Home Run

The things I miss most about the theater are the requirements. I have enormous respect for the fourth wall not just because I routinely decline participation opportunities, but because it is a mandate to observe and a notice of import. In this new world, there is the fifth wall of my computer. This fifth wall is where all the things are: the legislative website where I am tracking unique abuses to trans people by our state government, the fourteen Canvas pages open for me and children, the playbill, the endless stream of texts, the sticky note about the Valentine’s Day parties on Zoom I’ve yet to plan as the room mother, “Class 6” from Brenda Daniels that I meant to do at 9 am.

All these things pull me away from what I like to do most – sit in the dark and quietly watch. 

Winter’s Light by Daniel Charon does its best to bring me into the dance. Rather than staging a majestic scene (as much screendance does) the videography reveals the body and patterning. It makes undercutting feet and elbow/wrist/hand sequencing more sensory; it shows how satisfying those things are when you get to do them yourself. The dance is like the best parts of a good class that you wish you could do together. If I wasn’t a dancer, I think the falling and recovering would still be more or less recognizable as beautiful. 

Photo by Daniel Charon.

Because my fifth wall comes with the expectation of being able to fast forward, I lift up my hand to the mouse when a gestural phrase begins midway. My impulse might be a worthy critique or it might cement my belief that part of the pleasure of viewing a dance is the requirement to do so. 

Next I’m watching Woes, the durational installation by Megan McCarthy and Dominica Greene which has paint reminiscent of Shen Wei’s Connect Transfer. Accidentally, I swipe the desktop and I’m kicked off the streaming platform. I’m sent a new link (nearly immediately from RW’s own fifth wall) but I miss Don’t Chew With Your Mouth Open. Please send me your own review. 

Still from Wash.

Next is Wash, an excerpt of a film choreographed by Joan Woodbury in the seventies. I have seen some of this footage before and I love it still. I have always thought these earlier collaborative projects from Utah’s modern dance scene are much zanier than today’s fringe works, in part because they take themselves less seriously. Claudia Sisemore once notably filmed Utah dancers coming out of a sewer and this scene is similar in tone. What would it be like to run through a carwash fifty years ago? What it would be like to do modern dance with traffic superimposed on your artificially pink body? Everything is inexplicably pink and orange. Everything is slow. It’s very Nikolais in that humans are forms as much as people. Maybe that’s problematic but it’s also sublime. A face becomes a T-Rex. You understand how Pilobolus became what they are. You wonder where Martha Clarke is now. 

I’m distracted because someone in the chat named TalkativeSelf says “omg wash is so good.” More unfolds, the credits of the film visibly shake. 

Martha Myers was known to say “if you want to show difference, use unison,” and Again by Bashaun Williams and Fausto Rivera does this. Their symmetry shows what I know about Bashaun and will miss watching live as he leaves RW — clarity of motion, depth without noticeable striving, and a central place from where the dancing happens. I can see Fausto performs with a different sense of weight and without the same aplomb. And that’s okay. These are two friends dancing. Fausto is settling, Bashaun is shedding. The dance ends in a hug that’s felt, even with the limitations of my device.

Fausto Rivera (front) and Bashaun Williams (behind). Courtesy of Wonderstone Films.

Full View is the last dance on the bill, by Molly Heller. It’s colorful and stylized — dancers in a pale green set (chair, blanket, phone, picture frame, potted plant) with an amethyst cloud hanging above. It looks like a modern dance taking place in the Wing (on my fifth wall, I google what will happen to co-working spaces after the pandemic?).

Many of the idioms in Full View have been present in other Heartland Collective projects. I think the exaggerated facial gestures, pronating, straining, and repetitive tics are meant to be the contemporary version of Wash: an absurdity that is familiar yet hard to perfectly place. Yet, as my sister has been known to say about current concert dance: “why are they impersonating disabled people? Why are people laughing?” 

I do think that ataxic movement has a unique feeling to a trained dancer and thus has gained visibility in concert dance nationwide. However, in our culture, recognizable contemporary dancers like Maddie Ziegler are taken to task for playing roles including autistic artists. With that context, I’m unsure why concert dance has become not only exempt from but lauded for co-opting some of the common movements of disabled bodies for visual pleasure. 

Perhaps my sentiment here is strong because in a non-pandemic world I have the pleasure of watching young adults with intellectual disabilities and movement disorders perform through my work as a teaching artist. One of my classes also made a dance with a cloud. In ours, the cloud rose taller and taller. In Full View the cloud turns from purple to white and sinks toward Florian Alberge whose hands gesture around his heart. After the sweeping solos and duets from varied directions, it felt like it was coming to rest in his lap. 

