Deseret Experimental Opera: Life Relegated

Desert Experimental Opera is full of enthusiasm and ambition. Their new show Life Relegated, at an empty space (formerly Urban Outfitters) in The Gateway Mall, brings together several bands and an army of local dancers. It’s a bit like a talent show, in the best sense. Things unfold under the auspices of a plot that feels intentionally loose - each band is “dressed” as one of Utah’s national parks, who, personified, are recently out of work and facing down the “Invisible Hand” of the market, as voiced by a Stephen Hawking-esque computer voice.

Zion National Park explores its religious identity, Canyonlands submits to advertising, and Bryce Canyon sells out to a pharmaceutical company for better health insurance. The ballads of these anthropomorphized landscapes are sometimes clever, but the writing never feels like more than an excuse for the gathering. The whole experience is familiar if you’re from Utah. A place that’s still nominally a theocracy can elicit a kind of vague solidarity among those who fancy themselves outsiders.

The best thing about this show is the chance to see so many local performers all at once. Bands It Foot, It Ears and Durian Durian both shine musically. It’s encouraging to see a whole new generation of dancers who seem to be establishing themselves in Salt Lake for good. Emma Sargent partners with a panel of broken red-rock in a solo that recalls Eric Handman’s heroic soliloquies and also, somehow, the rune-like gestures of Daniel Nagrin. Emma Wilson, Meagan Bertelsen, and Amy Freitas, who we’ve recently lost to Moab, shine in some of the wilder moments when bodies fill the space. These three know how to listen and thus how to take the lead in the large group improvisations which make the rock and roll in this rock opera visual as well as aural.

That things never quite coalesce is hardly a problem - although I do wonder what some of these artists might really have to say about the politics of wilderness. We do have a bizarre relationship to the natural beauty in the southern part of our state. That this production doesn’t have much more to say about it than the craft beer bottles that celebrate hoodoos and arches is perhaps intentional. But I look forward to some of these artists making a deeper foray into some of the thornier questions.

Deseret Experimental Opera’s Life Relegated continues through Sunday, May 19, at The Gateway Mall.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

Dat Nguyen: Will the Sheep Come to be Cleaned?

First, there was lip-syncing to a Christina Aguilera song. Then the first dancer skated on stage, her gushing snarl followed on its heels by a riotous chorus of five others, all smizing in provocative black underthings and gyrating madly. The slinky, goofy burlesque of this brief scene wasn’t anything like what followed it, or much of anything after that. But throwing a few hints and conjuring the wild and weird spectacle of the kingdom of pop culture built on the joy found in watching people pretend to sing was a pretty good place to begin Dat Nguyen’s Will the Sheep Come to be Cleaned? The new work, presented at Sugar Space Arts Warehouse, was a raucously fragmentary and finely tuned pinball game of emotional complexity and spectacle.

With an approach based on the chopping, blending, obfuscation, and scrupulous arrangement and rearrangement of visual collages, Nguyen ricocheted between nearly a dozen wildly diverse and splintered stories, both masterfully and delightfully. Citing his own feverishly overstuffed brain intersecting with anxiety, depression, and life in a culture that jerks us from one disorienting and performatively manipulative spectacle to another at lightning speeds, Nguyen explained that his work was meant to be a multi-dimensional experience and deeply personal reflection of his multi-layered self. These refractions eschewed narrative but were richly infused with distinctly-felt character and setting, transmitted to the audience through dance but also through music, words, monologues, photography, sculpted visuals, and technology.

Following the flash of the overture, the show pivoted to a monologue by Emma Sargent, explaining a time she danced for a very “Jesus-y” company. While she told us how many times a day they prayed and about her clashes with the director over Gaga, the others roamed about, rotating through slow-drifting weight-sharing exercises. With deft comedic timing, her voice cut out at key moments. This culminated in a bit that had the audience rolling in their seats in which she mimed a tirade given by her director, the silence punctuated only by an intermittent “...Gaga…..Gaga….Ohad Naharin...Gaga…” as the dancers in the background exploded, flailing in mocking mimicry.

