Wonderbound is cooking with Gasoline (Lollipops) | John Moore

I tiptoed into the world of modern dance in 2023 only to discover that I was actually walking home.

The last two decades of my journalism career can be distilled to two points: I started The Underground Music Showcase (The UMS) in 2001 as a way to call attention to underappreciated homegrown bands like (eventually) Gasoline Lollipops. And, until expanding my arts-coverage horizons here at The Denver Gazette, my focus was almost entirely on the local live theater scene.

I had never attended a ballet in my life. Not even “The Nutcracker.”

But when I watched Wonderbound’s revival of “The Sandman” to christen its $8.4 million forever home in May, the math was simple: Modern dance plus dramatic storytelling minus dialogue plus killer live music pretty much equals live theater at its visceral best. In some ways, even better. Down in your gut. 

Wonderbound presents fully fleshed stories with full narrative arcs and well-defined characters, often accompanied by live bands. Six years ago, the Wonderbound power duo of Garrett Ammon and Dawn Fay went to Sunday brunch at Ophelia's Electric Soap Box, where the deep and dark alt-country band Gasoline Lollipops was playing. Ammon approached frontman Clay Rose, and it was love at first note. Call it a shotgun wedding.

“The Sandman” was their second collaboration – with a third set to open in May. Ammon conceived an original, newfangled Wild West ballet based on Rose’s haunting power ballad called “Santa Maria (and the Sand Man)." It’s the epic story of a gunslinger who vainly calls on Jesus’ mother to help him win back his lady love – only to fall at the trigger finger of the spectral “Sand Man.” Rose’s lyrics are as descriptive and evocative as any Dickensian novel:

“The adrenalin runs like razors and my stomach’s all in knots. I’m choking on the gun smoke and I’m trying not to believe that the Sand Man’s lead is lodged inside me, and there’s blood running down my sleeve.”

Ammon’s resulting expanded and eviscerating ballet was dance, but also theater. And a concert. And a sexy, kinetic ghost story akin to an archetypal Clint Eastwood Western.

Rose, with his intimate and fiery lyrical forays into matters of morality and mortality, rose to local prominence in 2010 on the heels of weighty local gothic country predecessors like 16 Horsepower, Munly and the Lee Lewis Harlots, and The Denver Gentlemen. For a decade, this haunting collective soundscape became known as “The Denver Sound.” But those others never had their lyrics made into a dance.

“Seeing a ballet choreographed to my music is the most deeply validating experience of my artistic life,” Rose said. “It has changed my reality and how I see myself, more than I could have ever imagined.”

Watching his songs performed by young, impossibly perfect Wonderbound dancers, he said, “is like watching a live-action music video for each one of the songs.”

“The Sandman” made Rose’s lyric images three-dimensional. Like a priest’s dying dance with the ghost of his wife. Or, in an homage to Robert DeNiro called “Taxi Driver Dance.”

“I always imagine that taking place in front of a mirror, in which Garrett’s cinematic, choreographed bad-assery asks the question, 'You talkin’ to me?’” Rose said.

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The creative relationship Ammon and Rose have built over the past six years is the kind of collaboration artists dream about.

“As a director and choreographer, the result of Gasoline Lollipops and Wonderbound sharing the stage in ’The Sandman' is the closest I have yet come to laying fully bare the brutal splendor of our humanity,” Ammon said.

Ammons’ other local-legend indie collaborator is Tom Hagerman, multi-instrumentalist for the Grammy-nominated band DeVotchKa. They are presently collaborating on “Awakening Beauty,” a fully modernized take on “Sleeping Beauty” set to Hagerman’s transformation of Tchaikovsky’s classic score. That will run from Feb 22-March 3.

Ammon first collaborated with Rose on “Wicked Bayou,” with Rose performing as Mortimer Leech. That’s his persona while performing with Widow's Bane, his zombie murder-ballad polka band that evokes the vaudevillian stylings of Tom Waits and Nick Cave through the use of sea shanties and klezmer.

Ammon and Rose next join forces for the May 2 world premiere of “Sam & Delilah.” This modernized biblical tale will take place in Palestine, Texas, in 1977, at the height of the ERA movement. Here, the long-haired Delilah is a beautician and Sam the local sheriff – star-crossed lovers who don’t always see eye-to-eye, but surely move in perfect tandem. Rose is creating all-new music that he will perform live with other local musicians.

Every aspect of Rose’s collaboration with Wonderbound “has been outside of anything I’ve previously experienced – so, I might not have the words to describe it,” he said. That being said, Rose equates collaborating with Wonderbound to the synergy between a mama bird and a fledgling.

“Beginning a new project with Garrett always feels like that moment when the mama encourages the fledgling to discover its capabilities by shoving it out of the nest,” said Rose. “It’s terrifying. And then, my world doubles in size.”

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 23rd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.