Onstage Ogden: Dance Theatre of Harlem

This year marks Dance Theatre of Harlem’s fiftieth anniversary. The company was founded by the inimitable New York City Ballet principal dancer Arthur Mitchell alongside ballet teacher Karel Shook at the height of the civil rights movement, in 1969, shortly after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Mitchell cultivated his own dream of creating a platform for Black ballet dancers in the New York neighborhood of Harlem. That dream is still alive today, as seen in the affirming presence of a large company of people of color both excelling at and innovating within the Eurocentric art form of ballet, under the direction of those with a shared experience. This is not a white-run company that merely represents diversity in the form of a token person of color; Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) is both embodied and directed by a majority of people that may see themselves in each other. 

This performance reflected upon the company’s 50-year lifespan to date, and additionally memorialized the life of Arthur Mitchell, who passed away last September at the age of 84. The bereft dancers did not appear to let the passing of their fearless leader dim their dancing; rather, they performed innovative choreography with sincere confidence and beauty. 

Nothing compares to dancing in the processing of grief. I write this with the utmost respect for pillars of dance who have passed: I would rejoice (albeit with sadness) to experience only performances by those paying homage to the deceased for the rest of my life. It is so humbling to witness the transformation of complicated feelings into movement. In a way, I suppose most dances could be viewed through the lens of “The Body Keeps the Score”; the way in which bodies can remember teachers and ancestors whose bodies made and influenced them in a continuum of memory stored in bones. 

It was an honor and a pleasure to see DTH in Ogden, Utah, of all places. The show began with the most classical piece of the night, Orange, which featured costumes and lighting to match, and was choreographed by Stanton Welch, the Australian artistic director of Houston Ballet. Although the piece was very traditional, there were delightfully unexpected outgrowths, such as the swift wobbling of heads while dancers bourréed across the stage. Here, their heads, normally instructed to “float above the body” as if nothing was happening down below, mirrored the movement of the feet, that carried on in a more classical way. This combination seemed to caricaturize the very act of ballet, as if the dancers were really bobble-head ballerinas. The bobble-headedness, however, was filled out by intricate duets, including a kiss on the cheek from a male to a female dancer that yet again made me think that the piece was playfully highlighting tropes of ballet through the abstract premise of the color orange. 

The second piece, Change, channeled the past with the dancers - Lindsey Donnell, Daphne Lee, and Ingrid Silva -  “clothed in the legacy of their predecessors,” wearing leotards constructed as “a creative patchwork of tights worn by former dancers with Dance Theatre of Harlem.” The past was also channeled through the labyrinthine choreography by Dianne McIntyre, who was “inspired by women - Black, brown, and beige - who have refashioned the neighborhood, the country, the world, through their vision, courage, and endurance,” whom she calls “warriors for change.” The dancers moved beautifully together, running in place, dangling their arms out as if their bodies were crucified, crouching down and mapping out points on the ground, and dancing with grace through it all. Each dancer performed a solo with movement that was sometimes shared by the piece at large. The choreography featured a variety of styles, that were not just thrown in for the sake of contemporizing ballet; the styles referenced the women that the movement was inspired by with a depth of character and understanding. This piece had the reverence and gravity of a grand finale, which it could have been. 

This Bitter Earth was performed by Crystal Serrano and Choong Hoon Lee and featured a poignant mashup of Max Richter’s minimalist composition “On the Nature of Daylight” and Dinah Washington’s soulful rendition of the titular song. Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon‘s robotic duet read impressively, as though the dancers were actually programmed to dance together and with no one else. It was romantic in a sleek and silvery way. Lee often ducked under Serrano’s outstretched arm or leg, even mid-rond de jambe. It was only at the very end that the dancers crumpled into each other’s arms while Lee carried Serrano offstage, swiftly, before too much of their human nature was glimpsed. 