Ashley Anderson is the founder and director of loveDANCEmore and Ashley Anderson Dances.

Rire-Woodbury: Traces

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s Traces includes a sharp, stylish duet by company artistic director Daniel Charon as a prelude and Ann Carlson’s evening-length “Elizabeth, the dance,” originally created for the company in 2017. My pet word is almost always “effective” when I critically appreciate and evaluate a production. But, regarding Carlson’s astounding “Elizabeth,” I find that the words sending me to the thesaurus are related to ‘“strength” -  strong choices, strong chemistry, and an overarching strong sense of deliberate purpose.

The focal point of the opening tableau in “Elizabeth, the dance” is a modular wall of dense foam blocks, each around two and a half feet square, that are stacked in rows of five or six. The company of six sits contemplating the blank, imposing structure. They proceed to launch individual full-body assaults on the wall, egged on by off-the-cuff verbal appraisal from their cohort. The wall gives way with a truly jarring crash and its constituent blocks are claimed, scattered, and repurposed by the dancers with intense motivation. This sequence presents a literal foundation, and also its figurative analogue. The theme is structure: obstruction, destruction, construction. These incredibly versatile blocks are later counterposed with light white balloons. Archetypal simplicity belies complexity of craft in “Elizabeth, the dance”; a textured collage of speech, movement, and sound proliferates within this elemental framework. 

Carlson drew directly from the lives and experiences of the dancers in the creation of this work, and the dancers embody it beautifully. Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company is thoughtfully peopled with distinctly virtuoso individuals who, together, have an incredible working chemistry. Their ensemble unison in silence was especially impressive. Some singular moments and images in “Elizabeth” stand out from the piece’s gestalt enactment of human endeavor: Melissa Younker is the first dancer to fully arrest the viewers’ attention, in a series of draping poses on a block pedestal with all the exaggerated static angularity and total living force of the classical statuary figures she invokes. A recording of Bashaun Williams telling a personal story is accompanied by William’s solo movement, which, though adept and sharp, left room to focus on the utterly compelling cadence and content of the narration. The dancers emerge and re-emerge from behind the wall in accumulating states of clown get-up, starkly breaking the aesthetic monochrome, and enact a furtive pants-tugging, crotch-rubbing, shiftily ambiguous probing of erogenous bits that hits the perfect note of discomfort and grotesquerie.

(From left to right) Bashaun Williams, Dominica Greene, Brian Nelson, and Melissa Younker of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Ann Carlson’s “Elizabeth, the dance.” Photo by Stuart Ruckman.

Other moments of note deal more explicitly with the overarching theme of dance history and precedent and its patent impact on the lives of dancers. Clad in pointe shoes and tutu, Megan McCarthy executes bravura balletic movement, only to break against human impediments and collapse dramatically to the floor. The director stops the scene to redo the fall again and again, which McCarthy accomplishes not only with wit and intensity but also the blithe, performative deference demanded of a dancer receiving vague, disparaging rehearsal notes. In another vignette, newest company member Dominica Greene speaks directly to the problematic framing of historical legacy. Greene and two other dancers ascend and descend a block, draping their long black costumes in pan-Hellenistic toga fashion and striking the corresponding languid poses. They respond warily at first to unvoiced questions about unnamed forebear Isadora Duncan. The series culminates in Greene stating that this historical figure was a racist, that she prefers personally to look to the many women of color who innovated and originated modern dance, and, in an admission of confliction, acknowledges Duncan’s contribution to the field with the certainty that Greene would have been excluded from her work. In “Elizabeth,” the treatment of modern dance as subject never feels like an in-joke. Rather, it is explicit and integral, driving conflict and inquiry.

Watching “Elizabeth, the dance” reminded me both of reading Italo Calvino’s lectures on lightness and weight and of trying feverishly to stay awake through the hippo, crocodile, and ostrich ballet in Disney’s Fantasia. It made me consider the difference between intention and objective. We are often called on to appreciate and acknowledge the intention or internal process of a performance. But it is refreshing and exciting to be swept along with unremitting craft and purpose, with the sense that each artist is driven by a strong objective in every moment, and on a path of deliberate choices. The path here terminated in an on-stage popcorn party, so thoughtfully scaffolded and respectful of boundaries that I participated in it comfortably and gladly.

Ann Carlson has long-standing connections with the University of Utah and the founders of Ririe-Woodbury and has recently presented work for UtahPresents and the inaugural Dance West Fest. I fervently hope she will continue to create here in our community.

