Ririe-Woodbury: Elizabeth, the dance

Choreographer Ann Carlson has a longstanding relationship with Ririe-Woodbury, originally studying modern dance under company co-founders Shirley Ririe and Joan Woodbury at the University of Utah in the 1970s. While there, Carlson also studied under the late Elizabeth Hayes, who brought the dance major to fruition at the U in 1953. Since Carlson began her choreographic career in the 80s, Ririe-Woodbury has added a couple of her works to their repertoire: “50 Years” (1996), most recently reprised in 2016, and now a world premiere for the company’s spring season at the Rose Wagner, “Elizabeth, the dance.”

I’ve only seen these two dances by Carlson, but even without the context of her entire body of work, I feel as though I know her voice - so singular is her style of piecing together vocalized text, a never-ending stream of new ideas, and movement that often seems to stem from a natural physicality.

“Elizabeth, the dance” truly delighted me, and so it’s almost a struggle to pin down the why and the how.

“Elizabeth” is like a collage by a well-known artist that you might convince yourself you could or would make: so many different components and references that you can clearly identify throughout, yet, strung together in a masterfully unique arc, the effect is truly producible only by that artist.

I use “arc” loosely here, because there was not one obvious narrative throughout. “Elizabeth” chronicled individual experiences, in real time, of each performer in reaction to a spectrum of challenges, prompts, and experiences. Sometimes autobiographical, sometimes abstract, the dance constantly glanced across a soaring range of emotions and qualities. Carlson’s structure laid each performer bare for us, while simultaneously allowing them to exist as a collective unit.

Multiple layers of whimsy and diversion were interwoven throughout, beginning with the dancers’ costumes. The base was a black skirt and leotard combo, the same for both the three men and three women. The skirt was then tied into pants, thrown over the head, tied up into a toga, and more. A tutu, tiara, and clown costumes were also donned at various points.

The set by Torry Bend added another layer of visual interest. Oversized, stackable foam blocks formed a wall that the dancers then disassembled, reassembled, pushed around, threw at each other, and launched themselves into over the course of the dance.

The array of visual elements never felt overdone to me; if anything, the costume and set changes always felt natural, like unearthing and assuming new roles from a dress-up chest in the attic. The changes re-directed the dance in unexpected and surprising ways each time, and I found myself wondering when the dancers had the chance to stock the next costumes or props behind the always-moving wall.

Throughout, images were suggested to me and then affirmed by some signifier soon after. This made the dance feel deliberate and well-crafted - an aware dance, that was able to anticipate and acknowledge its impact at any given time. This was achieved in tandem with the sound score - live, onstage accompaniment by multidisciplinary musician Matthew McMurray. He used quite a few recordings by The Beatles, which often connected to the images on stage.

Dancers in formation planted their hands on the ground, scurrying around with their feet while their black skirts swooped over them. I thought they looked just like a flock of birds descending upon a field. Immediately after, McMurray introduced The Beatles’ “Blackbird” into the mix. It was a simple connection, but one that gave me goosebumps.

“Lady Madonna” (“...see how they run..”) accompanied the performers running frenziedly throughout the space, in varying, cartoonish ways. “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (”...gather ‘round, all you clowns...”) was slowed down and warped by McMurray as the dancers donned clown accoutrements and slumped along the foam wall in a sad yet mostly comical procession.

It’s difficult to talk about the dancing in "Elizabeth" as a whole because so many puzzling and amusing things happened.

Mary Lyn Graves had a solo for which she appeared en pointe, leaping spritely from side to side, and bourrée-ing yearningly. She then began crashing into performers, which caused her to practice a melodramatic gasp-and-fall on loop, until she reached the perfect cadence of gasp and fell for a final time.

Bashaun Williams had a moving solo, beginning with a skillful basketball dribble, that featured a recording of him telling a story, concluding with “...angels exist, bro.” It was funny to hear him deliver that sentence, but the story and solo were both touching and thoughtful.

Melissa Younker, Yebel Gallegos, and Alexandra Bradshaw, their skirts fashioned into draped togas, took turns balancing upon a single foam block quoting and describing an inspirational, though unnamed, woman. Posing and gesticulating, they appeared like three muses or the ancient Greek chorus.

Bashaun and Daniel Mont-Eton strode onstage holding three white balloons each, while McMurray’s sound became a down-and-dirty, bass-heavy track. The mysterious orbs and the visceral, vibrating music made Daniel and Bashaun seem so cool and powerful.

There were a lot of these moments for me: captivating visuals that also seemed to vibrate with something deeper. Maybe you could pinpoint what that deeper element was, or maybe not. But I loved them both on their own and as a part of the larger accumulation of many working images.

