More and more presenters are reopening, having “homecomings,” or even being “reborn” as one rather effusive email I opened recently declared. It remains to be seen — will we really do things differently now that COVID is “over”? (It’s not.)
If so, how?
Despite my saltiness — perhaps I’m absorbing more of it as the lake dries up — I do think there’s evidence that people are stumbling through in slightly new and different ways. This is healthy, reassuring and sometimes slightly awkwardly, and I don’t mean that in a bad way.
Here in Salt Lake City, UtahPresents opened their new season with a performance by SALT. Several people I spoke to were excited about the idea of the university presenting a local company. The shape of the show itself also represented a change from the typical script — it began in the lobby with a man in coveralls (not quite a techie, more of a backstage grease monkey) declaring that he was filling in for a missing presenter. (My companion immediately spotted the gag.)
This supposedly ersatz host then escorted us through the first tier (where we witnessed the first bit of dancing) to a stairwell (where we were treated to an a cappella rendition of “Ain’t Misbehaving”) to the alley east of the building where one of our fellow audience members “fell in love” and ran off with one of the performers in a choreographic fit of nostalgia for the “simpler times” of forties or fifties American pop culture.
It was fun to see the theater, and then the backstage, deconstructed and de-formalized this way. The nostalgia got to be tiresome — opportunities to trouble the waters with a dose of historical reality we’re missed, and the tension between high and low brow that the guide’s character hinted at also remained underdeveloped. Still, it was a refreshing pleasure to see skilled full-bodied dancing, particularly at close range — the company’s dancers have much to offer.
Municipal Ballet also recently presented a season opener with a celebratory vibe and in non-traditional setting. The alleyway behind Fischer Brewing made for a convivial viewing experience for the SLC premiere of their new work Daughter of Zion, which was made while artistic director Sarah Longoria was in residence at Zion National Park. After not seeing people for several months it’s refreshing to sit next to someone you know, only to have them stand up to play the violin or join in one of the evening’s fleeting sculptural meditations.
Brolly Arts, long an on-and-off supporter of independent dance in Utah, brought an evening of Black choreographers — Natosha Washington, jo Blake and Ursula Perry — paired with a film (below) about the Black experience in Utah since the civil rights era, specifically highlighting the achievements of a handful of Black educators who rose through the ranks of an often hostile K-12 system in our state. It was nice to see the three solos by these well-loved artists again — especially in a context which invited the audience to consider their impact as educators as well as artists. (If you’re interested in seeing how this non-traditional space functions, come see loveDANCEmore’s Sunday Series this weekend.)
A couple of my favorite recent events in this vein have been very small shows — one in a basement and one in a barn. (Well, the Art Barn.)
Aaron Smith playing “Vexations” by Erik Satie on the piano, photo by Dani Mendez.
“Vexations” is a musical work by Erik Satie, written near the end of the nineteenth century. Usually performed on the piano, the piece consists of a short theme the interpreter is expected to play eight hundred and forty times. This August, pianist Aaron Smith teamed up with Interdisciplinary Arts Collective, known locally for their interpretations of Fluxus and other historical performance art scores, to mount a thirty-six hour staging of Satie’s piece in the basement of one of the buildings owned by the church at the corner of 800 East and 900 South.
My parent’s house is near this space and I visited the performance before and after having dinner with my dad and sisters. When we stopped in before our meal, Indigo Cook was dancing alone with Smith who looked exhausted. It was fascinating enough to watch him playing the same strains over and over, emphases shifting as he struggled to stay awake and present. Cook added another layer. Where Smith seemed to be slipping through each repetition there was something more determined in Cook’s dancing. I don’t know if I saw this because the context suggested it, but there was something of the old school, the early twentieth century in the assertiveness of her body — not the contrived melodrama you see in reconstructions of Graham work, but something of the abandon that we don’t quite seem capable of as “modern” dancers living in the present time.
When I came back later, the whole ensemble was improvising together on movement themes choreographed in loose relation to the music’s bones. Nora Lang’s playful attendance to energy stood out, but there was a lovely collective sense of carrying the group to the finish line.
The piece I saw at the Art Barn was Stephanie García’s demanding but beautiful solo Vanished Vibrations, presented as a part of García’s Flash Project residency, made in collaboration with PROArtes México, Punto de Inflexión Dance Company and video artist Peter Hay. I found the opening of this solo particularly moving. It began with García, seated on a plinth with a red flower held between her lips. As she descended, she took a small potted plant with her which she eventually carried on her back while slowly crawling from one side of the room to the other. Along the way there were many danced digressions, passages of pure movement where she seemed to tumble down a spiral into some region of mind that demanded her body and attention for a spell. Eventually she arrived at a corner where a handheld light passed to an audience member became the sole illumination.
Eventually this piece became about several recognizable themes: a reclamation of García own body, feminist protest movements in Latin America and beyond, a kinesthetic acknowledgement of the dozens of women murdered in Mexico every week. Even as García carried such heavy content (as well as a prop that at least momentarily read as a body bag) she seemed to loose her curiosity about the couple dozen bodies, in darkness and penumbra that were taking her in.
There were moments of tenderness — a disposable mask she put on when an audience member helped her hang a piece of twine; the care with which she hung up articles of clothing presumably representing lost lives; even the delicateness of a passage we all eventually traversed to the back of the building where she danced with Hay’s video — a brittle threshold of corn husks.
Samuel Hanson is the executive director and editor of loveDANCEmore.