Repertory Dance Company opened their 2021-2022 season with an evening of three works by Lar Lubovitch. It is rare to see a performance that showcases such longevity: both in the span of work and the length of the collaboration. The works presented had premiered in the years 1978, 2018, and 1976. Even more impressively, Lubovitch first collaborated with RDT in 1975 — a connection that has existed for forty seven years. With this context, North Star was a performance that celebrated the practice of returning again and again for new shared moments.
Lubovitch’s choreography is distinguished by his use of counterpoint. Counterpoint is a musical device where melodic lines are both interdependent and independent in harmony, melody, and rhythm. Lubovitch translated this quality to the human body. The dancers remained interconnected through linked arms, repeating steps, and a uniform movement quality and yet each person was on their own track. Each person darted through space with spontaneous bursts of energy. Throughout the works, the dancers cascaded in pathways that swirled in and around each other. This contrapuntal quality offered a dizzying chaos while creating a sense of shared connection.
The first work of the evening, “North Star” (1978) and the show’s namesake, refers to Polaris, the famous star that holds still while the northern sky moves around it. Thematically, this further captured the essence of counterpoint. This piece was incredibly structural in nature. Lubovitch noted that the movement was inspired by the actual shape of the constellation. The dancers moved in a way to embody the celestial torso, legs, and arms from an aerial point of view. Of course, the audience was seated in a proscenium theatre and was left to their imaginations to envision this intended imagery. The dancers had grounded, fast moving legs, paired with easeful, airy arms that found moments of bright suspension. Several times, Ursula Perry was lifted into a horizontal position with her legs bent — capturing a snapshot of the constellation in a single moment. I found the swirling patterns, repetitive movement, and balletic shapes to create a kaleidoscope of changing images and patterns.
Suddenly, a beam of light poured into the center of the stage and Lauren Gresens, a guest artist from SALT Contemporary Dance Company, appeared. She was wearing a long, loose black dress. Her body erupted in electric shutters and thrashing bursts. Her head shook and her arms poured through the air. This solo was meant to symbolize the brain of the constellation as an electric center. Gresens’s movement was striking and took my breath away in its raw, messy nature that juxtaposed the poised, suspended nature of the previous movement.
Throughout the evening, brief videos played between each piece that shared interviews with Lubovtich and Katarzyna Skarpetowska, who restaged these works. These videos offered additional context, glimpses at the rehearsal process, and insight into the choreographer’s intentions. A dancer in the audience remarked that these videos “took away some of the magic of the evening.” However, several other audience members who are newer to the discipline of dance, remarked that these videos offered an invitation for them into the performance experience. They found these films insightful, encouraging, and eliminated the feeling of being an outsider that they have felt at previous dance performances. There will always be strong feelings about the right amount of context and the value of an artistic work to stand alone. However, I find RDT’s performance videos to be inviting and ultimately, creating an access point for many folks to experience dance in new ways.
“Something About Night” (2018) plays with memory. Lubovtich seemed to create this piece as an epilogue to his journey as an artist: this choreography serves as a reflection on his full body of work. He incorporates fragments of duets and trios that allude to many of his past pieces. Lubovtich notes, “Mainly, my motivation was that I want to be quiet. I think I value quiet now. And in this dance, I’m seeking a quieting of the mind.” I find this incredibly poetic. After nearly 125 choreographic works, what remains is quiet, stillness, peace. There was something very grounded in this piece. The music gave off an elusive, echoing quality, as if it was being played in just a couple of rooms away, just out of reach. I found the lighting of this piece to be incredibly striking. The middle of the stage was lit with a warm glow that dimmed and dissipated toward the wings. The dancers moved from the center of this stage to the edges and would fade like shadows at dusk so I could just see the edges of their movement. The four dancers in this piece: Perry, Lauren Lenning, Trung “Daniel” Do, and Jonathan Kim presented an easeful, strong quality as if they were sharing one long sigh together.
The last piece of the evening, “Marimba...a trance dance” (1976) began with the dancers moving diagonally across the stage with a slow, sustained nature. They seemed to be running in slow motion with moments of unison and slight syncopation. This moment was simple, lasting for several minutes. It reminded me of water pouring over a collection of stones and the way that this liquid can seep through crevices and trickle in cascading patterns. The dancers were free flowing.
As the piece developed, the energy increased and dancers were caught in an “ebb and flow” like pattern. They began jumping, stomping, and twirling in large circular patterns. The dance was supposed to reference cultural trance dances that carry people to an elevated state of mind with movement. The piece was lively but did not seem to energetically build enough nor reach a sustained climax to fully capture this tradition or imagery. It felt slightly insincere and unfulfilled to allude to trance dances while using balletic movement on a proscenium stage. I did appreciate the use of minimalistic music that facilitated an arch in the movement dynamics. The dancers curved their spines, bounded through the air, and remained deeply connected. By the end of the evening, there was a feeling of collective suspension that emanated in the dancers’ limbs and in our breath as an audience.
Rae Luebbert is a multidisciplinary movement artist and arts administrator based in Salt Lake where she works in dance advocacy for Dance/USA, academic advising for the University of Utah, dance education, and art making. In 2019, Rae produced a show entitled Rosie surrounding the complexity of the color pink and its relation to gender, identity, and storytelling. Rae has presented and performed work with Dance Place (DC), Juanita Winston Dance (Maryland), the Hirshorn Smithsonian Museum (DC), and Sample Series (Salt Lake). Recently, Rae performed in Hundred Years Hence produced by Deseret Experimental Opera.