From there we bounced to a third segment, and one of my favorites – a duet between Nguyen and Nora Lang. I’d seen a working version of this section at Mudson earlier in the fall which I loved; it was even more breathlessly moving to watch it here. This movement focused on a more physical energy than previous sections, with a kinesthetic intimacy developing between their two bodies in swift and unending motion. Paired with sounds of rain and splashing, lapping waves layered under the circling carousel of a waltz as Nguyen and Lang moved in sync. Their bodies became cresting and crashing waves that turned back again into bodies as they came up against each other, fluid and spilling over the edges of themselves. The choreography was aerobic and sweeping yet riddled with small clever delights.

Interrupting this couple, Emma Wilson appeared carrying a large roll of what looked like shiny silver wrapping paper. The light shifted to cool blue as they took over the space and began speaking while rolling out the paper across the length of the stage, going through a halting cyclical reasoning about “purpose in life” that didn’t seem to get them where they wanted to go. The water couple did the sheep shuffle down the silver path – wait, sorry… let me back up and explain.

All the different expressions of Will the Sheep Come to be Cleaned? were abstract and unconnected, without an overarching narrative. But they did form what felt like a story, packaged neatly together by layered and excellent transitions, recurrent patterns, and of course, the sheep. Afterwards, during a Q & A, Nguyen explained how he borrowed from a moment in an earlier work to create the title expressly for a grant application. From there he applied his process of collage and brought ideas and emotions to the studio to explore and improvise upon. Nguyen noted that in creating his work, the integrity of its personal meaning was most important to him, as well as the process with his dancers. But he also touched upon (both in the Q & A and in press material, including an interview with Salt Lake City Weekly) finding a way to thread his many ideas together and creating an engaging experience for an audience, and how that is... well, kind of the point of sharing it with people, and the more interesting artistic challenge.

Nguyen was successful in not compromising the integrity of his clouded, shifting creation, which was explicitly designed to avoid straightforward articulation. And he found a way to select the arrangement of his collage and add subtle motifs to impose a loose conceptual through-line for the purposes of securing time and space to create work and appeasing an audience. It was incredibly satisfying and exciting to watch this done so masterfully and, as a very jumbled-up artist myself, I will probably carry it around with me for a long time.

Which bring us back to the sheep. Throughout the show, one of the devices used to pull it together involved the dancers bending over to grab their ankles and doing a little hoof-like scuffle around in a flock. A sheep shuffle. It looked as silly as it sounds and was so simple that it shouldn’t have worked. But it was so funny and perfectly effective at tying the far-flung emotional spectrum of the show together.

So, the sheep shuffled off, and the light plunged to a deep blue. The vocal track of a drill sergeant came on, or maybe it was an overzealous fitness bootcamp instructor, and Wilson performed a few casual feats of superhuman strength and agility. Rolling, bending, beating, and twisting their body, they propelled it in every direction with a force and control that sparked both a viscera-deep emotional as well as blood-racing somatic reaction. The dance was punctuated by their grin, at times equally sheepish and wolfish. They ended the solo by rolling themselves up in the wrapping paper to rest, a shining silver lump.  

Each part of Will the Sheep Come to be Cleaned? was meaningful and densely layered. It’s hard to give a short summation of what was important, because it all felt important. And at this point there was still a huge range of things to come: a girl wearing a pink sweater decorated with tiny sheep who read from her cell phone a technical description of how and why and to what standard sheep are to be cleaned for slaughter; the Emma sheep, who lost their footing and spiraled into violent Gaga-esque spasms; a pair that danced a series of slow, stilted gestures to the melodramatic power pop, disco frenzy of ABBA; a fake ending that fooled everyone; the return of the water couple, who swayed cheek to cheek before falling out of sync. There was a woman who instructed a fitness class by talking about pet ownership and death and her apathy towards her grandmother. The pinkest sheep waltzed back in and began a glassy-eyed, floating dance to “Ave Maria” while the lighting turned dramatically baroque and the others Army-crawled around her. She picked up the silver wrapping and vogued with it before tossing it over the group, who gathered together and moved out, writhing in the shadows.

A shoutout belongs here for the great lighting and technical direction by Peter Larsen. The Sugar Space stage is small and bare, with a seating arrangement close to the action - it can make or break a show depending on how its elements are handled. The design and direction throughout were excellent: no element, not even floor work, was lost and the complex production moved seamlessly.

The final scene was heralded by the chime of an echoing clock tower. The ringing turned into a mechanical tick-tock and the dancers fell into a walking pattern that somehow conveyed “nursery-rhyme-crossed-with-dystopian-slaughterhouse-conveyor-belt,” traversing right and left in pairs, intermittently breaking the pattern. A harsh mechanical scream stopped them and the light blinked to sickly chemical green. Headbanging forcibly before reversing the movement, they ended by throwing their heads back, necks exposed, in a slow, deep arch backwards. Returning upright, they coalesced and heaved Nora Lang onto their backs, her limbs and eyes splayed wildly. They dumped her, then she Army-crawled to the edge of the stage, throwing back a curtain as the clock struck again to reveal a galvanized silver tub. Pulling herself in and standing, she cast off her blouse and skirt to reveal the black lingerie that had been underneath since the beginning and began to pour water over herself, her face that of enraptured delight as the light faded.

Speaking with one of the dancers a few days later, they made a comment along the lines of, “It was so cool but also disorienting and odd to perform - we spent so long trying everything a million different ways.” Challenging the idea of narrative as we commonly conceive of it, maybe a collage is the closest way to tell the story of a life - everything all at once and following and preceding and repeating until it’s over, some of it real and raw while other parts get dried out or hidden. And that’s what it feels like, doesn’t it? Nothing makes sense when you’re in it.

Dat Nguyen’s Will the Sheep Come to be Cleaned? Photo by MotionVivid.

Emily Snow resides in Salt Lake City, where she performs regularly with Municipal Ballet Co. and with Durian Durian, an art band that combines post-punk music and contemporary dance.

Deseret Experimental Opera Company: 2047

The Bertelsen Manor was an uncommon venue for Deseret Experimental Opera Company’s 2047. Filled with childhood photos, piles of mail, and an old dog that wandered across the wood floors, the space was immediately intimate. I felt as if I was visiting a friend rather than attending a performance. Bolstered by this informal energy, the operas themselves were presented in the home’s attic ballroom.

Founded in 2013 by Logan Hone, Jesse Quebbeman-Turley, and Luke Swenson, Deseret Experimental Opera Company (DEXO) is an artistic collective that emphasizes cross-medium collaboration.  In this vein, 2047 asked four teams of a librettist, a composer, and a choreographer to create “micro-operas” addressing a simple but open-ended question: what will the Wasatch Front be like in thirty years?

“The Beekeeper’s Journal” followed a beekeeper and her apprentice as they attempted to manage a swarm of bees that commandeered a data center, putting both the beekeepers and the data retrievers at risk.  “Back Below” delved into the memories of Sarah and Rachel as they flew home to a Wasatch Front that no longer sees winter snow. A security system trapped an unhappy couple in “Open House.”  Finally, “The 55 brides of Brileen Young” profiled a group of polygamist brides as they prepared to travel east across the plains.

Written by Lara Candland and choreographed by Jasmine Stack, “The Beekeeper’s Journal” punctuated brief dialogues and audio of journal entries describing the mesmerizing beauty of a bee hive with movement accompanied by layered counting in various languages.  The beekeeper and her apprentice folded into mirrored positions, echoing and tessellating into each other with soft fluidity.  The warmth of these dance sequences contrasted the vacantly precise gestures employed by the beekeeper during the rest of the operetta.  Utilizing spacious silence, expressionless voices, and an ominous buzzing of hidden instruments, sound designer Jesse Quebbeman-Turley created an ajar landscape that was far from what I expected of an opera.  Ending with the suggestion that the bees had disturbingly embalmed the beekeeper and workers in sweet honey, I questioned what exactly the relationship was between the bees and the humans.

