Below are critical takes on our very own Only the Lonely series from writers Emily Snow and Sofia Sant’Anna-Skites. You can still watch most the work produced for the series here.
Only the Lonely, evening one
Evening one of Only the Lonely showcased two highly collaborative works landing at polar ends of an emotional spectrum. Nora Lang’s TV Dinners on the Farm was a giggly, gamified take on modern dance construction hosted by sock puppets, while Dimitri Peskov and Jung Ah Yoon’s complementary films – This Blinding Light and Companion – formed a ghostly, mournful pair.
Lang’s piece was an extension of an ongoing project she facilitates that “lovingly frames modern dance within the format of trivia game shows,” previous iterations of which had been presented at 12 Min Max pre-pandemic. This virtual version took several of the same concepts and applied the interactive features of Zoom to invite audience participation. The four dancers, Rachel Luebbert, Aileen Norris, Arin Lynn, and Tori Meyer, appeared in four separate windows, each accompanied by a sock puppet alter ego. They take turns dancing and posing different questions to us and each other.
In one section of the piece the audience was shown pairs of completely absurd and whimsical prompts. We were then tasked with guessing which one the dancers were using to direct their movement. This was a fun take on the sometimes equally goofy and eyebrow-raising prompts dancers and choreographers use to make new material in the studio, although some technical issues and system limitations in zoom made the performance a little clunky at times as a viewer.
Peskov and Yoon’s films were as serious as Lang’s performance was silly. Both films used the same imagery – a man in a grotesque mask distorting his face in apparent agony, another person in a less frightening but equally strange three-faced mask on sweeping hillside; escalators and train yards, crowded subways; Yoon dancing among autumn-leaves trees in a park, then walking through a shopping center in Seoul, and dancing in a dark room lit backlit around the edges by a blindingly bright light; another dancer (Warren Hess of Utah) moving in a desert landscape. These images are reformulated and rearranged in each film while cinematic, melancholy violins swell quietly in the background. Each artist performs a whispered, hollow-voiced monologue over the music for the length of their respective film, the language of both full of muted regret and longing with little hope.
Though these two projects couldn’t be more different in tone, the spirit of inventive collaboration across distance became an unlikely point of connection between them.
Only the Lonely, evening two
Emma Sargent and Max Barnewitz’s collaboration in Duet for Non-Things and Forsaken Objects unfolds in their home and out at Antelope Island in a series of duets and solos, plus an ensemble of stop-motion animated figurines and rocks. Nine movements intercut scenes of homey clutter with sweeping arid expanse. These videos exist individually on Barnewitz's website, a 3x3 grid meant to be watched in any order, viewer’s choice. For Only The Lonely evening two, they were presented in a single continuous stream.
Duet is described, in part, as a study of contrasts and the experience of being confined to one space for a long time “with one person, even if it’s a person you love.” Sargent and Barnewitz are partners, who self-describe creatively as a formally trained dancer and a nondancer/“outsider artist” of 2D comics and zines. This project was their first collaboration, launched by questions of what would happen if they put those different approaches to art together, what movement would result from that dancer/nondancer dichotomy. The most interesting thing about this study of contrasts, to me, was the indelible sameness in the result. Sargent is a versatile dancer, but her movement has a specific, identifiable sensibility I associate with her, and I was fascinated to find that Barnewitz moves the same way, the absence of the formally installed ‘grammar’ that underlies Sargent’s dancing is totally imperceptible. It appears that, in a kind of mimetic transference, they’ve developed a shared kinetic sensibility from the proximity and time they’ve spent just living their life together.
The two spoke to their newness to the format of “screendance” on social media before the show, touching on both the excitement and self-conscious nerves of preparing to present this work alongside other screendance artists. Duet was obviously a pretty lo-fi endeavor, I’d guess most of it was filmed via phone or laptop, with minimal editing beyond the stop motion. Charmingly, the two left in bookending moments from their recordings –– walking in and out of frame to start and stop the camera, little comments, giggles, and appraising compliments shared between them. These moments are small and lie at the edges of the work’s focus, but they feel absolutely critical. They wrap this performance of sequestered intimacy in the *actual* intimacy of Max and Emma, these two people, together in their home.
The stop-motion too, brings the camera in close, drawing attention also to their records, their furniture, the carpet texture, the dishes in their kitchen, letting us take a good long look at the quotidian background clutter we’ve been hyper-conciously taking inventory of through the Zoom windows of friends, strangers and ourselves throughout the past year. The simple muted choreography in the midst of all this leaves me with the impression of “home video” –– a kind of pandemic-inflected analog to the old tapes that archived the personally intense mundanity of other eras we felt compelled to preserve.
“Vintage pop music” generally and Roy Orbison specifically were cited by Sargent during the Q&A as a source of inspiration for the project and solace during the pandemic. The individual songs don’t feel particularly attached to any specific movement, instead functioning more as a kind of background soundtrack to fill out the silence and create contrast with field-recorded sounds from the wind, birds, and brushing grasses on Antelope Island.