Ultimately the dance ended, as they do, but for me it could have gone on into the night (never mind “too much of a good thing”). Carlson seemed to anticipate this with her false ending. We clapped, but the dancers returned to the blocks and began a rather meditative section.

Then a popcorn machine appeared. The smell of butter wafted over the theater, and suddenly the dancers descended upon us, crying out like concession hawkers, “Popcorn! Popcorn for everyone!” A free-for-all ensued: Dancers aimed kernels into audience members’ mouths, everyone munched from their personal bags, and the dance seamlessly melted into a rambunctious post-show gathering of performers, family, and friends.

Popcorn free-for-all following "Elizabeth". Carlson appears to the right of the frame, wearing all black, glasses, and holding a bag of popcorn. Photo by Amy Falls.

And it was truly magical; we had made it to the end and were duly rewarded.

Carlson remembered her dancers in crafting such a human work, with so many moments for each to shine. She remembered her mentors and the past through the era-traveling patchwork she has created with “Elizabeth, the dance.” Finally, she remembered us, the watchers, without whom the dance would exist only for the do-ers.

Writer's note: Congratulations are in order for company dancer Alexandra, on a fantastic final performance with Ririe-Woodbury. Salt Lake City will miss her dearly, both onstage and off!

Amy Falls has been loveDANCEmore’s program coordinator since 2014, transitioning Mudson from its original home at the Masonic Temple to more recent venues such as the Marmalade Library. She can also be seen dancing in projects with Municipal Ballet Co.

Ririe-Woodbury: Winter Season

Ririe-Woodbury recently performed its Winter Season at the Capitol Theatre, just a few blocks from the Rose Wagner (the Rose is RW’s rehearsal residence and where they most often perform). The evening included four separate works that dually complemented and contrasted one another, all curated like a well-balanced meal, including vintage and contemporary portions as well as environmental and social side dishes.

The company typically performs the work of the late choreographer Alwin Nikolais around this time of year. However, Winter Season did not include a Nikolais piece; alternately, “Physalia”, choreographed specifically for the company by Alison Chase and Moses Pendleton (who together created Pilobolus Dance Theater) in 1977, was reconstructed as this season’s playful, postmodernist dance.

The work was a delightful float through oceanic ecosystems. The Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish, also known by its scientific name Physalia physalis, and other sea organisms were all embodied with sustained, acrobatic movement by the dancers dressed in speckled, spandex bodysuits to clearly create unified shapes with one another.

Guest dancer Ching-I Chang Bigelow had a darker solo in which she was sprawled on the ground, belly down, her whole body precisely flapping and slapping like a fish out of water.  Mary Lyn Graves was separated from the group with a crouched, sticky foot solo. The piece was dated with the projection of various still images of deep ocean life that weren’t necessary, as the dancers already evoked  those images so fluidly.

“You and the Space Between” was choreographed by Miguel Azcue of the Swedish company Memory Wax. The piece began strikingly with sound, curtain, then lights, revealing Alexandra Bradshaw and Bashaun Williams center stage. They performed a mirrored duet, and were joined by the rest of the company paired off in duets, all moving one another’s body parts in a disjointed way as if they weren’t used to touching one another. Then, the dancers descended to the ground where they were captured live on camera from above and projected onto the cyclorama.

They moved through scenarios playfully, jumping from one horizontally-moving body/platform to a higher one, play-fighting, swinging from each other’s legs, and generally appearing to be in a video game. Eventually, everyone but Graves rose to standing, leaving her alone amongst the tops of heads on the video projection. This eye-level-to-bird’s-eye split was a compelling way to reveal two perspectives, literally and metaphorically, but after many minutes the comparison became belabored.

“Super WE” was created in collaboration between Tzveta Kassabova and Raja Feather Kelly in 2013, making this performance the Salt Lake City premiere of the work. On Saturday night, Yebel Gallegos and Graves took the stage. They rapidly executed phrase-work in circles, bobbing their heads while bent over, and trying to hold hands while also smiling at each other. The duet was fast and friendly with a frantic edge supported by Kelly’s original sound score: birds tweeting joined sporadically by a repeated “ha-ha-ha-ha” á la Laurie Anderson’s song “O Superman”. The dancers themselves sat down and began chanting “ha-ha-ha-ha”, effectively commandeering the soundtrack by making it themselves.

Graves and Gallegos had a litheness like that of the dance’s choreographers and their unison movement emphasized physical rituals - locomotion, holding hands, pointing, sitting in a chair – that the majority of humans do: sometimes robotically, sometimes with abandon, sometimes with gusto, always amidst personal dialogues, and creating meaning beyond the action itself.

