I sat down for a conversation with Salt Lake City dance and interdisciplinary artists Mitsu Salmon and Kellie St. Pierre to discuss their upcoming performance through the RDT’s Link Series “Landscapes Within and Without”, a split-bill evening featuring both artists' work.

“Landscapes Within and Without” opens in Rose Wagner’s Leonna Black Box Theatre October 17-18, 2025. More information and tickets can be found here.

Halie Bahr: Mitsu, the first time I saw your work was Somatic Tracing in 2022 at UMOCA, and Kellie performed in the work. Over the years working together, how have your interests as artists developed individually, and what shared interests collided when working together?

Mitsu Salmon: My work, in terms of form, has been very interdisciplinary, working with text, voice, video, movement and the visual. When using these different forms, I think of them almost as different languages. My biggest influence in terms of movement is Butoh, which is a Japanese contemporary form. Everyone approaches Butoh differently, but I've been really drawn to how animals and plants and emotions and stories and ancestors inspire movement.

In terms of the content of the work, I often start with family history, particularly on my Mom's side who's Japanese. In solo work, it's more about my family stories and how it connects with me personally. With group work, it's a little bit more flexible or fluid. We started Somatic Tracing in 2022 about ideas of invisible Asian labor. So, the first collaboration Kellie and I did, I worked only with Asian-American dancers and we were looking at our own experiences, or our family's experiences, or historically, this idea of Asian invisible labor. It felt very collaborative. My great-grandfather was a botanist, so I have been creating work connected to plants. Also my family migrated from Japan, so I studied birds as related to migration. It was more loosely based upon family. But, it wasn't just my story, I was working with other performers and thinkers to develop the ideas.

Kellie St. Pierre: In a similar way, what inspires me are spaces that hold multiplicity. I'm always interested in collaborating with environment to create movement. That could be with or without set pieces, digital technology, or whatever it is that I've been engaging in lately. How is movement present beyond our bodies, and with our spaces? I have worked with Mitsu for three projects now, and I'm always so drawn to her work in activating non-conventional spaces.

Halie Bahr: How did you both meet, and when did you start working together?

Mitsu Salmon: We've known each other for about five years. When I was new to Utah I did a residency through UMOCA, and I was asking around about Asian-American performers. Jorge Rojas recommended Kellie. I went and saw her work, and was like “this is amazing! She's amazing!” We grabbed coffee and talked, and then I invited Kellie into our rehearsals. It all started through a mutual friend and artist.

Kellie St. Pierre: We quickly jumped into a process together for Somatic Tracing, and we quickly became friends through that process.

Mitsu Salmon: Returning to what you've mentioned, Kellie, about environment. None of these previous projects were in a theater. The first piece [Somatic Tracing, 2022] was in a museum and it had mobile paintings and objects. The second one [Plants Daydream of Trouble, 2023] was a roving piece at the International Peace Gardens. The last piece [Feathered Tides, 2025] was a roving piece at the Miller Bird Refuge where only ten audience members at a time could view the work and listened to sound through headphones.

All three projects are very much about interaction with site or objects. Hearing about your work, Kellie, I feel like you create these really big and often difficult but amazing objects to work with. You build the environment you interact with. Then you and the dancers have to tame, or stay wild, within that environment. I can see a clear through line in your work in both interaction with others and environment. It feels very central to your recent and past works.

Kellie St. Pierre: Thanks for saying that. I do like to build environments, and I love engaging in site-specific work. Mitsu, your work reveals spaces to their fullest. I love being guided and coached on how to activate a space that already exists too. In Mitsu’s work, she reveals an environment and then adds layers and richness. In a way that both adds to the environment that exists and also creates space for her voice and the voices of the others.

Regarding our upcoming split-bill in October, “Landscapes Within and Without”, there's a lot of crossover with our work in multimedia production. We’re using video projections and storytelling to consider our identities. Even though the pieces are quite different from each other, they also complement each other within the evening.

Previously, my work [See Me Closely] has been shown in academic settings at Utah Valley University, and I wanted to develop it further. Mitsu’s work has toured many different places, but hasn’t been shown in Salt Lake yet. We are seeing this as a premiere for the Salt Lake City community.

