Repertory Dance Theatre: Emerge

This past weekend, Repertory Dance Theatre presented its fourth annual Emerge program, a collection of works choreographed by company dancers and staff. I appreciated that no unifying theme was forced on the show, so that each piece was free to be what it was.

The evening opened with “Indebted,” choreographed by RDT member Jaclyn Brown in collaboration with the performer, Angela Banchero-Kelleher. This understated piece featured gorgeous lighting and a regal yet simple feel.

“This Is What It Feels Like,” choreographed by company member Daniel Do and Mar Undag in collaboration with dancers Morgan Phillips and Nicole Smith, featured alternating solos and duets. The dancers moved with matching stylization, which was especially enjoyable to watch during a brief section of unison choreography. 

Choreographed by company member Lauren Curley in collaboration with performer Mikaela Papasodero, “Soliloquy” demonstrated impressive navigation of floorwork with a full long skirt, and lovely moments of uplifted posture and gaze.

I loved the flow of overlapping parts and the contrast of fast and slow movement in the group piece “Proto,” choreographed by RDT artistic associate Nicholas Cendese and dancers. Within the group, partnering between company members Megan O’Brien and Jonathan Kim stood out to me as feeling both natural and interesting, and I appreciated that one of their sequences together was performed twice within the work with different directional orientations each time.

“I… Me… We” was a delightful piece choreographed by company member Dan Higgins, who also performed spoken word live alongside the solo danced by Morgan Phillips. The vibe was generally silly, and the movement was floppy and weird in the best way – I imagine it would be fun to perform. Through eye contact and action-reaction pairs, there was a nice connection between dancer and speaker/choreographer, as if they were trying to figure something out together but not taking it too seriously and finding amusement in the idea that they weren’t really sure of whatever it was they were exploring.

“femme.” featured beautiful and well-rehearsed partnering between dancer/choreographers Ursula Perry (of RDT) and Laja Field. I interpreted the piece to be about female friendships until a friend pointed out that the title is a word that refers to an aesthetic presentation by a lesbian that fits into society’s typical conception of a feminine look.

After a brief intermission, we saw “Trick Mirror,” choreographed by RDT dancer and education associate Megan O’Brien in collaboration with the four dancers. The part of this work that I enjoyed most was the end, the dancers lip-syncing exaggeratedly to The Bee Gees while facing the audience at the front of the stage – I’m not sure what it had to do with the rest of the piece, but it made me smile.

“Trapped” (1974) by former RDT member Lynne Wimmer was well-performed by Tiana Lovett. I loved the small, sharp movements at the beginning, Lovett’s amazing leg extensions, the grand use of space, and how Lovett seemed to break out of her trap by the end of the piece.

Comparatively, “until you are no more,” by company dancer Jonathan Kim, was much less clear in its theme. For me, the most distinct and memorable part of this piece was a simple yet effective silhouette of purposeful walking, from the downstage to upstage at the beginning of the piece, and from upstage to downstage at the end.

The program ended with “The Hours,” directed and structured by Cendese with choreography and performance by twelve dance educators. This piece got exciting during a transition where three benches, which had been stationary for the first part, were creatively moved and interacted with – I would have loved to see this section extended with more choreographic exploration of this concept. Then the benches were placed in three rows and the dancers sat facing the audience like a congregation in church pews, and from there performed a very satisfying series of movement in canon.

Within the otherwise very professional presentation, I was distracted by the amount of backstage noise throughout, including multiple instances of doors closing, cast conversations, and, once, what sounded like keys being dropped. 

Overall, Emerge presented beautiful dancing alongside choreographic talent, coming together in a likeable show. I think it’s wonderful that RDT offers this opportunity for their dancers and staff to both create and share their creations. 

