30 Jun Palm Arts: AVID Returns for Encore Featuring “The Wolff,” 7/11!
Join Telluride’s Michael D. Palm Theatre for an extraordinary evening of dance as AVID presents the world premiere of The Wolff and other works. The event continues Telluride’s Palm Arts’ Summer Series and takes place Saturday, July 11, 7 p.m.. Doors, 6:30 p.m.
Prior to the show on the 11th, Emily Speed is offering an open rehearsal at The Palm, 4 – 6 p.m. on July 10. Local ballet star Valerie Madonia will be coaching.
General admission seating: advance tickets, $32 for adults; $25 for students. At the door, $37 and $30.
Go here to purchase your tickets.
Go here for more about Palm Arts (back to 2009).
AVID company photo by Quinn Wharton.
“I didn’t just want to dance,” said Emily Speed, founder. AVID.“I wanted to build an artistic hub where world-class dancers, choreographers, composers, and musicians could and would create work together to make ballet accessible, relevant, and electrifying for today’s diverse audiences.”
If you were in the audience for AVID’s debut, you know Speed delivered on her promise in a show titled “Boundless.” A theme and a statement of fact for a baby company that makes a habit of breaching boundaries.
Emily Speed by Matthew Wordell.
This year’s encore takes place Saturday, July 11. Titled “Gathering,” the program is headlined by a piece in tandem with today’s topsy turvy world: “The Wolff” turns the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” on its head.
Although it began as an oral folk tale circulating in European peasant tradition long before anyone put words to paper, the version we all know best is the one published by the Brothers Grimm (Jacob and Wilhelm),. In 1812, they appended a huntsman to the story. He is charged with cutting Grands and Red from the wolf’s belly, converting a tragedy into a rescue and folding in a lesson about obedience: Stay on the path young ladies or else!
Scholars read the tale as an initiation story about a girl’s passage into adulthood and sexuality, hence the red for passion. Folklorists have argued the tale was reshaped over centuries precisely to put school girls in states of fear, passivity, and obedience. And the male rescuer bolted on to the narrative tis there to reinforce who gets to do the protecting.
Yeah, way old school.
AVID’s Wolff is the creation of Melody Mennite, a former principal with Houston Ballet who has danced with the company since its first season and is now stepping fully into her voice as a choreographer.
The ballet, which the company premiered in New York this June ahead of its Fall run, is a reverse point-of-view telling of the old story, one that hands the audience its inherited assumptions then asks, gently but insistently, who taught us to believe them.
“What if the wolf was never the villain?” Mennite asks.
In her retelling the wolf is no monster, rather a creature in his rightful place, namely connected to the forest and the elements within, a guide rather than a threat, a reminder of the balance the natural world keeps when we stop trying to control it. Wolves, Melody notes, hold ecosystems together and are revered across many cultures, even as our stories insist on casting these animals as a public enemy.
But surprise, no huffing and puffing and blowing your house down on the Palm’s program.
That move on Mennite’s part, a perversion of legend, invites empathy for the scapegoat and quietly indicts the reliability of the original story itself: the tales say the wolf is big and bad, but who told you that, and what did they gain by it? Meanwhile a villainous grandmother desecrates the tale’s one sacred space — the maternal, the elder, the keeper of tradition. That surprise easily lands as a critique of inherited authority and the institutions that claim to protect while doing the opposite. That premise aligns with the harsh reality that harm to the young more often comes from inside the home rather than from strangers in the woods.
Refuge becomes cage.
“…In this retelling, our wolf is not simply a creature to fear, but a force of transformation: a call toward intuition, embodiment, womanhood, and the untamed wisdom buried beneath inherited fear.As the familiar story fractures, so too does the path Red has been taught never to leave….” states the program.
The Wolff anchors an evening that showcases the range AVID has built its reputation on: classical technique filtered through a contemporary lens, with live music onstage and dancers treated as collaborators rather than interpreters, as Emily states above.
The program pairs Mennite’s ballet with new work from choreographer Daniel Ojeda, a former Ballet Idaho soloist, set to an original score by the Juilliard-trained double bassist and composer Kebra-Seyoun Charles, who performs live.
“The live music was more than accompaniment—it breathed alongside the dancers, responding to their energy and elevating every moment with warmth, nuance, and emotional depth,” raved one critic who attended a preview of the show in June.
AVID Sara Jumper by Quinn Wharton.
AVID Photo by Jeremy Kyle Gruner.
Rounding out the night is a dynamic piece by the late Gerald Arpino, the legendary Joffrey co-founder and director — a nod, fittingly, to the very tradition Valerie Madonia connection carries.
Back in 1995, internationally acclaimed Joffrey ballerina and Telluride local Madonia performed on the Sheridan Opera House stage, later bringing the Joffrey Ballet to town for several unforgettable summers in residency.
Speed first met Madonia in 2013. One decade later, after a planned project fell through, she turned to her mentor for advice.
“And then it hit me. No one was coming to hand me the opportunity we needed. So maybe… we had to make it ourselves. It wasn’t about having some grand business plan. It was a bench in the park and a conversation between friends. A spark lit by frustration that fanned into something hopeful. That’s how and where AVID was born,” Speed recently explained to Dance Postcard.
What began as a whisper of an idea in New York City is now a company making waves across the country.
And so a pas de deux between two professional colleagues and friends comes full circle, no doubt, to great applause and perhaps the start of a tradition – AVID in Telluride.
As for the upcoming encore, AVID is betting the woods are not where we get lost, but where we ourselves really start to listen, not to mother, rather to Mother Nature and the natural order of things.
And rest assured, you will see the forest for the trees.
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