Mitsu Salmon: Yes, Kellie had presented this work at UVU, and I had opened this work in Chicago at Steppenwolf Theatre about a year ago. We had met up afterwards, and you showed me videos [of See Me Closely], and I was like “my goodness this is so gorgeous”, and I felt like not enough people from Salt Lake saw the work that you made. I really wanted to share with the community here.

There was already this desire to show these new works, but we realized there's also a lot of crossover with us working in multimedia and video projection. Kellie has these huge mobile screens that the performers are interacting with. The projections create this environment. My work [Desert Turtle] uses a lot of the landscape of Utah and the Mojave Desert in California as a huge, projected backdrop. When I presented Desert Turtle in Chicago, initially that was a way for me to bring the landscape here, what I've been exploring here in Utah, and tour it in all these different theaters.

I struggled to find a place to present [Desert Turtle] in Salt Lake City. In Chicago, there are these small little theaters. But, because of the way that it was developed at Steppenwolf Theatre, this big theater with lots of lights and a huge projection, it's taken me over a year to present in Salt Lake. Which says a lot to the kind of complexity of the performance art scene here.

Kellie St. Pierre: We knew we wanted to work with a theater that has the technical capacity to then bring the projections to life. The black box at the Rose felt like the best choice. In our planning, Mitsu brought up this great point that it is so hard as independent artists to actually present work in a theater if you're not already sponsored by a company. And it's harder in Salt Lake City. Mitsu took a year to figure out where and how to present this work. It's important to present in these larger spaces, and even harder to do so when not connected to a bigger entity or institution.

Halie Bahr: There are two things emerging in this conversation that are really interesting for me. Mitsu, you've been hinting at the environment, the desert landscape, literally becoming part of the work in Desert Turtle. Second, we are also discussing the practicality and difficulty of presenting work as independent artists in Salt Lake City. Can you both talk about your life as artists living and working in Salt Lake City and how this particular dance community has impacted your work for this production?

Mitsu Salmon: Before moving to Utah, I was living in Chicago. In Chicago, there’s a big community of independent artists making experimental work, it's even more than in New York in some ways because people do a lot of DIY work. It's a big community and I had a number of residencies in Chicago theaters making solo or duet work. The residency would give rehearsal for 20 hours a week and then after 3-4 months you present a work in their space. I had residencies at Links Hall, The Cultural Center…because I was given the resources I made a lot of solo work in theaters, and sometimes I toured those pieces in different spaces. When I came to Salt Lake, I realized quickly that it doesn't exist here. There's no such thing. In 2022, UMOCA had a painting residency and I have a painting practice, so I brought my performance into it.

However, in Salt Lake, there are grants to create work outside, interacting with the environment. Finding out what resources were here really changed the kind of work I made. For example, my recent work within the Miller Bird Refuge was looking at the birds of the Great Salt Lake, or this new work, Desert Turtle, uses the landscape of the desert to inform the work. So the landscape, in tandem with the history of Asian-American invisible labor and the transcontinental railroad, informs my work now. My recent work is connected to the landscape and history and personal mining of Utah and the desert.

In Salt Lake City, there are exciting things happening. It's much smaller, and it happens much slower. There's these spaces, like 801 Salon and loveDANCEmore, where there is independent work being shown, but they are small. There isn't a company that has a space where independent artists’ work gets programmed every weekend. There isn’t a place you can go to see a work that's gotten a lot of support to be developed. That doesn't exist here.

Halie Bahr: And that makes me dream more about the programming of loveDANCEmore. Rehearsal space and showing independent work is so difficult for artists in Salt Lake City. I wonder if there could be something to adopt from this independent artist model from midwestern cities that could really help the Salt Lake community flourish. It’s all a dream now, but I am curious.

