Moonstone of Memory was performed on May 25th, at 7:30 and 9 pm, at Atelier Mill. Billed as an experience of intimate live performance, mingling, and a dance party, the evening was directed by Tara McArthur in collaboration with her co-performers, and attended by a small but attentive and, I believe, ultimately enchanted crowd.
The setting of the show at Atelier Mill became nearly as large a character in our experience of the night as the performances themselves. Upon entering, we traveled through a tunnel of metallic silver streamers, past a lobby of low-slung seating and black and white photography, at the back of a long, dark tunnel of cluttered artists’ warehouses. In the barely marked corner of a nondescript office building tucked behind a drive-through, off a quiet street below Capitol Hill, lies the small, spare, and lovely light-filled room that functions as Atelier Mill’s performance space. We arrived here for the 7:30 showing just as the light in the valley began to soften towards evening. Stepping into the room, chapel-like with its crumbling old whitewashed brick, dangling wires and high-ceiling, flooded with dappled light and the green of spring trees waving through tall arched windows, my partner and I gasped with a little twinge of envy. It is a beautiful space for making art in. Soft lights inside large hanging globe lanterns tinged the air with refractions of glowing blue.
Images by Ryan Ross.
The next immediately noticeable and visually delighting surprise was the presence of the show’s two musicians, Nora Price and Chaz Prymek, somewhat inexplicably stranded aloft with all their instruments and gear on the tiny square of a ten foot platform upstage right. Once the performance began, McArthur led dancers Molly Heller, Efren Corado Garcia, and Andrew Merrell through a winding series of quartets, duets, solos, and trios on the ground floor, while Price and Prymek performed the live score from their perch above, the bending and warping net of sound falling gently over the dancers below. This clever use of space served to highlight both performance modalities individually as well as their interaction, and created an expansive, shifting draw of focus along that vertical line.
The overall patterns of movement and choreography, in the group sections and in the first duet between McArthur and Merrell in particular, transmitted well of the idea of memory, with dancers drifting through space and pushing up against the solid reality of each other, alternately sluggish, tender, or racing. The dancers liberally used the architecture of the room in their choreography, running into the walls, climbing up and down the stairs and onto the windowsills, and once even abruptly disappearing into the strange platform’s closet, to my surprise and delight. All wore short-sleeve button-down shirts in greens, blues, florals, and stripes, plus plaid trousers, blue cloud tie-dye jeans, and summer linen shorts. Everything was chaotically patterned, but together achieved a kind of muted and tonal coherence.
One particularly mesmerizing image occurred during the duet when Merrell gently scooped McArthur from her seat on the windowsill into a slowly rotating lift, and she arrived at a perfectly horizontal plank overhead by pushing off the wall with her feet and legs as one might do underwater from the wall of a pool, to dive back into another lap. Heller’s solo reflected her signature style, full of surprising and delicate jumps and twitches of the face and body. Price accompanied Heller by following her physical ticks with ethereal gasping vocals run through a telephone microphone that produces a shadowy, disembodied distortion. Following Heller and Price, Garcia (who had been hiding in the closet) emerged with two wooden bowls filled with water, placing them near the feet of the first audience row. During his solo, Garcia periodically returned to each bowl and dipped his fingers in, bringing them up to the temples and down the chest in a washing away or a blessing. McArthur’s final solo formed the crescendo of the piece with a peak of agitated gestural repetition.
At the end of the half-hour performance, the dancer group coalesced together again. They performed the strange rituals of removing McArthur’s outer shirt layer and spraying her down with water, before eventually reaching a final tableau — Heller facing away from the audience and holding a light machine that created a glowing oval of rosy light on the white wall, by now turned deep gray and blue by the sinking sun outside. Flanked by Merrell and Garcia, with McArthur slightly behind and off to the side, all four gazed up at their artificial moon.
After the show, a rickety ladder appeared to allow the musicians down and the cast mingled about with us, receiving copious praise from all. Drinks were provided out in the hallway. We left before the dance party, and, I have to admit, I think the added effect from the diaphanous play of light and shadow as the sun set after the earlier show was secretly the better deal.
Atelier Mill is a relatively newly activated venue in the Salt Lake arts scene, although the studio appears to have been in use by its lucky tenants for some time. Cultivating an aura of cool, winking towards in-the-know exclusivity definitely seems to be important here, even while community is also carefully cultivated. A flurry of vague and heavily curated posts began online at the start of this year, followed by a series of buzzy, ambient-heavy shows highlighting both local and eclectic touring musicians. Most of these shows have been curated by the also-new project “Yardwork Presents,” with which Prymek is also involved. A little bit of diligent online digging led me to identify Ryan Tanner, a local photographer whose work was presented at the only other non-music-centric Atelier Mill show to date, and Matthew Baird as two of the tenants of the space and producers of the Atelier series along with Prymek and others. Moonstone of Memory (not directly curated by Yardwork) was the first foray into dance performance for the series. The next show, titled Cake Face and set for June 15, is a visual art show and vinyl set, presumably with a dance party included.
Emily Snow has written about dance and art in Salt Lake City for loveDANCEmore since 2016. Her writing has also appeared in 15Bytes. She currently works for Salt Lake City on issues related to public space activation, and is pursuing a graduate degree in City & Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah.