Audio By Carbonatix
It’s no surprise that Garrett Ammon, the creative mind behind the newly minted Wonderbound dance company (and recipient of a 2013 Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Arts and Culture), is once again blurring boundaries with the first official Wonderbound performance, A Gothic Folktale: A Fool’s Journey — and he’s bringing in collaborators Jesse Manley and Professor Phelyx to help him do it. “I brought them together because I felt like the ideas of what Jesse explores in his music and the aesthetic ideas he pursues mesh really well with Phelyx’s approach to his art,” Ammon explains.
So Manley’s music — which he created specifically for A Gothic Folktale — and Phelyx’s illusions provide some of the context for Ammon’s creative choreography. “The whole thing is like a dusty vaudevillian sideshow circus from some past era, where illusion and magic were a part of life,” Ammon says. And the performance’s subtitle should give some hints as to where this folktale leads: into realms of self-realization and enlightenment. “If people walk away at the end of the performance wanting to have a conversation and engage with each other about it, then we have done our job,” he adds. “Each performance that you see is part of a longer journey and a longer conversation.” In other words, discard the notions you might connect to the words “dance,” and especially “ballet,” because Wonderbound is going to shatter them, anyway.
A Gothic Folktale runs tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Performing Arts Complex at Pinnacle Charter School, 1001 West 84th Avenue in Federal Heights; performances next weekend will be at the Parker Arts, Culture and Events Center, 20000 Pikes Peak Avenue in Parker. Tickets, $22 to $47, can be purchased at wonderbound.com or by calling 303-292-4700.
Oct. 18-19, 7:30 p.m.; Sun., Oct. 27, 2 p.m., 2013