Kellie St. Pierre: I also moved to Salt Lake City from somewhere else. I lived in LA and Chicago. I haven't been deeply a part of the LA scene for about five years now, but I agree with Mitsu in the ways that [smaller dance scenes] might be even more generative than the spaces of LA. My time in LA was specific because I was with the company [Diavalo | Architecture in Motion], and I was just starting to create my own work. We had a performance space, which made it easier to rehearse and present work, but when I was creating my own, I was usually traveling to that university and setting a piece. Instead of cultivating within LA.

After moving to Salt Lake City, I’ve been focusing more on my role as a choreographer. The Salt Lake dance community has supported a lot of my ideas. And, I am also inspired by the community itself. Similar to Mitsu discussing the DIY culture in Chicago, Salt Lake City has this very “can do!” attitude. Artists here love experimental work. They welcome the range of what is allowed to exist. There's such a punk culture here that likes to defy all of those boundaries. I love it, and I'm inspired by it. It has made me more bold, and has allowed me to believe in my own ideas more. I can just let my work live, take risks, and believe that it can happen here. My work doesn't have to be so buttoned up. I'm really inspired by the community here and it has shaped further who I am as an artist.

Halie Bahr: Before we close, I want to know just a little more about the process of creating both works that opened October 17th, Kellie your work See Me Closely and Mitsu, your work Desert Turtle.

Mitsu Salmon: So this process of this particular piece started during the pandemic in 2020. I got a residency through Rogers Art Loft, which is a residency space in Las Vegas. Since it was a pandemic, they awarded the residency but said “you can't come out here!” Instead, they financed housing for my research nearby. It was so important to the work that I travel geographically because the project began about my mother immigrating from Japan to Barstow, California in the Mojave. I wanted to make a video about that, and Rogers Art Loft supported me.

So, I went there with a friend from LA. We quarantined for a week, and she helped me video. So originally Desert Turtle started as a video work that was viewed online. Afterwards, I eventually developed an album out of it. Desert Turtle was a lot of research over time.

And then a friend and curator out of Chicago invited me to share some work at Steppenwolf Theatre. There wasn’t enough funding to bring the group I was working with at the time, but I thought of this particular video I made during the pandemic.

Originally, it was about my mother moving from Japan to the desert, when I was making through Roger Art Loft. Later when I further developed the work for Steppenwolf, I was four months postpartum. I just had a baby. The work then transformed and changed through that. Now I wanted to bring in the story of me becoming a mother in the desert. How becoming a mother has changed my relationship, both in how I see the desert, but also how I viewed my mother’s story.

When I presented it in Chicago, it became a solo dance piece, and then I toured it to different places. The work has changed in many ways since then, but many of the original parts are still there. I remember writing lines and singing while watching my baby. In one part, I was breast pumping, and thought “this is a sick beat”, and then I made up a song recording the beat of the breast pump. Desert Turtle was a multi-year project with large gaps in between. I get to revisit these ideas now, and feel how different they are, now that I'm a mother.

I always struggle with my work because it doesn't fit anywhere. I always feel a little self-conscious. I was in a performance art festival in Arkansas, and Desert Turtle wasn’t really performance-arty-enough. I’m singing too “in key”. Then I'll perform at a Butoh festival and think to myself, “There's too much contemporary dance in my work”. Now I'm performing it at RDT’s Link Series, and I think to myself “there's not enough contemporary dance in it now”.

Kellie St. Pierre: For me, See Me Closely started as a labor of love, guesting with Contemporary Dance Ensemble at Utah Valley University. I wanted the work to be multi-disciplinary, layered, and a challenge artistically for myself. Mobile set pieces, cinematography, editing, projection mapping, and choreography. I was able to pair up with UVU Broadcast Team for their cinematography, and I am grateful to the professionals in my artist community who offered support and helped bring my vision to life.

As a general narrative, the piece represents the challenge of living in the age of social media, where screens become windows of either separate or amplified narratives of “who we are”. Sometimes what is hiding behind the screen is a more raw version of ourselves, Sometimes people only view you in one way. And it's an interesting dilemma because we are both the creators, curating what our lives look like, and also the ones impacted most.

