What’s New at the 2025 Vail Dance Festival

This content is sponsored by Vail Dance Festival.

"The Vail Dance Festival is all about the mix and how we always keep growing,” says Damian Woetzel, Vail Dance Festival artistic director, regarding the extensive amount of new work, people, and collaborations that draw world-class artists to the festival each summer.

"We’re like a company,” he says. “Where adding new voices has an immediate effect, but from there it quickly becomes all about what we’re able to do together.” That artistic alchemy not only creates innovative new works for Vail audiences to witness, but it transforms the artists who join the mix, preparing them for new challenges as their careers continue to blossom beyond the Rocky Mountains.

This year, the festival boasts an impressive roster of up-and-coming dance stars and company premieres, and a wide array of new works made by today’s leading choreographers and composers. These debuts and world premieres, which will be in collaboration with returning festival favorites, are central to the Vail ethos of enriching tradition while carrying dance into the future.

New Artists

A notable first this summer includes the festival debut of Chloe Misseldine, who was recently promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre at the age of 22.

She has been described as having a “distinctive, otherworldly magnetism,” thanks to her groundedness, imagination, and grace. Artistic Director Susan Jaffe calls her a rising star, "not just in A.B.T., but in the dance world.” Misseldine’s fearless dancing, witnessed during her thrilling Swan Lake and Onegin interpretations that earned her the title of principal, allows her to reach transcendent artistic heights.

Another dancer making a Festival debut is Ryan Tomash, the Royal Danish Ballet principal who is known for his Bournonville precision and depth of storytelling ingrained in him since dancing in Denmark. Tomash makes his U.S. debut just before joining the New York City Ballet as a soloist this fall.

“Coming to Vail feels incredibly timely and meaningful,” Tomash says. "The opportunity to observe the City Ballet dancers and to work alongside them will be both helpful and educational before my official transition into the company.”

Among other assignments, he will partner with City Ballet principal Mira Nadon in Balanchine’s Diamonds pas de deux. The ability for artists to explore new roles and partnerships to deepen their craft is central to Vail’s mission, enhanced by coaching from Woetzel and Balanchine Ballerina Heather Watts, among others. Tomash shared special excitement for gaining insight from Woetzel and Watts, who have always prioritized empowering the next generation of dancers through education and opportunities to take risks.

The festival expands this mission to lift up the next generation of young artists by welcoming two Scholars-In-Residence into the mix. Elijah Geolina and Daniel Guzmán are both eye-catching dancers with the A.B.T. Studio Company. Guzmán, who hails from Venezuela, has won prestigious competitions including the Universal Ballet Competition and the Youth America Grand Prix. Geolina, from California, began his training in Latin Ballroom and appeared on So You Think You Can Dance Kids before joining the A.B.T. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School and later the Studio Company.

Also making his festival debut is Brooks Landegger, a Miami City Ballet soloist who will be joining American Ballet Theatre after the Vail season concludes. Landegger started his career young while playing Billy Elliot and touring throughout the United States, and his presence, alongside other dancers in various professional stages whose careers started early, allows for mutual learning to light the way for new artistic voices.
Dominika Afanasenkov is another young dancer joining the constellation of bright lights taking on artistic challenges for the first time in Vail. The New York City Ballet corps de ballet dancer has the “‘It factor,” according to the world-renowned choreographer Christopher Wheeldon.


Vail’s spirit of artistic risk-taking will be familiar terrain for Rachel Lockhart, who, alongside festival artist Mayfield Myers, was one of this year’s Dance Magazine 25 to Watch. The 24-year-old Juilliard graduate is unbound by genre, having danced in works ranging from Justin Peck’s Broadway hit Illinoise, to performing with the Metropolitan Opera to dancing alongside hip-hop star Doja Cat.

“The passion and possibility that is woven within every style is elevating,” Lockhart says regarding her unquenchable desire to dance beyond boundaries. “Each genre can enhance the layers of another,” she says. As a dancer, her luminous performances bring clarity to every collaboration she undertakes. Such simultaneous precision and sense of boundlessness carries into her choreography, which she will also debut in Vail as she makes a new piece with an exciting cast of festival artists.
Among many others debuting this year, the festival also welcomes Zack Gonder, whose powerful presence has been seen in contemporary companies including Twyla Tharp Dance and Pam Tanowitz Dance; and Naomi Corti, who brings a vibrant technique and emotional depth to her work as a dancer at New York City Ballet and will contribute her unique voice to the collaborative creative process in Vail.

Their participation, along with others, including several rising artists from American Ballet Theatre, exemplifies Vail’s commitment to fostering a rich tapestry of dance voices, pushing artistic boundaries, and inspiring audiences with fresh perspectives.

New Companies

For the first time, the critically acclaimed contemporary dance company A.I.M, led by Princess Grace and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Kyle Abraham, will energize the Rockies with a full evening of sublime dancing. A.I.M’s powerful dancers give life to Abraham’s rich choreographic style, which blends ballet, contemporary, and social dance with emotional, thought-provoking storytelling inspired by Black culture and history.

“As a movement practitioner and maker,” Abraham told Gagosian, “anything I experience — whether I’m looking at my friends at church camp… doing whatever they consider to be social dancing — I might put in a dance.”

This intuitive, creative process makes his works intimate and exquisitely layered. In Vail, A.I.M will dance If We Were a Love Song, Abraham’s homage to Nina Simone, which paints her music into a series of poetic vignettes as a reflection on community, love, and oneself. In addition to other recent works, A.I.M will perform the celebrated solo Show Pony, a piece that questions the pressures of performativity and being on display.

New Works

The Vail Dance Festival takes pride each year in fostering path-breaking new dances and music compositions. Presented throughout the festival in addition to the now is the Premieres program: an evening dedicated entirely to festival commissions. Audiences have the chance to consistently watch creative brilliance unfold.

Among returning choreographers making new dances, including Melissa Toogood, Michelle Dorrance, Larry Keigwin, Justin Peck, and Bobbi Jene Smith, three new artists bring their singular choreographic voices to Vail. Robert Battle, Gianna Reisen, and My’Kal Stromile are all trailblazing dance makers, inviting new generations to be moved by dance.

This year, with her company and alongside co-creator Ephrat Asherie, cutting-edge tap dancer and choreographer Michelle Dorrance brings her newest work, The Center Will Not Hold. Featuring 11 remarkable performers and original, live music by Donovan Dorrance, the captivating piece weaves together a range of dance styles stemming from the Afro-diasporic tradition, including house, breaking, hip-hop, tap, Chicago footwork, Detroit jit, litefeet, Memphis Jookin, and body percussion.

"These dances are really about resistance, resilience, and expressing who you are,” says Asherie of the multitudes of history and meaning held in these movement languages. Dorrance, a MacArthur "Genius” Fellow, sophisticatedly celebrates the dance lineages in which she situates herself as a tap dancer, which is a historically Afro-American art form. Dorrance Dance’s electrifying performances immerse audiences in these rich legacies through music and dance that move us at the deepest level of our humanity.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is a key element of the Vail Dance Festival. Robert Battle, the lauded former Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, will create a large-scale piece incorporating a range of dancers from backgrounds in modern, ballet, and beyond. Battle, who was personally appointed to lead Ailey by Judith Jamison in 2011, holds numerous prestigious honors, from Princess Grace and Dance Magazine awards to honorary doctorates and fellowship appointments.

While steeped in Ailey’s mastery of movement, Battle’s choreography is greatly his own. He has honed his work since creating his own company before leading Ailey, and is known for complex musicality, imagery, and nuanced use of gesture. After leaving Ailey, the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s Artistic Director Michael Novak appointed him as resident choreographer, so that he has a "home to focus on creating a new era of modern dance.” Battle’s Vail premiere marks an important step forward into that new era.

Audiences will also enjoy Vail debuts from sought-after ballet choreographers, Gianna Reisen and My’Kal Stromile. Both artists draw inspiration from the works they performed as dancers. Reisen, who was the youngest artist to choreograph work for New York City Ballet at age 18 in 2017, trained at the School of American Ballet before joining the LA Dance Project, where she danced modern and contemporary dances around the world. Stromile, who trained in multiple styles at the Juilliard School, danced with the Boston Ballet, where neo-classical choreographer William Forsythe created multiple works. Stromile’s recent commission at the Paris Opera Ballet was part of an evening centering the renowned choreographer, solidifying Stromile’s place in the lineage of one of ballet’s most important makers of the last half-century.

The festival’s identity as a place of artistic excellence includes breathing new life into existing work. Standout premieres range from revivals to adaptations, such as an encore of Bobbi Jene Smith’s stirring MASS created for Sara Mearns and singer Davóne Tines with music by Caroline Shaw. Smith will also be represented by a duet never seen in Vail set to Bach piano, in addition to a new work to be made in collaboration with Michelle Dorrance, in which the contemporary
dance maker who is known as a grippingly powerful performer will take the festival stage herself for the first time.
In another first at the festival, Robbie Fairchild, the versatile ballet and Broadway star, will make his debut in Three Preludes, a solo created by modern dance maker Mark Morris for Mikhail Baryshnikov and himself to the music of George Gershwin. This work, which premiered in 1992, will now, 33 years later, be seen in Vail for the first time, as Fairchild shares the charm, wit, and musicality emblematic of Morris’s iconic choreographic voice.

These festival firsts, among other extraordinary happenings including new works by Composer-in-Residence Caroline Shaw and the festival debut of Grammy Award-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens, contribute to what make Vail the transformative destination that draws artists and audiences in from around the world.