On Wednesday, Dawn Fay and Garrett Ammon will realize a dream that’s been dancing in their heads for 16 years. That’s when the married leaders of the modern dance company Wonderbound finally christen their first (and hopefully last) forever home at 3824 Dahlia St.

The hipster company, which began as Ballet Nouveau Colorado in 1992 before it was reinvented by Ammon and Fay in 2007, has had more homes than Oprah Winfrey – only it hasn’t owned any of them. Broomfield. The Newman Center at the University of Denver. The PACE Center in Parker. The U.S. Post Office garage near Coors Field. The Pinnacle Charter School in Federal Heights. So many others. Most recently, the former AT&T call center in East Denver that was all set to become the company’s first forever home – until it was so badly vandalized in November 2020, Fay thought that a bomb had gone off.

“We’ve had so many different spaces, I like to say we’ve essentially been camping for the past 10 years,” said Ammon, who took possession of the company’s new 16,000-square-foot property in 2021. Ever since, he’s been building it from the ground up into a cultural gem – and one of the city’s only venues dedicated exclusively to professional dance.

And it’s only happening now because Fay’s life for the past four years has been dancing the never-ending ballet of raising $8.4 million to pull it all off. She’s down to the last $1.5 million of the capital campaign, and she’s determined to have the job done by the end of 2023.

Wonderbound’s new space was built in 1927 as an airplane hangar surrounded by warehouses. Most recently, it was a massive art studio for the legendary Denver sculptor (and, fittingly, former Air Force pilot) Ed Dwight. It’s a mere chip shot to the former Park Hill Golf Course – an area that has galvanized citywide conversation over the future of East Denver. Whatever ends up happening there, Wonderbound will be there, too. It’s hard to overstate what happens to a cultural institution’s identity when it finally has a place – and not just in people’s hearts. A physical place in the community. With an address.     

“That’s a huge thing,” Ammon said. “When we did shows in Parker, often audiences didn’t even know we were local. They thought we were a touring company. Our hope is that people come to associate this new space as Wonderbound. This is the destination.” One that will solidify Wonderbound’s place in Denver’s arts ecology and allow it to dream bigger, risk bigger and experiment bigger than it ever has before.

Touring the new space last week, signs of understandable urgency were everywhere, from piles of clutter to a daunting, hilarious backstage white-board sign listing more than 60 remaining action items. It’s titled, with aplomb: “Fortnight of Doom: 14 Days Til Show.”

That show would be Wednesday’s opening of “The Sandman,” an original, newfangled Wild West tale created by Ammon in collaboration with the Denver country rock band Gasoline Lollipops.

But in reality, the place is in great shape for Wednesday.

It boasts 260 proper theater seats, up from 90 in its most recent temporary space on Grape Street. They’re stretched wide from side to side over just six rows, so no one in the audience will be more than 40 feet from the dance floor. And that floor is massive, measuring 50 feet wide and 55 feet deep, allowing for maximalism amid the intimacy. And, for the first time since before the pandemic – live music on stage.

Wonderbound premiered “The Sandman” one month before the pandemic shutdown, at the PACE Center in Parker. Ammon and Fay had seen Gasoline Lollipops in concert at Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox, where they approached frontman Clay Rose about working together. Voila – “The Sandman” is their second creation, inspired by Rose’s song “Santa Maria and the Sand Man.”

Giddyup, partner

Wonderbound has long been known for its collaborations with partners of all creative kinds, from Tom Hagerman of the Denver band DeVotchka to Curious Theatre Company to the Lighthouse Writers Workshop to the Colorado Symphony. In its new space, Wonderbound will be able to accommodate as many as 24 onstage musicians alongside Wonderbound’s 14 dancers.

The new space boasts all the amenities of a modern state-of-the-art facility – some tailored for audiences and others for the artists and crew. For audiences, that means perfect sightlines from every seat, fully private gender-neutral bathrooms, and seats with actual armrests. For the dancers, that means expansive dressing rooms, twice the rehearsal space and, perhaps most important: proper sprung floors – the kind that are cushioned and calibrated to absorb the weight of flying bodies and prevent shin splints and other common injuries.

Dancers, Ammon said, rarely get to perform on actual dance floors, because they are constantly moving from venue to venue, adapting to whatever (usually hard) surface comes with them. Gone, said Ammon, are the days when his dancers would have to adapt to three different venues in three nights. Now, he added, they have a home court just as the Denver Nuggets have Ball Arena.

“They get to get completely comfortable with a new show from the very first steps all the way through to the actual production without ever having to navigate into a new space,” he said.

Dancer Jocelyn Green estimates that, even with the pandemic pause, she has performed in five different venues since joining Wonderbound in 2019. She said the benefit to a dancer of both rehearsing and performing in the same space cannot be overstated.

“It makes a really big difference when you are already there in your space from the start,” she said. “That makes the process more comfortable, and I think the piece gets inside your body a little faster.”

For Ammon, the new space means he is done renting other theaters. Done spending days loading in and loading out. Done figuring out solutions to unexpected logistical problems. Done working around other venues’ packed calendars for available dates.

“Just knowing that we don’t have to pack everything up and move to a different space ever again is such a huge, huge mental relief,” he said.

Like many Colorado cultural organizations, Ammon partnered with Chris Wineman of the Denver design firm Semple Brown on the creation of the new venue. Ammon started the process by mapping out a broad layout of his ideal space, then left it to Wineman to figure out the details.

And those details make Ammon a little giddy. Like the modern tech booth in the back of the theater that doubles as a daytime office for his production staff. One with a sliding door that allows them to run the show from their desks. Like sound-mitigation efforts that make it possible for backstage builders to do their work at the same time rehearsals are going on in the theater. Before, all that noisy work had to be done at night or on weekends.

From the outside, two noticeably lacking elements are a parking lot and a big, bright Wonderbound sign. But Ammon isn’t too concerned because there’s gobs of street parking right outside on Dahlia Street that will always be available for performances because literally none of his neighboring businesses operate after 4 p.m. And anyone who has followed Wonderbound’s trail for the past 16 years is used to the accompanying parking adventure.

This must be the place

Ammon chose “The Sandman” to open the new facility because trying to open both a new facility and a new show at the same time could have been disastrous. “The Sandman” is a known, manageable challenge for his cast and creatives. Still, he said, it’s a special show, an epic production, a uniquely Western experience. And, he can’t emphasize this part enough: It marks the company’s return to live music in performance.

“I think this story is going to hit people in a really visceral way,” Green added. “To tell it in this space with a live band – it’s all the things that make Wonderbound Wonderbound all coming together.”

Over the past 16 years, Ammon and Fay have built Wonderbound into a company that lives, as he describes it, at the convergence of tradition and innovation. One now with seven additional employees and 12 core company dancers working on annual contracts. With an annual budget now sitting at around $1.4 million. A dream no more. This is real.

Ammon believes this new Wonderbound facility will prove to be good for the city and good for the Park Hill neighborhood. And the fact that it’s a bit off the beaten path is, to him, all the better.

“It’s always been important for us to not be where all the other stuff is,” he said. “I think that as any city grows, it always needs to be thinking about how its arts organizations exist in that city. If you stick them all in one place, there can be some great advantages to that. But I like that we are going to be in a neighborhood where there is nothing else like us.

“Let’s face it: The idea of ballet can be daunting for some people. But Wonderbound has always been about trying to tear down that aspect of it. We’re going to be accessible to everyone by telling stories that everyday people can relate to.”

Wonderbound is not only going to open its doors on Wednesday, Ammon promised, “‘The Sandman’ has so much power and energy that we’re going to blow those doors right off.”