I would like to take this opportunity to honor that this season is Bradshaw’s last performing with Ririe-Woodbury. The inclusion of many University of Utah dancers in director Daniel Charon’s “Snowmelt” prodded me to imagine a future member of the company, perhaps even one of the students on stage, and how they might fit into the current community of RW dancers. Bradshaw’s strong, elegant presence will surely be missed, though it is an exciting time for the company to continue to re-create itself.

“Snowmelt” concluded the evening starkly, but without very much explicit commentary on the subject of snowmelt itself due to global warming. The projections accompanying the piece depicted pieces of glacier falling into water, wind turbines, snow literally melting, a log on fire, the sun through orange haze, and bird’s-eye views of a freeway system. Sometimes the image would flip upside-down. The images were all very sharp and similar in compositional quality to the “natural” scenes of Utah displayed on giant screens in the new 111 Main building in downtown SLC. Both are highly produced and curated to demonstrate some kind of institutional acknowledgement of the natural world juxtaposed with the industrialized world. Charon’s piece did seem to acknowledge the interrelatedness of the two worlds, but only with the projections themselves which dominated the performance. “Snowmelt” was danced with rigor and physical acuity, but lacked moments of stillness to punctuate the movement or connect it to the projected images. I am interested in experiencing this highly kinetic piece without projections blatantly telling the story instead.

Winter Season was a cohesive yet eclectic evening of dance. We were plunged undersea, then swept up to the ceiling, pressed into reality of rhythm, and finally, confronted with a taste of our nature and nature itself.

Emma Wilson is a graduate of the University of Utah and a regular contributor to loveDANCEmore. She frequently jams with Porridge for Goldilocks and was a choreographer for Red Lake at the Salt Lake Fringe Festival this past summer.

BRACE at Art 270

Alex Bradshaw and Brad Beakes began by holding hands.  

They slowly but confidently adapted their grip. As their fingers looped and laced, the two dancers created a visible and kinesthetic bond. As dancing separated them, the pull they created in that first moment worked like gravity, connecting the two throughout their collaborative duet, BRACE.

For one night only Art 270 was home to BRACE. The gallery offered a deep channel for the highly physical movement of the two dancers and a view of Eleanor Cox and Jon Yerby who adapted music by Arvo Pärt for classical guitar and cello. But there was also information in the distant periphery. As the grounded movement unfolded, there were the pedestrians, trains, cars, and the noise of a summer night. External information was obscured by window panels but still served as a counterpoint to choreographed movement and sound. There was such an amplified intimacy between the two dancers and the depth of live music that the fleeting action outside placed the material in a sculptural sense of relief.

With a run time close to 15 minutes, the apparent objective to explore physical strength as a buoy and source of connection was met and exceeded. But the brief duet also lends itself toward commentary on the show as part of a larger landscape of Salt Lake dance. The two dancers have a somewhat special platform because of their relationship with Ririe-Woodbury (Bradshaw is still a company member, Beakes departed after this season) and BRACE works in part because of the long-term physical connection of its two choreographers. If you dance together every day, in wide-ranging repertory, distilling how you might make something is readily at the surface. Knowing how to partner, seeing movement possibility, having trust -- it’s all more readily at the surface.  Further, the audience was primarily fellow dance-makers, performers and Ririe-Woodbury patrons who were each prepared with knowledge about the capacity of these artists and ready to give their best energy toward the labor of love that BRACE has become (an injury delayed the original premiere and now it also serves as a farewell for Brad who will join the Limon company this fall).

Some of these benefits are hard to come by for local peers as it’s difficult to find time to move together daily outside of a traditional company model. But the payoff for this work was so clear that it poses questions for me about whether longer-term process could become a priority beyond some of the things peer artists more frequently consider in contemporary contexts (video reels, performance hashtags, fleeting funding streams).

Although BRACE had access to some of the benefits named above, Beakes and Bradshaw also share the same struggle of needing to build new work from the ground up. They, alongside all of Salt Lake’s independent makers, are part of an ongoing search for venues, temporary use of technical equipment, and funding to support a rehearsal process and performance. For independent artists, it’s like beginning again with each new work not only creatively but administratively. BRACE problem solves deftly by having a willingness to abandon the expectation of evening length material, deal with informality and, also, play upon the desire for a performance to be, above other things, a mode of social interaction.

Ashley Anderson directs loveDANCEmore programs as part of her nonprofit, ashley anderson dances. This review is co-published on 15 BYTES where she serves as the dance editor.