The audience gathers in the wings of Kingsbury Hall for What Have We Lost?, presented by Punto de Inflexión as part of the UtahPresents Stage Door Series, February 12–14, 2026. With our tickets, we were handed emergency blankets. We were told we will be instructed when to use them. The performers, smiling, arrive from an elevator and take their places on a small platform. They instruct us, ventriloquist-style, on how we will navigate the space through their guidance.
Walking into the theater, the audience enters an installation with the stage. Emergency blankets drape and hang throughout, transforming the space into something both precarious and luminous. Stephanie, the choreographer and performer, is already present and reading. You can't quite hear her. Her face is layered in safety masks, from a gas mask to an N95, which she slowly removes. There is a curtain of streamers that divides the stage from the audience pit. The dancers move behind it, obscuring their dance without fully concealing it. They then move to the center, where projections fall across their bodies, and in one of the rare moments of stillness and darkness that allow us to arrive. Then the performers, in a stunning image, tug on the emergency blankets like a rope, pulling and sharing the weight, navigating together.
Next is a series of vignettes: a puppet show about microplastics, a sermon that opens like a meditation and arrives at consumerism, and dancers doing calisthenics while reading accounts of atrocities aloud. The satire is sharp and doesn’t soften what lies beneath. Migration, climate change, violence, and the accumulation of what the world is doing to itself.
The design is gorgeous throughout. Emergency blankets, Peter's visual world, the evocative layered soundscape, the costumes with their dystopian minimalism, all of it creates an atmosphere you genuinely want to inhabit, even as it delivers things you don't want to hear. The performers move with exceptional physical strength, spine undulation, asymmetry, and virtuosic leaps and feats. The body here does not collapse or yield in the face of what is being named. It rather pushes through.
Photo by Peter Hay
Later in the work, our emergency blankets are taken and spread across the floor. Then a church descends, constructed from emergency blankets, around both audience and performers. It is one of the most stunning images in the piece, simultaneously transcendent and claustrophobic, and carries a residue of sadness because of what the material implies.
A thread of the spiritual runs throughout the work, from the sermon to the church to the blankets themselves, but its meaning is ambiguous. You are never quite sure whether you are being invited into something sacred or asked to examine why you might be.
Towards the end, a video is projected of images from wars, the Holocaust, and acts of violence, as the dancers continue to move. I found it hard to look directly at the screen, not from shock but from something closer to numbness, similar to the feeling of reading too much news at once. And yet the performers are not numb. They are ferociously present.
What Have We Lost? is both the title and a question that runs throughout the work. The piece addresses loss on multiple levels, from environmental loss to the loss of life and homes. The emergency blanket, so central to the work, carries this as an object given to those fleeing, those who have lost everything. But the blankets also shimmer and catch light. This contradiction is at the heart of the work, which holds both the horrific and the gorgeous. For a work about loss, the work is very full. Dense, layered, fast, funny, fierce, beautiful. The vignettes pile up. The dancers push through with extraordinary force. Is this velocity an argument, a way of meeting the scale of what is being addressed? Or is it that stillness, in the face of all this loss, is simply too much to bear?
Photo by Peter Hay
Mitsu Salmon is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Salt Lake City, working across performance, sound, and visual installation. Her practice explores translation across media, culture, and personal narrative. Her writing has appeared in Dance Chronicle and loveDANCEmore, and she received the Dance Chronicle Book Review Award. She has self-published artist books including Resonates, Traces, Orchid, and Feathered Tides. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from NYU. She has presented work at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center. Her work in Utah has been supported by the Utah Performing Arts Fellowship and grants from Salt Lake City.
Halie Bahr is the Editor of loveDANCEmore. For inquiries please message halie@lovedancemore.org
What Have We Lost? by Punto de Inflexión
Concept and Creation: Stephanie García and Peter Hay Movement Artists and Co-creators: Leslie Jara, Fausto Rivera, Kellie St. Pierre, Stephanie García Installations and Sculptures: Peter Hay Sound Design: Manuel Estrella Chi Costume Design: Al Mendoza Lighting Design: William Peterson Video Work: Collin Bradford and Stephanie García Stage Manager: Samijo Kougioulis, VAMP Productions Presented by UtahPresents, with support from the Guggenheim Fellowship, loveDANCEmore, and Salt Lake City Arts Council
Photo by Peter Hay