June 11 at the Arvada Center for the Performing Arts
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