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s Traces continues through September 28, with a family matinee and full-length evening performance, at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center.

(From left to right) Dominica Greene, Brian Nelson, and Melissa Younker of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Ann Carlson’s “Elizabeth, the dance.” Photo by Stuart Ruckman.

Nora Price is a Milwaukee native living and working in Salt Lake City. She can be seen performing with Durian Durian, an art band that combines post-punk music and contemporary dance.

UtahPresents: Ann Carlson's Doggie Hamlet

Go see Doggie Hamlet. It’s a rare event, and one that exemplifies what dance has to offer our species. Last night, I drove down Provo Canyon, from a conference I was attending in Midway, to the Salt Lake County Equestrian Park. Just to watch this dance. It reminded me: viewing dance – the rarified act of looking at other bodies and identifying with them – is an irreplaceable way of knowing. 

Those incredible mountains I’d just driven through lay there on their sides, bathing in the sun. The lawn was eerily verdant and flat. We sat on bleachers – like you do at a high school football game – staring at an arbitrary rectangle of grass. Dominica Greene, who you may know from Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, climbed over a fence and a haystack to traipse casually across the long, heroic diagonal. She was wearing what looked like a wedding dress made of snakes. We never saw her again, but she was followed by Imre Hunter-To, who might have been a teenaged ranch hand. He waved toward a faraway road, and moments later several dozen sheep came bounding toward us from the inaudible distance. Dogs, a shepherd or two, and more dancers followed. 

Doggie Hamlet, the brainchild of choreographer Ann Carlson, is hard to describe because the action unfolds at a glacial pace – and yet there‘s always more to look at than you can really take in. You make choices. I spent a lot of time looking at Eph Jensen’s son, the middle-aged caretaker of his father’s flock, who stood still at the far corner of the field, an imposing icon with his cowboy hat, bright white shirt, and cane. (The program notes tell us that the Jensens are the only sheep outfit in Utah that still trails their ewes home each fall via a dedicated right-of-way in Box Elder County.)

Geese and airplanes cross the sky. The six human performers (including Diane Cox, the “onstage” shepherd) comprise a weather-beaten family.

One of many tableaux: the dancers call out for the dogs with a helpless enthusiasm. Their cries and useless flailing-of-limbs make the dogs’ connection with Cox seem like the epitome of ancient human-animal competence. Another image: our heroes dress up in sheep-drag and perform a gruesome Vaudeville number for their uninterested ungulate co-stars. As the night unfolds, the sheep themselves react very slowly to the rising temperature of inexplicable human behavior. The dogs do what dogs do. They labor to make sense of the social predicament. 

Ryan Tacata dances an entrancing solo with real or fake sign language that puts me in mind of the work of Francisca Benitez. Maniacal human-patriarch Peter Schmitz (more King Lear than Hamlet) invites us to sing. The dancers – yes! – but there’s always something else to look at. It’s not anthropology or narrative that lets us understand these humans, it’s what they look like next to the other animals who also run, leap, and stare. Periodically, we even find ourselves to be indifferent to the human concerns on display. We become like the sheep and the empty blue sky. 

Doggie Hamlet asks a lot of the audience. When we are not being sheep, we must work. We must accommodate several different frames, up to and including the valley in which we live. We must look at animals and people in various states of pain and confusion. A logic emerges, far outside of what a story can tell us. We learn something by imagining ourselves as a part of that grimy – dare I say, primitive – pack of humans. We learn something else through our aestheticized empathy with the dog who gets stepped on by a ewe. Another insight comes from watching how the flock acts as one slow-moving mind, but still makes room for the odd leaping soloist. The sun sets on all of us. The mountains turn azure and pink and the grass is still unnaturally green. 

Doggie Hamlet continues Saturday, September 14, at 6 p.m. at the Salt Lake County Equestrian Park.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

Dance West Fest: Topography

topography n. the physical or natural features of an object or entity and their structural relationships

The inaugural Dance West Fest combined workshops hosted individually in the past by Repertory Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, and the University of Utah. The newly branded workshop culminated on Thursday night with Topography, an aptly titled program that featured a hybrid of dances in varying stages of completeness. The evening served as a preview, both of the upcoming local dance season as well as of work from outside the state, and provided an instructive side-by-side of pieces that would not share a program otherwise.

With no printed playbill, directors and choreographers personably introduced each dance and cast; the informality was a nice foil to an otherwise surprisingly polished presentation in the Rose Wagner black box, complete with lighting and (light) costumes. 