Roxanne Gray’s Tableau was created in collaboration with Jasmine Stack, Benjamin Swisher and Ashley Isenhour, who came together from different parts of the country to bring Gray’s colorful vision to life. The film is beautiful, polished in its aesthetics and seamless. Tableau utilizes precise editing to achieve a sense of play with timing, it’s the clear product of professional film know-how and equipment. Gray co-stars with a medley of fruit (and eggs) at a table with an orange tablecloth and a chair, in front of a bright teal background. At first the table is empty, and Gray sits there, clearly bored and frustrated, drumming her fingers and spinning out until the cornucopia of mystery fruits materializes. In five successive movements dedicated each to one type of round-ish food item, Gray dances among them, around and on the table and chair with increasing freedom and joy.
Like the work as a whole, each movement is titled in French –– we have la papaye, l’oeuf, le pomelo, le pamplemousse, et le cantaloupe. There’s mention of French New Wave influences thrown out in the discussion, but it’s not super clear whether there was further intention underlying the aesthetic face value of that choice, in much the same way, it’s both unclear and doesn’t matter much what all these melons are doing here.
A “study of play and micro-gestural movement in a contained space,” Tableau is child-like, tactile and imaginative, a mood and method of interacting with the world probably influenced by Gray’s life with her own young son, who appears in the last frames of the film. The music is bouncy and the movement is quirky –– Gray wiggles her fingers and eyebrows at us, employing the full arsenal of goofy faces of a parent with a young kid. She presses the fruits to her cheek and rolls them into each other and under her hands and off the table. Her clothes have a similar vibe to the bright whimsy of a cable sitcom’s idea of a schoolteacher –– cardigans and cutesy puffy sleeved dresses and skirts, then a polka-dotted jumpsuit, and she beams a sunny smile and sunnier attitude at us unflinchingly.
The whole thing has the breezy, blissful look and feel of both children’s television and extremely millennial ad copy, a Venn diagram that has a lot more overlap than I realized. Tableau hits every hallmark of the eye-pleasing design that can sell us anything and everything; high contrast colors that are both saturated and muted, rounded edges and rolling shapes, infinite smoothness complemented by pleasing mildly textures, and those gratuitous, mouth-watering, aesthetically-scattered fruits everywhere everywhere everywhere. In a world collapsing more and more towards primarily digital interfaces, our individual linguistic and visual tastes converge and flatten too. Everyone’s an influencer and everything’s an ad, and things begin to look the same everywhere you go. Playful, humble produce in the company of all that winking, soothing sleekness? It’s a kryptonite lure. It says “look at this abundance. This imperfect, carefree, casual mess, how dreamy. How sensual and earthy. How real.” As lovely as Tableau is on its own merits, while I’m watching it I keep seeing the mirage of this influencer puzzle company I’ve been getting ads for, and my dumb internet-broken brain just can’t accept it’s perfect polish isn’t trying to sell me something.
Ya-Ya Fairley zeroes in on a singular, concentrated ache in their close-up meditation on touch deprivation, Skin Hunger: A Performative Perspective on touch starvation during this pandemic. Only about two minutes long, it wastes nothing – inviting us into the too-familiar fever of Fairley’s unanswered desires with intensity and immediacy. We’re microdosing thirst.
Saturated light filters the spare apartment in red, blue, yellow, purple and orange. The pulsing carousel of colors circles Fairley’s lone form as they wrap their body around a wire dress form, tangle in a string of christmas lights, and roll around the space of their small apartment. Watching them press the softness of the body into these unresponsive inorganic things, I wonder about the temperatures. Is that rigid wire frame cold? Are those lights the kind that get hot when you leave them on for a long time? I wonder about the pressure too –– what’s going to the surface of the skin, what to muscle, what to the level where you become aware of your bones. The helpful yet unhelpful advice on haptic self-soothing techniques I encountered a lot of in the early pandemic days floats to the surface.
Like Duet for Non-Things, the recording is a casual and grainy affair. The use of the technology on hand again confers additional depth and intimacy that higher production values wouldn’t have. It sends me back into the feeling of filming solitary dances on my phone this year. Improvisations, attempts to “make a thing,” classes at the kitchen counter. And not just the dances, the selfies too – wfh outfits, record-keeping of creeping worry-lines and grey hairs and new tattoos, wearing a mask, crying in a mask, crying at work, smiling in nature, a lot of joint portraits with my dog, a screen capture of a zoom with my grandma, my own hands holding things, thirst traps I never sent, thirst traps I did send, photos I took just for myself, to remember I’m here and I have a body. Documentation of the subject available, documentation of desire without an outlet. It brings to mind questions raised by my and Fairley’s mutual friend Emmett Wilson last April – how do you deal with the numbness of not just being thirsty but parched? How useful is the documentation and exchange of digitized hotness stripped of its in-person parallels? What does it mean to be feeling yourself when you are the only one who can feel yourself? Holy shit why do I cease to exist in the physical realm when I can’t hug my friends?? I'm definitely paraphrasing.
