It’s been a weekend of catching up. Among other catch-up tasks (talking on the phone, cleaning house), I spent time re-acquainting myself with dance in Salt Lake City. It’s a continuous practice, and, it turns out there’s still a lot going on even if you’re unwilling to leave the house except to visit the grocery store.
12 Minutes Max which has always been one of my favorite ways to sample local experimentation. Now you can watch it from home, and in this case, several days after the fact. This edition had a dance film by Roxanne Gray, music by Logan Hone and a vintage film collage by Steve Creson, full of eerily timely images of medical science and flourishing pathogens. I also took in (for the second time ever) Salty Showcase, which offered two musical acts and a new dance film by Arin Lynn in which the sole performer, Tori Meyer, is revealed through tiny gestures and a slue of ever-changing and playful, if quotidian, outfits.
It was in this context of appreciation for how much is still available to engage with that I watched Christina Hughes and Angela Vecchione’s collaboration with Rhode Island-based collective Metamorphosis, which will be presented again on Sunday, January 31 at 5pm MST, as a part of their collaborative Choreofest project.
From what I’ve seen of the ongoing Choreofest offerings (of which I haven’t seen everything), the goal of the series is to explore what it’s like to make dances together over the internet, with an eye toward collaboration with new partners. I didn’t enjoy the Metamorphosis collaboration as much as an earlier iteration I saw in which Hughes and Vecchione worked with Faby Guíllen, who performed live from her home city in Mexico. What made that piece striking was that it stuck to a visual diptich — at first somewhat jarring — in which we saw the soloist dancing live from two different angles about 90 degrees apart in an anonymous-looking, seemingly random patch of urban space.
Faby Guíllen dancing in a collaboration with Hughes and Vecchione from last year.
In sticking to a formal constraint which pushes hard on the subliminal training on how to watch that we’ve all received TV and movies, the work with Guíllen maintained a sense of tension that allowed the actual choreography to be quite playful without feeling scattered or unedited. This piece would work well in a gallery setting. The work with Metamorphosis takes a different approach, attempting to collage the Zoom-meeting-as-stage (I was impressed with the way the six dancers “entered” and “exited”) with more traditional screendance tools (cutting on action, screen direction, cutting from one dancer to another doing the same phrase).
Although the result was less pleasing as viewer, as a dancer, I appreciate seeing the ongoing work — the trial and error in which all of us are currently engaged. I look forward to more.
A particularly pleasing moment of unison from the Metamorphosis collaboration.
Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore.