Tap, Irish Step and Ballet Share One Stage in Vail

On August 10, the Vail Dance Festival in Vail, Colorado, will premiere a new work created by tap dancer and choreographer Michelle Dorrance together with Chelsea Hoy, co-artistic director of Chicago's Trinity Irish Dance Company. The premiere forms part of this year's NOW evening of world premieres, and the cast pairs Trinity's Irish step dancers with tap artists and three New York City Ballet dancers: India Bradley, Tiler Peck, and Roman Mejia.

Dorrance, a 10-year veteran of the festival, is working with Hoy, a first-time VDF choreographer. The performers include tap dancers Emiko Nakagawa and Dario Natarelli, plus Trinity's Hoy, Maddie Cabral, Michael Fleck, Anna Gorman, and Sofia Dorantes. Dorantes, in just her first season with the company, ranks among the top dancers on the competitive circuit and is currently Mexico's winningest female Irish step dancer.

Dorrance and Trinity have collaborated before, starting with 2020's American Traffic and again on SÉseacht earlier this year. Dorrance says she has admired Trinity since the late 1990s. "As a collaborator, but also as a fan of the company, truly, I am thrilled when I experience these artists," she says. "These dancers are blowing everyone's minds."

Both sides come to the project with cross-genre experience. Dorrance frequently creates with dance artists from across the style spectrum. Trinity has made cross-genre works for decades.

What sets the Vail project apart is the addition of ballet to the mix. In the studio, Dorrance and Hoy are looking for common ground between forms. The tap dancers are exploring the virtuosity of soft shoe and skat. The ballet dancers are finding the percussiveness inherent to petit allégro.

"Irish is the common denominator," Hoy says. Irish soft shoe, she explains, shares a lineage with ballet, with French influence contributing to its movement. Percussive hard-shoe dance aligns more closely with tap; it is a dance of resistance, carrying the rhythms and music that kept Irish culture alive following the British invasion of Ireland.

Irish dance rarely appears on the concert-dance festival circuit. Trinity last visited the Vail Dance Festival in 1999, amid the Irish dance craze that followed the commercial success of Riverdance. Last summer, Trinity's appearance at Jacob's Pillow marked the first time Irish dance received a full evening in the Ted Shawn Theatre.

"Irish has been relegated so far from the ballet and contemporary worlds of dance that still, today, we're at the Pillow, we're at The Joyce, but we definitely do feel that," Hoy says. At Vail, she notes a shift: "This is the first time I think our dancers have been, like, 'We literally can exist on the same dance floor.' What's surprising to them is how much people want to learn from them."

The August 10 premiere will test whether that shared floor can hold three percussive and classical traditions at once — and whether festival audiences, two decades after Riverdance, are ready to see Irish step dance as part of the concert-dance mainstream.