From the ashes of one fallen dance company rose another.

When the pandemic effectively dissolved Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Aspen’s highly trained professional dancers who made up the troupe were out of luck. Their options were either to find another company somewhere else in the country or give up their dance career.

Laurel Winton, a professional ballerina with the company, said no thanks to both choices. She’d fallen in love with Aspen and Colorado and wanted to settle herself in for the long haul. So she gathered her dancing colleagues to brainstorm a solution. What emerged in 2021 was DanceAspen, a high-caliber contemporary ballet company.

“We’re focused on not repeating or copying other companies that exist, but going into territories that may have not been explored yet,” said founder and executive director Winton.

“A couple of our artists create works. In addition to bringing in creators from the outside, we do in-house work. That’s unique; not a lot of dance companies do that. That generates a different style and innovation than other companies.”

DanceAspen will bring “Limitless” to Ent Center for the Arts on Friday.

Seven dancers will present four pieces that recently premiered in Aspen, including the evening’s featured 22-minute work “Cloudline,” choreographed by Robyn Mineko Williams for Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago.

“It highlights all the dancers,” Winton said. “It’s got a timeline like a movie. It goes back in time and bops around to different couples and relationships. It’s a cinematic, visually stunning work.”

In another piece, “Sliding Glass Door,” company member and choreographer Madeleine Scott incorporated CGI (computer-generated imagery).

“It’s one of those controversial questions about what it’s doing to art,” Winton said, “so we thought we’d use it in a way that supplemented human art.”

The new company is doing well, Winton says. It’s growing in size and was invited back to the Vail Dance Festival this summer for the third time.

Creating a new entity might seem daunting, but it seemed like the only solution.

“I didn’t have anything to lose,” she said. “It was worth a shot. Everything is a mix of timing and effort. Things aligned and I have the experience in my industry in terms of my connections with choreographers. And I had people in the community who wanted to help. It was a team effort, but you had to jump off the cliff and not know what was on the other side.”

It’s not the first time Winton jumped off a cliff in her dance career. After a classically based professional dancing career, which included dancing with the Joffrey Ballet for five years, an opportunity came along that she couldn’t pass up — a role as Penny in the international Broadway tour of “Dirty Dancing.”

“I’d always wanted to act,” she said. “It’s why I fell in love with dance in the first place. With Broadway you perform more than you rehearse. You perform eight times a week.”

Dancing in a different environment than she was used to helped smooth the way for her current role.

“It did prep me for being assertive because in the classical ballet world you’re not supposed to be that way,” she said. “You’re supposed to be a soldier in the group and you’re structured and strict with routines. I can’t be that in this role. I have to be outgoing and try new things. I have to not be afraid to vocalize things. I have to direct the group. It’s definitely helped me get outside of that classical box.”

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