Meaningful steps: Vail Dance Festival brings displaced Ukrainian ballerinas to Vail
Trio will perform and train alongside some of the world's best
Youth America Grand Prix/Courtesy photos
An aching to help. It’s what pushed Heather Watts to dial the unfamiliar number, unsure of what was on the other end.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Watts, like so many others, found herself glued to coverage of the war. The famed ballerina who had starred for the New York City Ballet, performing all over the globe, was left wondering what she could do in her sphere beyond donating to aid organizations.
She found her mission when she happened upon an article about Larissa Savaliev, a former dancer with Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet Academy who had emigrated to the United States and founded Youth America Grand Prix, and who was helping to place Ukrainian dancers whose lives had been uprooted by the fighting.
“What I envisioned was a dream apprenticeship,” said Watts, who is the chief organizer of the Vail Dance Festival’s Scholars in Residence program. “A woman I didn’t know, I just called her up cold and said, ‘I understand you’re placing dancers in Europe. We have a dance festival in the summer, and I’d like to invite some of your students to come.’”
Watts, admittedly, didn’t have a fully hatched plan. The scholars program for the festival, which opens Friday and runs through Aug. 9, isn’t an academy or a traditional dance camp.
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What the program has always been is an accelerator for young dancers on the cusp of their professional careers. Bringing young talents to Vail, and dropping them into the strong creative current generated by some of the best dancers, choreographers, and musicians in the world, generates propulsion. It opens eyes and speeds up a dancer’s progression.
But how to make it a reality with the clock ticking? Watts wasn’t exactly sure what it would entail to expand the scholars program for this year’s festival to make room for a handful of dancers from Ukraine, but she did know Vail. And she knew in her heart that when others involved with the festival heard the idea, they, too would create the momentum needed to make such an undertaking happen.
Erin Baiano/The George Balanchine Trust
At the top of that list was Watts’ husband, Damian Woetzel, who she met when both were principal dancers for the famed New York City Ballet. Woetzel, the current president of The Juilliard School, has been the artistic director for the Vail Dance Festival since 2006. Watts also planted the seed with Mike Imhof, the president of the Vail Valley Foundation, which hosts the festival, and Sarah Johnson, the vice president of philanthropy and the Vail Dance Festival.
“It was just willingness and risk,” Watts said. “We run the festival with Mike’s blessing and Sarah’s blessing, and we do it very instinctually. We pushed some boundaries. This was done at the last minute, and we didn’t have any money. Damian just said: ‘Do this.’”
The end result is that this summer’s festival will host three ballerinas — Eva Hrytsak, Yeva-Mariia Skorenka, and Polina Chepyk — hailing from capital city of Kyiv that have been displaced by the war.
Two of the three dancers had relocated in March, as the war escalated, to schools in Western Europe — one in the Netherlands and another in Germany — while a third had already been training in Switzerland, but can’t go back to Kyiv now.
The festival hoped to bring another Ukrainian dancer who had been working in Monte Carlo, but visa issues won’t allow her to make it to Vail for this year’s program.
Travel costs, and living expenses, and a place to stay, all came together through the willingness of others to help and the VVF’s large donor network. The three dancers, along with a teacher and a mother of one of the dancers, will be staying at a condo at the Antlers at Vail, which donated the space.
“What’s breathtaking is the people of Vail,” Watts said. “People always talk about skiing then they talk about Vail, but it’s the people, it’s the community. They’ve always embraced citizen artistry. And the Vail Valley Foundation never says no. They always say yes, how can we make this work? How can we bring people?”
Dancing diplomacy
While the festival has never taken in artists displaced by war, its history is rooted in the idea that art and the universal language of dance can transcend divides, whether cultural or political.
The festival started when an opportunity came about to bring dancers from Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet Academy to Vail in 1989 to perform on the new Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater stage at the height of the Cold War.
The Vail International Dance Festival, as it was first known, has continued to bring the world to Vail. And, under Woetzel’s vision, it has served as a space where dance education is at the forefront of the mission for the artists and the audiences that come to see them.
“The genesis of all this wonderful creativity, the direction of all this, for me, as the artistic director, it goes back to the principles of the festival, which has always been about next steps for artists, for choreographers, for audiences,” Woetzel said. “What’s the next step where you are? I had a home company with the New York City Ballet, but when I would go out on the road, it was always about, what can I add to my quiver? Whether that was dancing with a different partner, working with someone that I wouldn’t get the chance to regularly work with, or in a place that was unusual, that’s all found its place in the festival.”
Among his other personal pursuits, Woetzel also holds a master’s of public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Chris Kendig/Courtesy photo
He’s a firm believer in the arts as a force for greater good in the world.
“In many ways, we in the arts can be part of the solution,” he said.
‘An exponential experience’
In the case of the three ballerinas from Kiev, Woetzel and his wife aren’t exactly sure just what will come out of bringing them to Vail for a few weeks to train and perform, but Woetzel said it will add up to something unique.
For the ballerinas themselves, of course, but also for the other artists who work with them, including ballerina and choreographer Tiler Peck, who Woetzel asked to create a piece for the young ballerinas. The trio is slated to perform as a unit but will rehearse and train with dancers from other companies.
“They’re going to be side by side with some of the best ballet dancers in the world,” Woetzel said. “Vail is such a warm welcoming, community. When they’re taking classes or rehearsing, they’re going to have a fantastic experience in Vail.”
For any young dancer, the years between 16 and 18 are life-altering, Woetzel said. It’s when young dancers come into their own, expand their repertoire, and progress rapidly.
His vision for the festival’s scholars program has always been to provide young artists ready to take that next step with what he calls “an exponential experience.”
“They’re 16, 17, 18, they’re all on the cusp of that professional moment,” he said. “It’s an extremely pivotal time as a dancer, and this is one of those times when you can learn exponentially. You’re learning fast, you’re seeing, absorbing, progressing.”
As for Watts, she knows that feeling, too, having been that young, gifted dancer who was taking the world in as it came to her and evolving quickly as an artist and as a person.
And while she knows that bringing three dancers to Vail for a few weeks may feel like a small thing in the midst of a war that has displaced millions, it’s something.
Something important. Something transformative. Something that makes the world a better place. Something that matters to all those who worked to make it happen.
“It’s small in scale,” she said. “And big in heart.”