I also noted while watching, that this was the only Only The Lonely performance representing someone who is actually, alone. I very much enjoyed the new collaborations between real-life partners who brought their disparate creative practices together, and friends who found inventive ways to collaborate from afar, but this one struck a nerve for me in this specific way. Of course, we’re all lonely, we’re all craving the touch of our former lives, from friends, from far-away family, from strangers. But still the differences in the effects of social distancing over the last year between those living with a partner, with family, roommates, pets, with no one, those who had a ‘safe bubble’ within which to date or see loved ones, the people who were left without a safe bubble, those who never felt safe at their in-person job, and those who had someone and then suddenly didn’t – are massive. Like a lot of people, I belonged to different categories at different times. There are wide gulfs between them. To be clear, I don’t know the matrices of social connection in Ya-Ya the person’s irl life, and it wasn’t a requirement for Only the Lonely that performances respond to artists’ pandemic experiences at all (although most did), but I found it noteworthy that this performance dealt directly with what it means to be alone and feel lonely during this time, to work creatively in isolation, and to desire connection with more than objects and be denied it fully.
In reflecting on how and why I am especially drawn to this piece, I am cognizant of the fact that it’s not my experience, actually. We are all together in feeling starved, but Fairley makes a point in their artist statement to recognize and center their identity –– this is an inexorably personal representation of their lived experience in their “Black Trans Dancing Body,” as the title reminds us. That site is the provenance of this hunger, the specific appetite of their perspective enveloping mine in its abstraction, through the pinpoint lens of those two minutes. These converging intersections of universality, specificity, and the snarled dynamics of power and truth in both naming and not naming the distinctions in hand – all bring back to mind a piece I’ve chewed over and over in the last few years since it was published in Bomb Magazine in 2018 – Miguel Gutierrez’ fantastic Does Abstraction Belong to White People? I’ve tried (and obviously failed) to keep these reviews brief – so just please, please go read that and then get back to me. I’d love to chat about it all, and hear how you feel.
Emily Snow lives in Salt Lake City. She is a dancer, writer, artist, musician, she just wants to hang out and make things together.
Only the Lonely, evening three
I live streamed Only the Lonely, not really knowing what to expect, but feeling pleasantly surprised by two thoughtful and exquisitely performed pieces. This evening was the third and final part of a performance series featuring artists who had created virtual works.
Evening three opened with an excerpt from Ashley Anderson’s dear old familiar, restaged on the Great Salt Lake and performed by Alex Barbier and Samuel Hanson. The excerpt was simultaneously simple and nuanced; natural and mechanical. I heard an oceanic or wind-like noise as Barbier and Hanson stood side-by-side facing away from the camera and the wind played with Barbier’s yellow floral dress. After several beats, the two began to move calmly and in unison. Without much auditory stimulation, and with the natural landscapes shot in the excerpt, the piece conveyed a sense of ease. Although Barbier and Hanson moved effortlessly, they used many arm gestures and often remained upright, which added a contrasting sense of automation.
After Hanson briefly introduced Nora Price’s piece, small mal, her collaboration with Koty Lopez followed as the main event. The piece opened with several shots of Price playing various instruments and singing ethereally. Price’s lower body began performing on a makeshift miniature stage with red curtains. The casual indoor setting and theatrical props combined with Price’s wondrous voice and soft movements reminded me of a child’s imaginative passtime, filling a room with creativity and purpose.
The camera then cut to Price sitting in front of her laptop and listening to a female-sounding voice providing breathing cues. Bizarre and distorted sound effects accompanied this voice and projected an anxiety reminiscent of days spent inside during quarantine. As Price followed the cues and stared down at the computer screen impatiently, I felt myself holding my breath with her. Finally Price picked up a tiny harmonica, and the piece transitioned into a wild ride in which Price blew into the instrument and allowed her increased breathing pace to inform the speed and tension of her movements. One spectator dubbed this part as “genius” in the comments, and I had to agree. The musical and physical manifestations of familiar feelings captivated me.
In the section that followed, Price accepted the voice’s tantalizing request to “just shake it all out.” She had donned a black fringe skirt and the slow-motion shaking that ensued felt lengthy and unvaried but allowed me the time to process what I had seen thus far. In the final moments of small mal, Price had taken another one of the voice’s requests to heart and had literally become “a part of the floor.” This was yet another brilliant moment, as Price twisted the gentle commands of a virtual instructor into a sense of entrapment.
Price’s movements throughout looked reactive and organic. This improvisational quality served Price’s work well and created relatability during a time when many of us feel as though we are simply existing and reacting to the greater events around us. She isolated various parts of her body in these strings of movements, yet her entire being was deeply and fully engaged in its own world. Even her eyes danced.
Although Price’s dancing was intriguing in and of itself, what stuck with me were the concepts behind her creative process. Time and time again, I felt myself thinking, “she’s releasing the emotions and thoughts I’ve often felt over the past year.” Watching Price perform was a thought-provoking experience.
Sofia Sant’Anna-Skites was born and raised in Chicago, but has been living in Salt Lake City for the past four years. She will be graduating from the University of Utah in the fall with a BFA in modern dance and a BA in English. Sofia is passionate about writing, artmaking, learning, teaching, and embracing outdoor experiences in the Salt Lake area and beyond.