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa choreographed the grand finale, Balamouk, that truly was grand, if not a bit disjointed stylistically as well as compositionally. The large cast of eleven dancers magnified gestural movement, crossing arms over chests and flicking hands out to the side, jumping up and out in close proximity; I could have watched this tight grouping of people do these moves indefinitely. However, the dance proceeded to expand outward from the tight clump and oscillated from upbeat music and choreography to ominous music with dancing done amidst fog, then back to dancing exuberantly; then to a multi-minute sequence featuring one woman being lifted and pointing her finger out in front of her, that sequence culminating in a male dancer being pointed at by three female dancers. I was not sure what to make of this dance other than the stress I associate with “call-out culture,” as it went from a convivial tone in a group to a more accusatory mode of incisive, yet haphazard, pointing fingers. 

Each duet throughout the performance was juxtaposed in my mind with the famous pas de deux from George Balanchine’s Agon, which Arthur Mitchell famously performed with Diana Adams in 1957. The intensity of that duet, featuring a Black man and a white woman, was not unnoticed during a time when white supremacy was often enacted in the form of lynching and other more “grassroots” atrocities fueled by Jim Crow policies. I compare this past brutality to a slightly different yet still institutionalized form of white supremacy that exists today, where Jim Crow policies may be flagrantly masked as a war on drugs or terrorism or “cleaning up the streets,” and “grassroots” white supremacists are just as violent as those in the past, further emboldened by White House leadership. 

Mitchell stated that Agon was an exploration of “my skin color against hers,” and I would wager that it was also an act of extreme bravery on Mitchell’s part. The duet was performed just two years after Emmett Till was brutally murdered for having a forgettable interaction with a white woman, which was spun as a violation of how Black men were “supposed to” interact with white women. At the time, this kind of tragedy was not uncommon; parallels must also be drawn to how justice plays out, or doesn’t, today. 

It seems like it could be both culturally and personally healing for the dancers of DTH to perform duets as themselves, or as living beings, in addition to being representations of Black and white people in conflict. There is more to existence than that conflict, though, and these dancers seem to celebrate that fact in their practice. In his time, Arthur Mitchell was both the first African-American dancer in a major ballet company (New York City Ballet) as well as the first African-American principal dancer. His work, that not only made room for people of color in ballet but vindicated and innovated the art form, is continued by the current artists of Dance Theatre of Harlem. The company will continue to carry on, and will change, just as this program’s piece by that name did so powerfully. 

Emmett Wilson/Ew, the dancer is a body-based artist from Houston. They live in Salt Lake City, doing strange acts at drag shows, making and teaching dance for a variety of contexts, and working as a community garden coordinator. Their practice hinges upon vulnerability and resource-sharing to offer care and support to sustain community.

Alwin Nikolais through the ages: Ririe-Woodbury's Strata

The work of Alwin Nikolais presented in Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s Strata spanned three decades, but the exploratory nature of Nikolais’s work appears to transcend time. What was once progressive still feels to be so; while others have emulated areas which Nikolais pioneered, his work maintains its sense of existing on the edge, despite the ebb and flow of many dance trends.

This article seeks to place the works featured in Strata within their original contexts rather than presume new observations and, in doing so, seeks to reveal how Nikolais’s choreography, concepts, and staging hold up, or even accumulate layers, as they continue to be performed and discussed.

Nikolais’s “Tensile Involvement” premiered in 1955; to place it historically, this was both the same year Arthur Mitchell first joined the New York City Ballet, later to become the company’s first African American principal dancer, and the year the polio vaccine was approved by the FDA. Around the same time, Nikolais himself wrote the following in a piece for the New York Times:

“We speak of dance necessitating humanistic relationships and concern, but new semantic meanings of man and his relativity within our present historical strata are constantly being redefined. The tools of the dancer - motion, time, space, light, sound, shape and color - have greatly extended and altered in meaning during the last quarter-century.” (August 18, 1957)

Nikolais’s observation may be extended more broadly, but is certainly an apt description of his own work and intent, as embodied in “Tensile Involvement” (if not equally embodied throughout his repertory). In the piece, dancers cavort, energetically but purposefully, weaving paths back and forth across the stage with long, ribbon-like cords. The dancers’ relationships to their environs triumph here; their relation to each other is important and evident, but is perhaps only a byproduct of the primary task at hand.

Withstanding the test of multiple viewings, the premise of “Tensile Involvement” continues to feel refreshingly new; arguably, the same holds true for the test of the span of decades since the work’s premiere. Perhaps this is also to credit the bright performance quality brought out by the spirit of the dance and the inherent quality of Nikolais’s movement: energy radiating from the eyes down to the metatarsals, and, in this case, even still outward along the full length of the cords, from the floor all the way up into the fly-space.

“Gallery” premiered in 1978 as part of a two-week run at the Beacon Theater in New York; in the same year, the U.S. would launch the first global positioning satellite and Yvonne Rainer would perform her iconic “Trio A” for the camera. New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote the following after attending the opening night of “Gallery”:

“[The] metaphor of an ordinary fairground shooting gallery representing humanity is typical of Mr. Nikolais’s way with a message. Yet it comes as no surprise that he also seduces his public with the dazzle and wit of his technique… It is one of Mr. Nikolais’s strongest works, in which he has achieved a great deal of variety within self-imposed restrictions.” (April 20, 1978)

Nikolais’s success in fully exploring one idea, living within restrictions set in place by a specific world, was a recurring impression throughout Strata, but especially in “Gallery.” Harkening back to composition class, the idea of exploring one thought completely before moving on to the next is tantamount to choreography; a thorough exploration is akin to sweeping out all the nooks and crannies, unlikely to leave a viewer wanting.

“Gallery” is an embodiment of such thorough exploration, as it twists and turns through various iterations of similar themes. The dance’s dominant imagery consists of red and green targets, bobbing heads, DayGlo masks, and dancers serving as abstractions of goofy yet macabre caricatures. While far from appearing human, the mime-like performers still elicit human responses from the audience - laughter, shock, discomfort, surprise - in their odd renditions to an eerie sound score.  

At first, the cast of “Gallery” seems to be in control of the fairground shooting gallery they inhabit: popping their heads up and down, going in and out of view, swirling back and forth along the counter they are behind, doing the backstroke, eventually creating elaborate counterbalanced shapes on two stacks of tables in front of the counter. But by the end, all are compelled to return to the confined gallery space from whence they came, and are subjected to invisible projectiles that render the mask-like targets in front of their faces shattered. Were they ever in control? “Gallery” explores such a full range of possibilities within its parameters that it seems for a time that they are.  

1980 saw not only the premiere of Nikolais’s “Mechanical Organ” but also those of the Pac-Man game, Star Wars’ The Empire Strikes Back, and Salt Lake City’s very own Ballet West in New York City. Nearly a year after the debut of “Mechanical Organ” at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, Kisselgoff observed the following after a Nikolais Dance Theater performance at City Center:

“An ensemble precedes the best moment, a solo beautifully danced by Marcia Weadell-Esposito. Like a lean wildcat pacing in her cage, she darts and whirls, discovering her own shape and yet still alluding to the mannequin image, her own head lolling atop her neck...As a pure-dance piece, "The Mechanical Organ" is as good as its choreography. It does not seemingly aim for the philosophical resonance of "Gallery." (February 12, 1981)

Mary Lyn Graves, in the solo described above by Kisselgoff, is a highlight of Ririe-Woodbury’s staging of “Mechanical Organ.” Quick and crisp, elegant and elongated, Graves’ performance of the doll-like solo was a perfect balancing act of precise attack and languid release.

Throughout “Mechanical Organ,” specifics of choreography remain of greater interest than the dance’s conceptual arc. While a divergence in that regard from other pieces in Strata, there was still delight to be found in Juan Carlos Claudio and Bashaun Williams’ virtuosic duet, in which they leapt over and rolled under each other, and supported each other in hinges and other counterbalances, and in an all-male quintet that took place largely on the floor for a transition from male bravura to more meditative contortions.

