Two men appear, one after another, dressed in work suits. They take turns pushing a plastic garbage pail through a field of discarded objects — broken cups and clam-shells, eerily white. jo Blake leans on the can, then back onto two feet, he proposes something with the slap of a foot, a hip turning inward. There’s a good-natured humor in how his limbs paw through the void. Dmitri Peskov’s movement is more cautious, yet also somehow jocular in a way that complements his partner’s directness. They gather up the each piece of refuse, but they aren’t in a hurry. They pick things up and consider them. They even pick tentatively at each other, hands considering another body. Along the way we realize that the soundtrack is telling stories of, among other things, space travel. These trash men are understated and calm, their improvisation is a bit like bricklaying, but as the title and the mysterious ending of this short piece reminds us, they — all of us — we are dead stars. A plastic cup could just as well have been a piece of the breathing, intelligent body deciding to pick it up. All proposals are provisional, transitory. Everything is material for some kind of dance.
This opener sets the tone for Two Fold, a concert by three Utah dance artists who have been working in different contexts in and out of Salt Lake City long enough that they aren’t trying to impress anyone. They’re in it for the long haul. The evening's choreographers, who include, among others, Peskov, Meghan Durham Wall, and Lehua Estrada, are at times quite diligent, but in Two Fold they share a refreshing lack of flashiness.
Photo by Doug Carter
In Alexandra Bradshaw-Yerby’s collaboration with Peskov, The Alex (Dmitri?) Show, the two performers earn our attention through markedly individuated strategies. For Bradshaw-Yerby, its all about dancing. Her opening solo displays a kind of playful, balletic musicality. It also contains the ever-present suggestion that, if she let herself, she might fall through space with a shattering multi-directional abandon, breaking the spell of formality cast by her long legs and articulate hands. Somewhere in the middle of all this delicacy, Peskov suddenly arrives, perfectly awkward, carrying one chair after another to make a circle around her. Finally he brings his partner a plastic purple Martini. She mimes drinking it and Peskov starts telling the audience a tall tale version of how he has arrived at this particular moment on stage, brilliantly making fun of, among other things, himself, the other Dmitri Peskov who works for the Kremlin, Paul Taylor, and, of course, dance itself. Eventually she rejoins him, four members of the public are brought on stage, and two proposals collide into an ending.
I say “ending,” but one of the best things one can say about Two Fold is that the whole show is both a collection of proposals and a collision into an uneasy whole. It’s nine dances, none of which — even at their most uneven — are too long, and it’s a show that talks to itself — sometimes literally. As Wall writes in the program, it’s “about listening, responding, and creating something together that none of us could make alone.” All kinds of images arise, subside, and speak to each other in this group experience, like Estrada’s trio of fierce wolves — Devin Etcitty, Kylie Lloyd, and Samantha Matsukawa in O-Six — presaging further breeches of the fourth wall in Salt Lake Ballet Collective’s rendering of Peskov’s wherever we are is what is missing. One thing leads to another, but not necessarily along straight lines.
Photo by Doug Carter
Wall’s works play with the tension between language and dance — a tricky proposition given the ways in which text can overdetermine how we read movement. In Werklyfe, Wall dances to what sounds like a TED talk about the tyranny of email, but also vocally addresses the audience herself, her movement riding the wave between narration and spoken aside. In frio, frio, frio, with theatrical foil Stephanie Stroud, Wall shows as much willingness to poke fun at herself as Peskov, pillorying both herself and the ego it takes to make any dance happen.
My favorite of Wall’s works was Confessional, which boasted a stellar cast of local veterans. Wall was joined by Eileen Rojas, Corrine Penka, and Lehua Estrada, dancing to verse by Carmen Giménez. Poetry in particular, when read into the voice-of-God microphone, can often crush a relatively abstract dance such as this one, but in Confessional something clicked, and I once again found myself thinking about everything as kind of proposal, a conscious choosing of one of many possibilities. The poem itself was a litany of proposals, conditional statements of identity which cascaded down on these women’s bodies at such a speed that they added up to being a statement about the instability of identity itself. This somehow made space for the dancing itself to become a vehicle for seeing these women in a state of serious play. Their expectations for each other were high, and each of them delivered — Wall and Penka crisscrossing with a mercurial vitality, Estrada stepping out and owning the space in a way I haven’t quite seen before, and Rojas, dancing like calligraphy, in confident ownership of a pared-down simplicity.
Samuel Hanson is the executive director of loveDANCEmore.
