The Brokeback Mountain ballet will have its world premiere Jan. 13, 2027, at the Guggenheim Museum’s Peter B. Lewis Theater in New York, opening the Underground Uptown Dance Festival with 8 p.m. shows through Jan. 15. “Tickets start at $15,” says the festival announcement BroadwayWorld published Nov. 2, which sends buyers to Works & Process, the Guggenheim’s performing arts series, where seats run up to $65.
Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg created the ballet, based on Annie Proulx’s short story, with music by David Conte. The ballet takes place out West in the years before same-sex couples could marry, and it “follows the tragic romance of Ennis and Jack, two shepherds,” according to the announcement.
The official event listing does not yet name the cast. In an April casting call on Dance/NYC, Works & Process said it was hiring “five dancers to portray three men and two women for the creative development and premiere performances,” with eight musicians playing alongside them.
How Pontus Lidberg Built the ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Ballet in Colorado
Lidberg and the cast spent three weeks this summer on the piece at Green Box Arts in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, which commissioned it with Works & Process. “It is almost like a living painting,” he said of its scenes at a free in-progress showing there Aug. 15, The Mountain Jackpot reported.
The showing filled the Sallie Bush Community Building, the paper said. “This really gave us focus,” Lidberg told the paper afterward. “We were able to accomplish in three weeks in Green Mountain Falls what it would take us six weeks to do in New York City.”
His version leans on Proulx’s story more than on the movie, Lidberg told the paper. “We didn’t have to worry about commuting or traveling or any of the big city hassles,” he said of the mountain town.
Conte chairs the composition department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, “where he has taught since 1985,” his website says. He studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, “where he was one of her last students.” The Mountain Jackpot reported that the project began with music Conte wrote more than 20 years ago, and that final approvals to go ahead with it came only recently.
“We are so glad to be part of this Brokeback Mountain ballet journey,” said Anna Faye, who runs engagement and communications for Green Box.
Before the Ballet, Ennis and Jack Sang in Madrid
Proulx’s story first ran in The New Yorker in 1997, The Irish Times noted in 2005, the year Ang Lee’s film with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal came out and went on to win three Oscars, including best director (but not best picture, which went to “Crash,” a sore spot Michelle Williams revisited on “Watch What Happens Live”).
Madrid’s Teatro Real premiered Charles Wuorinen’s opera in January 2014, with a libretto by Proulx herself, and the opera house quotes Wuorinen calling nature in it “a constantly menacing, deadly force.”
London got a stage play in 2023, with Lucas Hedges as Ennis and Mike Faist as Jack. “We’re all Ennises and we’re all Jacks, in our way,” Faist said that May, The Associated Press reported.
Jonathan Butterell directed it. “It’s not a love story,” he said, according to the AP. “It’s a story about fear.”
Scottish singer Eddi Reader was part of the live band onstage, the AP reported. “These characters bursting into song would make no sense at all,” said Dan Gillespie Sells, who wrote the play’s songs. “These characters don’t have an inner dialogue.”
In April, Works & Process described the ballet this way: “The dance conveys deeply internal, often repressed emotions that words alone cannot express.”
Last Stop Before the Guggenheim Is Marlboro, Vermont
The company was booked at Modern Accord Depot in October, and its last residency runs Jan. 4 to 10 at The Campus at Marlboro Music in Vermont, according to the Works & Process residencies page. The April listing said the premiere “will take place in NYC, with potential for touring.”
The festival is part of JanArtsNYC, and it “illuminates the creative process behind new work,” the announcement says. David Dorfman Dance and John Manzari are among the other acts, and Limón Dance Company closes the festival with Akram Khan’s reimagined “The Moor’s Pavane.”
