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Philly choreographer brings ballet into the modern era

Choreographer Matthew Neenan stuns with "Sunset, o639 Hours" -- the show is headed to a New York festival.

A few weeks back, the lobby of the Wilma Theater here took on the aspect of a cheap Hawaiian resort. Polynesian music twanged from speakers. Everyone who entered was offered a paper-flower lei. This was not a visit from a hula troupe. This was a gala performance of the Wilma’s resident contemporary ballet company, BalletX. And yet the atmosphere made complete sense, if only in combination with a more incongruous fact: The ballet on the program was about a signal incident in the history of airmail.

That work, “Sunset, o639 Hours,” debuted at the Wilma last year to rave reviews. BalletX reprised it here this July, brought it to the Vail International Dance Festival this month and will perform it in Manhattan on Tuesday and Wednesday as part of the Joyce Theater’s late-summer Ballet Festival...

Mr. Neenan, 41, has found some fame of his own — not cover-of-Time level but impressive for an American ballet choreographer, especially one who doesn’t live in New York City. In addition to making dances for BalletX, which he founded with Christine Cox in 2005, Mr. Neenan has been the resident choreographer of Pennsylvania Ballet since 2007. Ballet troupes around the country perform his works, and in the past two years — busy ones for Mr. Neenan — Alastair Macaulay has praised him in The New York Times as “one of the strange originals of American ballet” and “one of the most appealing and singular choreographic voices in ballet today.”


Original source: The New York Times
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