Wonderbound's indie-music collaborations are a whole new arts genre | John Moore

It’s no coincidence that if you ask veteran Denver indie rockers Clay Rose and Tom Hagerman to describe the singular creative vision of Garrett Ammon, all eyes turn toward the heavens.

Ammon is the founder of Wonderbound, an upstart Denver dance company that since 2002 has created its own distinct genre of performance art through cross-disciplinary collaborations that live somewhere in the chaotic creative triangle between modern ballet, musical theater and a rock show at the hi-dive.

I mean, if you combine the words “rock” and “ballet,” you get “rocket” – which in a sense is kind of where Ammon lives.

Hagerman: “I feel like Garrett has built this solar system, and he just pulls people into his orbit.”

Rose: “The way he works is like he’s forming a planet. He starts with the elements and then he compacts them, and then he adds pressure and heat – and it is incredibly intense.”

Hagerman is a classically trained multi-instrumental musician with Denver’s Grammy-nominated band DeVotchka. He’s also a versatile composer whose most recent collaboration with Wonderbound was “Awakening Beauty,” for which he re-imagined Tchaikovsky’s original score as a modern-day soundtrack that he performed live with a hand-picked ensemble of classically trained local musicians.

Hagerman went into the project knowing that the basic story, in his words, “was about a young lady who falls asleep and wakes up and this Prince is supposed to kiss her or whatever.”

He had no idea that in Ammon’s jet-propulsed creative mind, “this young lady was going to wind up in a cult and be sexually assaulted.”

In an era when small arts organizations across the board are struggling to rebuild attendance figures to pre-pandemic levels, “Awakening Beauty” sold out its entire run three weeks in advance. “Sam and Delilah,” composed by Rose and opening Thursday, is close behind.

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Rose is the self-taught frontman of the deep and dark alt-country band Gasoline Lollipops. He’s risen to the highest echelon of local songwriters with his intimate and fiery lyrical forays into matters of morality and mortality. Last year, Rose collaborated with Ammon on “The Sandman,” a sexy, kinetic ghost story akin to an archetypal Clint Eastwood Western. It was based on Rose’s haunting power ballad called “Santa Maria (and the Sand Man)."

Wonderbound essentially presents fully fleshed stories with full narrative arcs and well-defined characters, often accompanied by live bands playing original music – sometimes with lyrics, sometimes not.

But in the beginning, there is what can only be described as “The Big Bang” creative spark. Let Rose tell you about the evolution of “Sam and Delilah,” which will be staged at Wonderbound’s swank new forever home on the eastern border of the Park Hill Golf Course.

This story actually starts in 2017 with the GasPops, as Rose’s band is known to acolytes, playing its standing Sunday brunch gig at Ophelia's ElectricSoap Box. Dawn Fay – Ammon’s wife and Wonderbound’s president – lured Ammon there for what he didn’t know at the time was a musical shotgun wedding. Love at first note.

“Garrett approached me during a set break and asked if I'd ever thought about doing a musical or a rock opera or anything like that,” Rose said. “I told him that I actually did have an idea for ‘The Sandman.’” But Rose had no toehold in the world of modern dance, so Ammon told him to check out a Wonderbound collaboration with another iconic Denver songwriter, Ian Cooke (who was backed, among others, by Hagerman.) Yeah, that kind of backfired.

“That really freaked me out because I'm sitting there looking up on stage, and I'm like, ‘They want me to do that?’” Rose said. “I had extreme imposter syndrome. I'm just shrinking in my chair watching this.”

But the next thing he knew, there he was sitting in a ballet studio – faking his way through.

“The whole thing just seemed totally surreal to me,” Rose said. “I felt so far out of my element. I'm used to playing dive bars, but I did my best to act like I belonged there.”

Fast forward to 18 months ago. Both sides had by then committed to the project that would become “Sam and Delilah,” based on the Old Testament tale of the Philistine who uncovered that the secret of Samson’s strength was his hair, then betrayed him to his enemies. But it would be six months before Ammon and Rose even uttered the names of those iconic Bible characters.

First came “the retreat.” That’s when Ammon took Rose to Silverthorne for four of the most grueling days of Rose’s life.

“At this point, Garrett is just starting to figure out the story we're going to tell,” Rose said. “We have no idea what the ballet is going to be. It could be anything at all.”

Ammon, Rose soon learned first-hand, wakes up at 5 o'clock in the morning. Already making his latest new planet.