For me personally, See Me Closely, came from a deeper place when moving to Salt Lake City in 2020. I had just left a really rough part of my life in LA that completely transformed who I was. I was recovering for years, and had just gone through my seventh surgery. And then I entered into one of the most rigorous spaces, graduate school. I just had to move forward. And there was no connection to who I was while grieving the way that things were in my recovery.

In graduate school you expose your heart open. You expose all that you were protecting over the years. I felt like in graduate school there were a lot of people who could articulate who I was, but I felt like they were missing a lot that happened for me to get to that point. And so, See Me Closely came from this cry for me to say to people "Hold on, can you learn more about me before you decide who I am?" I was just kind of thrown around in my mind, I felt super displaced and super confused even on my own identity.

See Me Closely is this cry to use image and film as a way to get really viscerally close to a human body for the purpose of connection. It’s also about how the work resonates with the dancers involved, “If you could just look past the screen there's something there you're missing.” Social media is a form to equally connect and disconnect. We can hide behind its presence or live up to it.

I feel so grateful that Mitsu and I get to support each other, and I get to share a show with a beautiful friend.

Mitsu Salmon: Thank you, Kellie. I'm very excited to share this evening with you. I feel honored and humbled and look forward to sharing “Landscapes Within and Without” with the community.

“Landscapes Within and Without” opens in Rose Wagner’s Black Box Theatre October 17-18, 2025. More information and tickets can be found here.

Halie Bahr is the associate director and editor of loveDANCEmore. She continues to present work and perform all over the country, and is a professor of dance. In 2024, Halie was awarded the Performing Arts Fellowship through the Utah Division of Arts & Museums. www.haliebahr.org

Mitsu Salmon creates visual and performing works that fuse multiple disciplines. Creating across differing media, translating from one medium to another, is connected to the translation of cultures and languages. Her work draws on familial and personal narratives, then abstracts, expands, and contradicts them. Her current projects investigate familial histories, nature, imperialism, and archives.

Salmon received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and BFA from NYU. She has participated in artist residencies such as at Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan), Incheon Art Platform (Korea), Guildhall (NY), and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. She has presented work at places such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Chicago Cultural Center. She has received the Midwest Nexus Touring Grant, Chicago Dancemaker’s Lab Grant, Utah Performing Arts Fellowship, and grants from Salt Lake City.

Kellie St. Pierre is an interdisciplinary artist, engaged as a choreographer, performer, filmmaker, and educator. She creates dance experiences that highlight the kinesthetic and emotive interplay between movement, environment, technology, and objects. She crafts socially relevant works that invite dancers and audiences into tactile worlds, often integrating other collaborators. Her approach encourages risk-taking, awareness, and spontaneity while examining the balance between simplicity and complexity.

St. Pierre received her BFA from UC Irvine and MFA in Dance and Screendance from the U of U. She danced for Donald McKayle’s Etude Ensemble and spent five seasons touring with DIAVOLO | Architecture in Motion. Some of her choreographic commissions include Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, SALT Contemporary Dance & Ching Ching Wong, and several universities, including the U of Utah, UVU, and the UCO. She was awarded Pacific Monticello Emerging Choreographer through Regional Dance America and is currently a finalist for Palm Desert Choreography Festival. As a screendance artist, St. Pierre has been recognized for her films through Women in Dance Leadership Conference Los Angeles & Dance Film Festival in Yokohama, Japan, Cinedanza International Festival, For This Earth Screendance Festival, and Utah International Dance Film Festival. St. Pierre is currently the co-director of Contemporary Dance Ensemble at Utah Valley University and adjunct professor at the U.

Credits:

See Me Closely

Dancers: Lilly Barrington, McKayla Browning, Emma Crow, Ciera Erekson, Aubrey Fisher, Zachary Marshall, Heather Morley, Richelle Rindlisbacher, Emmanual Diaz Santos, Ashley Wilcox

Music: Josiah Pugmire

Set Design: Steve Goemaat

Cinematography: UVU Broadcasting

Special thank you to Monica Campbell and Melissa Younker

Desert Turtle

film in collaboration with Amelia Charter and music in collaboration with Kiku Hibino.

reviews

Mitsu Salmon and Kellie St. Pierre on “Landscapes Within and Without”