Doris Humphrey’s 1949 “Invention,” staged by Limón company alum and veteran repetiteur Nina Watt, opened the program with jubilation. RDT will perform this new acquisition in its coming season; here, it was danced with aplomb by seasoned company members Jaclyn Brown, Lauren Curley, and Tyler Orcutt. 

Difficult feats such as a series of tours en l’air, with bow-and-arrow arms, and suspended hinges to the ground appeared effortless, buoyed by the performers’ horizon-focused gaze. As Norman Lloyd’s piano score transitioned from effervescence to effort, so too, and seamlessly, did the relationships between dancers. Though “Invention” clocks in at just eleven well-paced minutes, “through form and music and shape and gesture, [Humphrey] creates a world." 

Lauren Curley and Tyler Orcutt of Repertory Dance Theatre in Doris Humphrey’s “Invention.” Photo by Tori Duhaime.

The fully-mined finality of an archival work was followed by an exploration of something brand new, as Ann Carlson introduced an onstage rehearsal featuring Ririe-Woodbury artistic director Daniel Charon. Carlson explained that, for her, the audience always completes a dance; this is evident in her 2017 work for Ririe-Woodbury, “Elizabeth, the dance,” which the company will re-stage this fall. 

Charon tap-danced to “Moses Supposes” from “Singin’ in the Rain” and Carlson admitted she knows nothing about tap as she mimicked his movements while calling out directions, her hands fluttering behind her like quaking aspen leaves. Her coaching interjections, which functioned both for Charon and for us, made the case that, even here, the audience remained her final ingredient. 

Molly Heller (left) and Arletta Anderson presenting the start of a new collaboration with Katie Faulkner. Photo by Tori Duhaime.

Bay Area choreographer Katie Faulkner presented a collaboration with Arletta Anderson and local artist Molly Heller. The three women live in different cities, and Faulkner introduced their piece, the beginning of an evening-length one (shown in front of an audience here for the first time), as an experiment in working across distance and time. 

Performed by Heller and Anderson, the duet focused on percussion (audible, prancing pony steps, body slaps, and half-intelligible, breathy muttering) to create an abstracted narrative verging on the humorous. Like a contemporary art rendering of two Stooges, Heller and Anderson’s foibles (literally) pushed off and built upon one another, the two garnering laughs as they raced in circles around the stage, one clearly imagining herself the triumphant winner. 

Rebecca Aneloski (foreground) performing in a piece created by Dante Brown during Dance West Fest. Photo by Tori Duhaime.

New York-based choreographer Dante Brown mined both poetry and personal life in his offering performed by four students of the workshop, which he introduced as a “text to movement experience.” For the most part, any clarity was derived from the poetry read aloud by Brown at the front of the stage. The dancers began by moving in a rather amorphous blob and Brown’s relationship to them, as well as his choice to wear feathered wings, was not abundantly clear, lending the selection the air of a classroom exploration (in fairness, it was created in just several hours over the course of the workshop). But a solo by Rebecca Aneloski colored the space between performers and text beautifully, providing both heft and purpose. 

Yin Yue, also based in New York, presented twice on the program; first, a duet performed with Grace Whitworth, who is rehearsal director for Yue’s YY Dance Company, and then, to close the program, an excerpt of a new commission for Ririe-Woodbury to premiere in April 2020. 

Yin Yue (left) and Grace Whitworth in Yue’s “The Time Followed.” Photo by Tori Duhaime.

Lights rose on “The Time Followed” (2019) on what appeared to be one figure - the soon-revealed duo of Yue and Whitworth continued the idea of a singular, eight-limbed body with responsive, intelligent, and close-quartered partnering. Each manipulated the other through challenging weight shares and elegant promenades, both remaining in simultaneous control throughout. The ending image had Yue and Whitworth facing each other, arms outstretched and hands slowly rising while moving closer together, like moths seeking the light.

The program-concluding excerpt of Yue’s Ririe-Woodbury commission gave an enticing glimpse of company newcomers Dominica Greene and Nicholas Jurica. Similarly task-oriented partnering once again emphasized movement itself as concept (if the chosen selection is any indication of the whole). The dancers of Ririe-Woodbury appeared freer to inject daring in their approach to Yue’s choreography, or perhaps their sense of abandon was a product of their bodies’ interpretation of a new language - either way, it was a rewarding expansion upon the previous, more carefully calculated, pas de deux. 

Dominica Greene and Brian Nelson (pictured in rehearsal attire) performing an excerpt of a new commission by Yin Yue for Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company. Photo by Tori Duhaime.

Amy Falls manages and edits all reviews found on loveDANCEmore.org. Please send press releases for upcoming shows, and inquiries about writing, to amy@lovedancemore.org.