1520 Arts drew a large crowd to their in-the-round performance space at the Utah Arts Festival at Library Square. Their time was part demonstration and part workshop. First, Joshua “Text” Perkins, one of the founders of 1520 Arts, presented a brief history of hip hop culture with help from dancers and their DJ. Then, they invited audience members up to learn some of the moves and participate in a cypher (a circle where the dancers each go in one at a time). Perkins was a fantastic presenter and covered a lot of hip hop culture while keeping the energy really high. The b-boys and b-girls, Sam Heng, Katie Hall, Tonga Lavulo, and Ben Ukoh-eke, showed off top-rocking, footwork, power moves, and freezes while Perkins walked the audience through what all of these elements mean in breaking. After demonstrating this vocabulary, the dancers showed us a battle, which was the most exciting thing I saw at the Arts Festival. What was a quiet audience at the start got much louder as the dancing became more explosive.
Photo by Tori Meyer.
For their workshop, they invited audience members to the stage to try out breaking. Although Perkins was encouraging the adults to join in too, most of the takers were young kids. There were a lot of kids eager to get in the middle of a cypher and the dancers were really friendly and encouraging. This performance is one piece of 1520 Arts’s mission to introduce breaking and hip hop culture to wider audiences in Utah. Utah Arts Festival had a lot of areas and activities geared towards getting children involved with art. Especially since youth twelve and under get in free, the whole festival was very family friendly. During the workshop portion of 1520 Art’s performance, I felt a little odd as one of the only adults who wasn’t there to watch kids dance. However, 1520 Arts performed all four days of the festival, with a youth, adult, and open styles battle on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday respectively, so each of these events would likely draw in different crowds.
Earlier that day, I got to see Salt Lake Dance and Parkour, one of the festivals designated “Emerging Artists,” perform in the same space. Their presentation was also educational, starting by involving the audience in their warm-up and ending with inviting everyone to try some basic vaults and jumps on the stage. In the middle, they showed their work Sixes which blended parkour elements with modern dance composition sensibilities. It began very subtly different from their warm up, all four of them traveling in a circle, jumping over and over their wooden vault structures. The music faded underneath the quiet sound of their sneakers absorbing impact. The loudest sound was the rattle of their tallest wooden vaults when landed on. It made me wonder what they would do performing with more space to gather momentum or more solid structures like the series of concrete steps we were sitting on. Throughout, it felt casual and intentional: a dancer would take a break for some gatorade then set their sights on getting to the top of a concrete wall. Salt Lake Dance and Parkour was also performing for many families and by the end, the kids and a few adults were ready to try out what they had just seen. I’m excited about how excited all of the kids were to dance and I hope that 1520 Arts and Salt Lake Dance and Parkour have created some future dance lovers.
Tori Meyer is a performer, choreographer, and dance educator based in Salt Lake City. She received her Honors Bachelor of Fine Arts in Modern Dance from the University of Utah in 2021. Her choreographic work has been shown at loveDANCEmore’s Sunday Series, Deseret Experimental Opera, Queer Spectra Arts Festival, Damn These Heels Film Festival, Salty Showcase, Finch Lane Flash Projects, Salt Lake Unity Festival, and Red Butte Gardens.