With an incisive libretto by Ilana Fogelson and crisp music by Hannah Johnson McLaughlin, “Back Below” focused on Sarah, as she returned to her family and home after twenty years away, and Rachel, as she attempted to introduce her daughter to a childhood home far away in place and memory.

Emma Sargent’s performance as Sarah stood out for its simplicity and sincerity.  As Sargent leaned her head against an imagined window, her movement and voice’s nuanced clarity was arresting. A foil to the quiet seriousness of Sargent, Nicholas Daulton’s Flight Attendant was delightful. Full of humor and charm, Daulton’s playful gestures poked fun at the familiar pre-flight speech. I actually laughed out loud as he signaled the chorus’s direction changes while in an one-legged airplane balance.  

Emma Wilson’s choreography for “Back Below” was witty and engaging.  Wilson deftly arranged the chorus with movements recognizably specific but heightened just enough to make them feel futuristic. They argued over seats and climbed across rows, wove their hands like blades of grass and jostled with the turbulence of the plane. Wilson tightly forged the movement to the story and music, creating a predicted future that felt darkly realistic despite its comedy.

At one point, a silver cord physicalized the connection between Rachel’s daughter and Sarah, tying one’s head to the other’s heart. Simple and poignant, the cord twisted to entangle the two, binding childhood creation of memory to adulthood’s remembering. I wondered how we will convey the memory of this place once it has changed beyond recognition. How do you tell a child about snow when they may never see it? As strange as that question sounds, “Back Below” reminded me that it is an unfortunately practical one to consider.

I couldn’t make up my mind about “Open House.” It felt like the collaborators couldn’t either. The franticly absurd energy of the two dancers portraying the rogue security system, their wonderfully silly bright red goggles, and a mid-action rave complete with LEDs, glow sticks, and light-up gloves primed me for a darkly surprising comedy. But the music and story took themselves very seriously. I wished “Open House” had gone more the direction of Carly Schaub’s quirky choreography; it was a missed opportunity.

Closing the nearly three hour evening, “The 55 brides of Brileen Young” opened with deep voices singing navigation directions from Provo, Utah to the Missouri site where the LDS Church places the Garden of Eden. Brides of all genders, dressed in a mixture of white skirts, silken nightgowns, and billowing sleepshirts marked with blue “b”’s, pantomimed preparing, searching, and gathering. Supported by an ominous drone recalling an electric generator, the brides seemed trapped in the repetitive forward motion of travel.

Luke Swenson’s allusive libretto related a series of vignettes in the life of the group of polygamist brides. One bride, a cappella, called the rest to prepare. Their answers were layered so thickly that individual voices were difficult to differentiate. One by one, the brides met each other mid-stage to matter of factly detail preparatory shopping and the quiet rigors of child rearing. Joined by a few audience members, the brides sang a rustic hymn and alluded to Mormon Sunday meetings, one of the many references throughout to LDS culture.  Introduced by the ward choir director, they called upon members, all with the last name Young, to “fulfill their destiny.”

Even when the brides were separated, they were distinctly united as if their lives had been entwined to the point of becoming indistinguishable. This feeling largely came from the dense compositions of Stuart Wheeler and from Meagan Bertelsen’s simple but skillful spatial arrangements. Voice and body were defined by those around them in a way that did not diminish individuals but instead honored dependency.

In a particularly absorbing moment, two bearded brides stood chest to chest, their bodies pushed into each other and sparely lit by a flashlight pressed between them. Lips nearly touching, they sang of an intimacy that softened edges and they echoed this intimacy in the boundary-blurring nearness of their bodies. The indefinable story coupled with the uncommon sight of such closeness captivated me. I relished the ability to wander through all possibilities of their relationship and did not want the tender moment to end.

As I wrote this review, I found myself talking through the show much more than usual, only able to process the performance through rambling conversation. Because only theme and medium loosely tied the four operas, 2047 did not lend itself to a neat concluding impression. Some moments made me sit up straighter and some didn’t. However, that was the draw: it was an evening formed around wondering and striving rather than arriving.

Mary Lyn Graves, a native of Tulsa, OK, studied dance at the University of Oklahoma. She currently dances with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company.