Kendall Fischer is the artistic director of Myriad Dance Company, and has enjoyed performing opportunities with Voodoo Productions, SBDance, Municipal Ballet Co., and La Rouge Entertainment, among others. Her choreography has been performed by Myriad, Municipal Ballet, and at Creator's Grid, and her dance film project “Breathing Sky” received the 2017 Alfred Lambourne Movement prize.

Dan Higgins: Speak

Dan Higgins’ new work Speak, which opened yesterday at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, looks like it might have been made for his employer, Repertory Dance Theatre (it was sponsored by RDT, as part of the company’s Link Series for independent choreographers). The seventy-minute dance, in its finer moments, brought to mind teenage memories of seeing that company. There was a pleasure in watching the eight dancers — four women and four men — swim through the project of being together on stage for more than an hour. 

At the outset, we heard a disembodied Higgins reminding us to silence our phones. Then he enjoined us to look over our left shoulder, to take stock of what we smelled, to revisit a recent significant decision we’ve taken in our own lives. Soon we were watching six black benches being rearranged on white marley floor. Eight dancers folded and unfolded, glided and slowly toppled, were careful and precise in the harmonics where they faced, how they followed a looping initiation from elbow to knee to fingertips, in and out of unison.

There was a spareness and a wakefulness in this first scene that I didn’t expect. The air was cut by a leggy, bouncy solo from Emma Eileen Hansen. A frontal assault of technical prowess changed hands a few times and eventually gave way to a tactical confrontation between the men and the women — a study in changing focus and walking on the beat. The benches lined up like chess pieces.

The lithe Mar Undag and Jaclyn Brown disappeared smoothly behind these black slats of wood — moments like this returned to the spirit of the first five minutes. Higgins sometimes got lost. He sometimes relied too heavily on the kind of music that stands in the background and tells you vaguely how to feel without saying much else. But he made a believable seventy-minute dance. There were no big questions, but I respected getting to see these eight talented dancers coexisting and, at times, rising to the occasion of play. 

Speak was at its best when it didn’t know where it was going. One section comes to mind where the conceit of a common struggle gave way to chaos. A meandering trumpet (the music for the piece was by Michael Wall) whirled through the air under a series of harried runs across the stage — six-second character studies from Brendan Rupp, Micah Burkhardt, Bailey Sill, Jonathan Kim, and Morgan Phillips. 

Higgins knows how to use stillness to effect. Sometimes, I wish he would lean into that more than other implements of the scholastic modern-dance toolbox. The ending: Higgins himself came out and picked up where his opening speech left off, recounting a vague fable about a boy bravely jumping over an infinite void. This was a little much, but I can forgive him. The fleet-footed romping of his cast was enough. 

Speak by Dan Higgins. Photo by Sharon Kain.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

Repertory Dance Theatre: Sounds Familiar

Repertory Dance Theatre’s Sounds Familiar began in a manner that was also familiar, the director striding through the closed curtain to deliver pre-show remarks. Immediately, though, this familiarity was playfully subverted. Artistic and executive director Linda C. Smith executed a perfect act of vaudeville opposite an airborne pest, through attempts to shoo, entice, capture, and eventually menace it with a baseball bat, to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.” It was on the nose, tongue in cheek, surprising, and, yes, brief enough to be both compact and impactful. The program continued in this fashion. 

A diverse dozen of local artists was called upon to choreograph short works to culturally prominent pieces of classical music. This seemingly simple premise was likely tricky to produce, involving a great deal of structure to support many discrete works, a conceptual scaffolding to hold them together, and a good deal of trust and investment in many artists to pull it off - which RDT did, and beautifully so. 

Each musical selection was one deeply embedded in current culture. When called on to consider such a selection explicitly, it is often to the tune of asserting value or declaiming knowledge. Sounds Familiar is a title that perfectly encapsulates this production’s opposite approach. Video interludes presented history and context, serving as transitions while dancers and stage were reset. With the benefit of educational content, and without judgment, the audience’s tacit recognition of a classical song could become the patent processing of new, affecting interpretations. This complex pairing of familiar and unexpected must have been challenging to produce on the front end. However, it was perfectly simple and rewarding to appreciate. 

