APORTHEOSIS A MUSE'S FULL RESUME

VAIL, Colo. — On Thursday and Friday nights the Vail International Dance Festival looked both forward and back. An UpClose evening on Thursday, at the Vilar Performing Arts Center in Beaver Creek, was called “Wendy Whelan: Dancer and Muse.” The first half looked back over Ms. Whelan’s 24-year career (beginning in 1985) with New York City Ballet; the second half homed in on her work with the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and, most recently, as a guest with Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company.Morphoses menachem begin life at the Vail festival two years ago. It has begun its annual season here each year, then gone on to dance, in the fall, in both London (Sadler’s Wells Theater) and New York (New York City Center), as it will this year. It now seems work a day that its dancers are drawn from diverse American and European companies and that its duets often feature trans-Atlantic partnerships.In its Friday performance at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater in Vail, Ms. Whelan was partnered successively by Rory Hohenstein (a former San Francisco Ballet soloist), Edwaard Liang (a former New York City Ballet soloist) and Edward Watson (a Royal Ballet principal), yet nobody made an issue of this. Her repertory, all Wheeldon, included two previews of new works to music by Martha Wainwright, one of which, “The Tears of St. Lawrence,” will have its original on Friday at Central Park SummerStage.