“So by the time I get up at 7, he's already had two cups of coffee – and he's just going and going,” Rose said. “I come out of the bedroom rubbing my eyes and Garrett’s going on about sex trafficking and child slavery and Gaza and religion and biblical wars and earthquakes and all this (bleep). And I'm just like, ‘Whoa, Garrett – can I please have a cup of coffee first?”

Ammon, Rose quickly learned, “is just unrelentingly curious about the human condition. And through studying these things very intensely – like 16 hours a day – we come up with … absolutely no answers,” he said with a laugh.

“But we do come out of it with this ball of seething lava.” A ball of fire wrapped in a mutually shared ideological belief “that we all have this darkness in us,” Rose said. ”But then, we all also have this virtue that we want to hold up and put it on a shrine and preserve forever. We want to expel the darkness as if it's not as natural to us as virtue.”

Ammon and Rose had two intense writing retreats for “Sam and Delilah” – ”and both of them completely wrecked me,” Rose said. “It took me days to recover when I got home. I just felt so emotionally and spiritually beaten.”

No one said birthing was easy.

But the work paid off with a creative direction: They wanted to pursue a deep exploration into how toxic masculinity has gotten to such an extreme in our culture.

“We were talking about whatever happened to an appreciation of feminine wisdom, which has been gone since the Crusades, really,” Rose said. “We wondered, what would it be like if we lived in a society that balanced both masculine and feminine wisdoms? And that brought us to the discovery that Sam and Delilah are our main characters, because they represent the clash between the masculine and the feminine.”

But it is only then that the work really begins. And what happens next, Rose and Hagerman agreed with delight, is absolute creative chaos.

“In the classical world, you build these kinds of shows three years in advance,” Hagerman said. “Garrett is doing it four times a year.”

Hagerman began the “Awakening Beauty” creative process by weaving 90 minutes of music into 21 movements (think chapters in a book). Rose wanted to give Ammon a rock opera, with a set number of pop songs telling the story from start to finish.

“But that’s not what Garrett wants,” Rose said. “Garrett gives his composers a very general storyline and then inspires us to write general music for that general storyline. He doesn't want a literal rock opera – he wants a soundtrack that fits the feel and the overall mood of the ballet. And he takes it from there.”

But how does that all turn into a precisely tuned – and timed – ballet?

Ammon essentially takes the first draft of his composers’ raw music, puts it into a software program and then, Rose said with a laugh, “he starts chomping your (bleep) all up.” But that’s how he first starts to see and hear the story – and its choreography – develop in his mind. 

“He’ll start choreographing to a song I've given him, and then he’ll go, ‘No, they need more time to build up to this moment,’” Rose said. “Right there in rehearsal, he'll go to the computer and cut out a bar, or he’ll duplicate it by three and move it to the beginning or end of the song. And then he'll add another part if he wants to.”

Ammon ultimately must storyboard his narrative down to the second. He might dedicate 16 measures of music to convey parents fighting, then 32 to convey their sad child crying in her bedroom. But he’s not constricted to exact sequences.

The only way Wonderbound can work in this way is because of new technologies that can pump out new musical charts every time Ammon makes a change. That’s a godsend for Hagerman and his classical musicians. But Rose is old-school. “When Garrett chops up a song on a computer and sends it back to me, I use a metronome so that I can count the beats while I'm writing the new piece of music to fit his cuts,” he said. 

The first time Rose went down the creative rabbit hole with Ammon, he admits, “it scared the (bleep) out of me, because Ammon will still be cutting and moving music around two weeks before rehearsal starts,” he said. “The story's still not straight. We don't know what's going on. I am sure it’s going to be a disaster.

“But what I have learned by looking at his dancers is that they trust him completely. They know that in those last two weeks, everything's going to fall into place. It's going to be beautiful.

“I think, in the end, his main motivator is pressure. I don't think it's by mistake that he is still making changes in the last two weeks. That's when he does his best work – when he’s got a gun to his head.”

After now working on several Wonderbound projects, Hagerman is convinced Ammon is a unicorn. “I just don't feel like anybody else is doing anything like what Wonderbound is doing here,” he said.

And maybe in the end, Ammon is not so much a rocket man but an old-school artist.

“He's like an impressionist, abstract painter,” Rose said. “Only, he doesn't paint with a fountain pen. He paints with watercolors.”

And the planet he paints turns out to be an awfully nice place to live. 

“Seeing a ballet that Garrett has choreographed to my music is the most deeply validating experience of my artistic life,” Rose said.