Meet Vail Dance Festival artist-in-residence Jamar Roberts
If you happen to have missed a taste of Jamar Roberts’ choreography during Tuesday’s Dance for $20.24, it’s not too late to see the work he’s been creating during the festival: Monday’s NOW: Premieres features his yet-to-be-titled work, set to music by Caroline Shaw, which she will perform live.
As this year’s artist-in-residence, Roberts has had a bit of a hectic schedule. He arrived in Vail on his birthday, dropped his bags off and got to work — though the day did include a sweet surprise in the form of a birthday cake presented by artistic director Damian Woetzel.
Roberts has previously performed in Vail with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and also choreographed his first work for Vail Dance Festival in 2021. Last year, he created two new works for the festival: “Eros & Psyche” for BalletX dancers, which premiered in Vail, “embodying the rhapsodic feeling of when heart and soul unite,” Roberts said, and “Songs to the Dark Virgin,” performed during 2023’s International Evenings of Dance III program.
This year, he showed up without a plan or any actual steps for Monday’s NOW: Premieres piece: Woetzel simply gave him Shaw’s music and pointed him to several dancers, and off he went into a process that involves deeply listening, which suits him just fine.
The act of listening to music and moving is where Roberts began as a dancer, and it’s where he continues as a choreographer. He started dancing in fifth grade in Miami, after a friend in an after-school recreation dance program told him they needed guys. He discovered he enjoyed dancing to popular tunes of the time, including Mariah Carey and C+C Music Factory, so he continued training in hip-hop, jazz and ballet.
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“Music was the first thing that connected me to dance,” he said. “I can’t hear any sound — even a fire engine — without moving my body.”
He continued his dance training with The Dance Empire of Miami and went on to graduate from New World School of the Arts and The Ailey School. He became a leading dancer for Alvin Ailey, as well as dancing for Ailey II and Complexions Contemporary Ballet and performing as a guest artist with the Royal Ballet in London.
Now, he’s a choreographer, “in demand all over the world,” Woetzel said Tuesday night. Last year, Parsons Dance named him “one of the hottest choreographers around.” In addition to creating works for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and BalletX, he has choreographed for New York City Ballet, Miami City Ballet, the Martha Graham Company, The Juilliard School, Ailey 2 and more. Additionally, he’s the creative associate for The Juilliard School (from 2023-2024).
He credits his sensitivity as a deep listener for a good portion of his success as a choreographer. He views both listening to music and observing dancers as a sixth sense — something that can be honed, but a talent you’re simply born with.
“It’s all in the small things that you can see … You take the micro and make it macro,” he said, noting that it also requires communicating a clear idea, even if that idea contains multiple themes, or complexities, within it. “I let the music inform what comes out.”
Though his first narrative ballet, “Resurrection,” premiered at San Francisco Ballet in January 2023, he doesn’t tend to revolve his choreography around a story. Rather, he relies on abstraction.
“I like being abstract, but not so abstract (you can’t understand it) — it opens me up to explore different ways of moving,” he said. “I think that I am a little bit left of the trend. There’s always sort of a trend that happens in dance, and I’m always going against it — not on purpose. I’m simply being honest to what I think I need, to what I think the dancers need and to what I think the community at large needs. The more I stay true to myself, the more that makes my voice singular.”
For the seven-woman piece he’s creating during the festival, his initial inspiration stemmed from listening to Shaw’s voice.
“Her voice is so versatile and so angelic. It’s a really inspiring sound to listen to, even when you’re not making a dance,” he said. “I always enjoy female energy because I find that women know how to problem solve and work as a group more than men do, and they’re really sensitive. They’re not always trying to get to the big stuff. They lean into the process more and take their time.”
That generosity, so to speak, reverberates throughout Vail Dance Festival, as dancers supportively share with both each other and with the audience.
“I appreciate that I get to feel like I’m really a part of a dance community (here),” he said. “It’s rare where you get this overlapping of dancers who are here for one goal: To create beautiful things and to give back to the community. You would think there would be a competitiveness, but there’s not. There’s a lightness about it, and it’s even fun.”