“Mechanical Organ” featured a sound score composed and edited by Nikolais himself, who forged a new path, technologically speaking, in 1964, when his company commissioned the first commercial Moog synthesizer. Nikolais used a synth to create jarring, discordant, computer-y sound scores for decades of dances, including for all those featured in Strata (all the program’s scenic and lighting designs are also his work).

In 1985, the year Nikolais’s “Crucible” premiered in Durham, North Carolina at the American Dance Festival, many now-common technologies were in their infancies, including the Internet Domain Name System, the Nintendo home console, and Microsoft Windows. William Forsythe’s first collaboration with composer Thom Willems was in 1985, the year following Forsythe’s appointment as director of Ballett Frankfurt. Jennifer Dunning wrote about the opening night of “Crucible” at ADF for the NY Times:

“One cannot help feeling that Mr. Nikolais will continue to play with ''Crucible,'' which doesn't look quite settled in. For the piece is almost at odds with itself after its first stunning and amusing moments. ''Crucible'' begins with a play with mirrors...and the nudity is meant to be one more abstract element...As is often the case with stage nudity, the bodies do become abstract and asexual very quickly. But as ''Crucible'' now stands, there is little eloquence to this design with bodies beyond a play of shapes and patterns.” (June 16, 1985)

“Crucible” employs optical illusion to create its otherworldly choreography; a sloped mirror duplicates hands, arms, and legs that poke upward, first like flora, swaying and multicolored, then metamorphosing into fauna, pecking and chopping. The emphasis here is truly on form and limb, and the kaleidoscopic imagery is successful due to the abstraction of bodies, which enables the eye to see a whole rather than a sum of many.

However, as the dancers begin to reveal more of their bodies above the slanting mirror, the abstraction wavers. Though the original nude dance thongs are foregone here for more SLC-friendly nude unitards, the focus very quickly shifts to the human body as, transparently, a conglomeration of its parts; the audience audibly tittered and even whistled as the dancers turned (the illusion of) nude rear ends to face them.

Viewing “Crucible” now, much may have settled that Dunning felt was incomplete following the work’s premiere. And, rather than sharing Dunning’s skepticism at the success of bodily abstraction, this writer wondered what lay at the heart of the interplay, even conflict, witnessed in “Crucible,” between the abstracted body and the human body. Through barriers of costuming, lighting, distance, and concept, the dancers’ bodies still appeared as unrelentingly un-abstract to many in the audience. It is a testament, perhaps, to the power of the body to announce itself, no matter its additional trappings.

By their very natures, history (both dance and otherwise) and technology have barreled ahead since the premieres of “Tensile Involvement,” “Gallery,” “Mechanical Organ,” and “Crucible.” But Nikolais’s singular and inventive use of lighting, projection, sound, costuming, concept, and movement still elicits strong response. Among a relatively small canon of enduring choreographers, Alwin Nikolais has proven what is unique about a dance may remain so, and that new layers may even be acquired in a dance's lifetime. This writer fancies that is because of, rather than despite, not only continued performance of the work but continued conversation and criticism surrounding it.

Amy Falls manages loveDANCEmore’s cadre of writers and edits its online content. She works full-time in development at Ballet West and still occasionally puts her BFA in modern dance to use, performing with Municipal Ballet Co. and other independent projects in SLC.

OSBA presents Collage Dance Collective

The Ogden Symphony Ballet Association presented Collage Dance Collective, a decade-old company directed by Kevin Thomas that has, in their own words, “inspired the growth of ballet by showcasing a repertoire of relevant choreography and world-class dancers representative of our community.” Who is included in their community is perhaps hard to define, though one could carefully say that this company is challenging the Eurocentric elitism and lack of racial and economic diversity that has pervaded the art form for centuries. There have been many companies and individual artists that have pushed and continue to push who ballet is for, who can perform it, and whose stories it will tell: Alvin Ailey, Arthur Mitchell (Dance Theatre of Harlem), Alonzo King, Carlos Acosta, and Misty Copeland, to name only a select few.

