We Will Rock You

Ballet Nouveau Colorado artistic director Garrett Ammon casts a youthful aura over the troupe by creating such amped-up works as his hot, hot balletic version of Moulin Rouge and his growing series of Garrett Ammon’s Rock Ballets, which includes previous dance versions of “Mediate,” by INXS, and Queen’s “Love of My Life.” David Bowie is the latest pop icon to get the Ammon treatment (the song is a surprise), and as Andy Warhol so famously noted, “One’s company, two’s a crowd and three’s a party.” Thus a full evening of BNC rock ballets was born.

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• Garrett Ammon
• Moulin Rouge!
• Rock Ballets
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Dance

As a choreographer, Ammon displays a discerning ear and a clean outlook: “Finding the music is a wandering process,” he says. “I’d sit and listen to all kinds of music. Over time, I realized that making a ballet to Queen made a lot of sense: There’s so much going on in the music, so much texture. So it just came to be.” And then, the challenges began: “When creating to compositional music, there’s a composer who has already gone through the process of creating a theme, cli-max and resolution. The structure is already there. But pop music has a very different form: verse-chorus-verse.” Rather than re-create a story based on the lyr-ics, Ammon instead worked to instill his own vision into the music.

“What we do is not what people imagine ballet to be,” he adds. “It’s more a different reality, where movement expresses who we are as people. Ballet just hap-pens to be the vocabulary that our dancers use to start from, but we also draw from other dance forms and everyday movements.”

BNC performs the three works today through Sunday at the Lakewood Cultural Center, 470 South Allison Parkway in Lakewood, and again on November 7 through 9 at the Pinnacle Events Center, 1001 West 84th Avenue in Westminster; for details and tickets, $22 to $26, visit www.bncdance.com or call 303-466-5685.
Oct. 31-Nov. 1, 8 p.m.; Sun., Nov. 2, 2 p.m., 2008