Ballet West will raise the curtain on the first Ballet West Summit Festival: Where Art Meets Elevation that runs July 15-17 in the Wasatch Back. The schedule includes three acts: From Root to Relevé — a farm-to-table dinner and performance experience with Ballerina Farm. Raising Voices En Pointe — two films screenings and post-screening discussions, hosted by Final Bow for Yellowface and presented by Park City Film and Ballet West. Ballet West at the Summit — an evening of performances, suitable for all ages, at the Amphitheater at Canyons Village at Park City Mountain. While the film screenings, which are scheduled for Thursday, July 16, are free and open to the public, the dinner, set for July 15, and the performances, which take the stage July. 17, require tickets and registration. To register and purchase tickets, visit balletwest.org/events/bwsummitfest. The festival is a dream come true for Adam Sklute, who has been Ballet West’s artistic director for 20 years. “I think the biggest thing we’ve always wanted to do was create more connection and a greater connection with Park City,” he said. “It’s been that way for as long as I have been here.” Throughout Sklute’s two-decade tenure, the dance company has set up touch points with the Wasatch Back that paved the way for the festival. “We performed (up there) when we could, but we wanted to create something more connected and bigger,” he said. “Our profile has grown tremendously now that the Frederick Quinney Ballet West Academy Peggy Bergmann Park City Campus has moved to our new facilities, and it was really wonderful when Canyons seemed open to do this and create a three-day festival that was not during ski season.” Debbie LaBelle, Canyons Village Management Association director of marketing and public relations, looks forward to the event. “Bringing Ballet West to the Mountain Amphitheater in Canyons Village is a milestone for us,” she said. “Watching dancers perform against the backdrop of the Wasatch mountains at dusk is a truly unique experience. We’re honored to partner with Ballet West and to bring a performance of this caliber to our community.” Sklute gives former Ballet West principal dancer Allison DeBona, Frederick Quinney Lawson Ballet West Academy Peggy Bergman Park City campus principal, all the credit in moving the festival forward. “Allison DeBona, one of the first dancers I hired, is doing amazing work up there,” he said. “Not only is she the principal of the Park City Campus, but also our Park City liaison for development. She has worked very hard to build those connections, and it’s been great that we have been able to create this festival that, hopefully, would be something ongoing and permanent.” DeBona became the dance company’s Park City liaison last summer, when the idea for the Summit Festival germinated. That’s when Jocelyn Scudder, Arts Council of Park City Summit County executive director, emailed DeBona and introduced her to Tony Tyler, a Canyons Village Management Association board member. “Canyons Village wanted to have more programming during the summer,” DeBona said. “They do a lot of concerts and cool festivals, and they wanted Ballet West to be a part of summer programming in some capacity.” DeBona, Tyler and Angela Krull, Ballet West’s director of major gifts and corporate sponsorships, met and started bouncing ideas off of each other. “At that point, in August, the most obvious way to move forward quickly was to bring the choreographic workshop to Park City for a performance,” DeBona said. The workshop is facilitated by ArtÉmotion, a summer-intensive ballet school founded by DeBona and her husband, Rex Tilton, who was also a Ballet West principal dancer. “Ballet West Academy ArtÉmotion have been in partnership since 2017, and our first year was in Park City,” DeBona said. “So, I knew this could be feasible, and from there, so many different things started happening.” DeBona began thinking about choreographers and told Sklute she wanted to work with Phil Chan, Ingrid Silva and Garett Smith. Silva, a principal dancer for the Dance Theater of Harlem, cofounded Blacks in Ballet, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote diversity in the global dance community. Smith, a Salt Lake City native, has created works for a string of international dance companies including the Mariinsky Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, New York City Ballet and Ballet de l’Opera de Bordeaux, and Chan co-founded Final Bow for Yellow Face and is the president of the Gold Standard Arts Foundation, which respectively works to eliminate stereotypical representation of Asian culture on stage and “champion Asian voices in multiple creative disciplines.” Once things started to roll, DeBona asked Tilton to come on as a fourth choreographer, and these four are creating world-premiere works that will be performed by young dancers who have been recruited for the summer intensive program. “During that process I knew I needed (members of) Ballet West up here,” she said. “I knew whatever we had to do, we needed to get the company up here.” Those company members turned out to be Ballet West principal dancers — Katlyn Addison, Jenna Rae Herrera, Adrian Fry and David Huffmire — who will perform “Quattro a Verdi” by Michael Smuin, “L’air d’Esprit” by Gerald Arpino and “After the Rain Pas de Deux” by Christopher Wheeldon, according to DeBona. “The academy and main company worked hard to get these four principal dancers up here,” she said. “And then everything started coming together like a dream.” What started with a live performance expanded into the dinner with Ballerina Farm and the free film screenings, DeBona said. Hannah Neeleman, who, along with her husband, Daniel, run Ballerina Farm, has four of her daughters in the Ballet West Academy as students, she said. “I asked if she would like to partner with Ballet West and do a performance at a farm with a farm-to-table dinner, and now, we’re building a stage out there,” DeBona said. The film screenings came into the picture after Chan pitched the idea to DeBona. “Phil calls me and said, ‘I will give you these films to screen,’ and my brain started working,” she said. “I know these incredible people in Park City, including a family of filmmakers who put me in contact with Park City Film Executive Director Katy Wang.” Wang told DeBona she had been following the work of Ballet West and Chan and loved the idea of facilitating the screenings. “I’m grateful it has come together the way it has, and it feels like it was meant to be,” DeBona said. “There wasn’t anything that felt too hard to accomplish in a short amount of time.”  The Ballet West Summit Festival comes at a significant time in Sklute’s tenure as the company’s artistic director. He plans to retire after the 2026-27 season. “I’ve been contemplating when would be the right time to retire for the past few years, and I wanted to make sure that the company was at one of its strongest peaks when it was time for me to go,” he said. “There have been so many wonderful milestones that are happening now that feel so gratifying, and that said to me more that I am retiring and moving on at the right time. Now through this wonderful festival, which hopefully can become an annual thing, we are really connected with Park City in a way I’ve always dreamed we could be.” Ballet West Summit Festival: Where Art Meets Elevation When: July 15-17 Where: Various venues in Summit County Tickets: tinyurl.com/2ddtj688 Web: balletwest.org/events The post Dance rises to the occasion at Ballet West’s inaugural Summit Festival appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less