Collage Dance Collective obviously takes its place among those who strive to usher ballet into an age of inclusivity, exposure, and diversity, and the executive director of OSBA, Emily Jayne Kunz, even encouraged us to read the bios in the program to notice “how far some of the performers have traveled to be with us.” This sentiment was further echoed when I overheard a fellow patron remark, “These dancers are not all trained in New York; that is where you usually come from if you ‘make it.’”

While I cringe to think of agreeing with that sentiment, I cannot entirely disagree, and even think back to my graduate studies when a New York-based performance artist came to the University of Utah and remarked, “All my friends thought I was falling off the face of the earth when I told them I was going to Utah.” Just as it brought me a level of satisfaction to have to drive forty miles from the bigger, “better” Salt Lake City to Ogden to see Collage Dance Collective, it also brought satisfaction to know that while the company was founded in New York, their home is in Memphis, and they are enriching that particular community with their outreach, virtuosic dancing, and quality programming.  

Ella Suite Ella opened the show with a triptych: a duet, a pared-down solo, and a culminating trio. The piece, choreographed by Arturo Fernandez, celebrated the life of Ella Fitzgerald and thus featured her music (with Joe Pass). Fernandez has worked as ballet master for Alonzo King LINES Ballet for the past 25 years, and there is a recognizable connection in approach and aesthetic between his work and King’s: partnering based in contemporary ballet, lines that hit, undulation and extension with equal attention and value, and a clarity and focus in compositional structure. This was a short piece and a great way to begin the evening: embodied, exact dancing to Fitzgerald crooning, “How could I know about love, I didn’t know about you...”  

The Rate in Which I Am, choreographed by Joshua Manculich, featured music by local artist and University of Utah faculty member Mike Wall (as well as Dustin O’Halloran) and was a choreographic highlight. The piece featured six dancers and an exploration of the spotlight, the overhead light revealing, concealing, and casting shadows. Just that morning, my three-year-old daughter had asked me, “Mommy, what comes first, the day or the night?” and the continuous play of light and dark left me wondering the same thing.

I was captivated by Manculich’s accessible yet refined sense of drama and tension, but I struggled to find footing in Nicolo Fonte’s Left Unsaid. This was the longest work of the evening and multiple sections were marked by the upstage curtain lifting gradually to reveal a white cyc. During one section, three women danced in the foreground while three men sat in chairs, fully clothed in black suits, watching the movement unfold. I tried to ignore swirling dialogues dissecting the power and implications of the male gaze and instead to appreciate the architecture of the space, the moving foreground cutting against stationary background, but I could not resist imagining an alternative version of this section: three women holding the space, watching, monitoring the movements of three partially dressed men.

Another section continued with a man and a woman and two chairs, initially set far apart on the diagonal. Throughout the duet, the chairs were moved together until the man and woman were reluctantly forced into proximity, their faces manipulated to confront one another as the ending image. True of other sections, the ending provided a clean resolution to what was previously established.

Left Unsaid was in many ways a multi-faceted theatrical work that perhaps deserves a second viewing to unwind theme, metaphor and image; regardless, I struggled to reconcile what was presented into a cohesive work. When the cyc was finally revealed, and then covered by a quick drop of the back curtain, it was like the boy who cried wolf; I failed to be convinced of the impact upon the wolf’s arrival.

The final two pieces, Lineage by Darrell Grand Moultrie and Wasteland by Christopher Huggins, were both large-cast numbers that showcased the technical virtuosity and absolute kinetic joy that Collage Dance Collective harnesses as an ensemble. At one point during Wasteland, I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin. The driving music, the ever-changing formations, and entrances and exits: it was spectacle in every positive interpretation of the word, and performed flawlessly. After a prolonged standing ovation, I began my drive back to Salt Lake, happy that I had been able to experience this company.

Ogden Symphony Ballet Association will next present Parsons Dance on March 3 at 7:30pm, at Weber State’s Val A. Browning Center for the Performing Arts.  

Erica Womack is a choreographer based in Salt Lake, and an adjunct faculty member at SLCC.