Three reprising solos by Molly Heller, duets by Nicholas Cendese, Natosha Washington, and Luc Vanier, and a solo by Sharee Lane danced by Ursula Perry were instantly memorable. 

Heller’s pieces effectively utilized repetition and escalation on many levels. The solos were interspersed throughout the program, grounding what was otherwise successive and fast-paced. Each solo was set to the same Bach prelude (from Cello Suite No. 1). Each dancer occupied the same space while moving through graspable patterns of repetition into escalations of phrasing that then moved beyond our ability to track. Dancers Trung “Daniel” Do, Jaclyn Brown, and Jonathan Kim each inhabited this echoed approach wholly differently. The reflection of the internal structure of the music with its repeated themes and variations, and the play on the very notion of a prelude, was motivated and moving. I could watch an infinite iteration of dancers traversing that diagonal, to that suite, under Heller’s direction and never, ever tire of it.

Nicholas Cendese’s piece for Do and Kim, set to Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” was spare in staging and totally full in aesthetic sensibility. The two duetted with gorgeous synchronicity, established some iconic movements, and then used them as landmarks of recognition for departure into fiercely individual contemporary movement. The integration of contemporary social dance wasn’t imitative or exploitative. It was seamless and completely culturally legible and authentic, in flawless contrast to the music’s deeply imprinted piano rondo. I hope I forever associate those arpeggiated alternating motifs in A minor with these two incredible performers. It was like viewing a film in which you let yourself sit back, suspend disbelief, and simply enjoy the craft, and then leave the theater suspecting that you might’ve just enjoyed a piece of incisive social criticism.

Duets by Natosha Washington and Luc Vanier were each richer in staging and setting. Washington’s featured a tableau of archetypes: a statuesque woman in an impossibly long gown, obscuring a pedestal, with a man below; a bouquet of flowers; a chalk circle; and the darkly shining instrument of pianist Ricklen Nobis. Vanier’s set was Washington’s dystopian mirror, or foil: dancers enrobed in hazmat ponchos, trashed couches and a glitching television on squeaky casters, cyclorama projections of desolate environments, and a faint tinny musical recording. Both pieces explicitly treated challenging topics. Washington’s duet brought immediate gravity to the inherent romance of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Dancers Ursula Perry and Tyler Orcutt exhibited a mastery of contained fluidity that established the weight of connection, and their artistic maturity allowed it to arrive safely and responsibly at a depiction of intimate partner violence. Every choice, from the initial selection of the music and its live execution, to the stage dressing and perfect casting, supported the presentation of something darkly beautiful and deeply considered. 

Vanier’s duet was equally human and thoughtful in its treatment of ecological disaster. It built slowly and never hurried, allowing for the changeable pacing of the video background. Lauren Curley and Dan Higgins have the incredible ability to project their awareness at each other with their attention drawn in opposite directions, past each other, or into the middle distance, which made every act of intricate partnering or the intimate brushing back of a plastic hood intensely chilling. The dramatic physical scale of the projection and the indistinct symphonic strains of Beethoven framed the human drama, creating with the set and costuming a built world evoking Ray Bradbury or Ursula K. LeGuin’s science and speculative fiction.

Ursula Perry’s solo, choreographed by Sharee Lane, was a virtuoso accomplishment. Not for a moment did the Puccini aria overshadow Perry’s movement. It done was in my favorite kind of contemporary ballet vernacular, and felt connected to the very core of its performer. It is good to be reminded that the complementary acts of reaching out and digging down haven’t been mined to nothing yet. There was an untellable richness and feeling to Perry’s performance. A marriage of the universal and the personal is itself a classical artistic aspiration, and it was wonderful to see it carried out by these experienced, capable artists.

There were some very successful ensemble pieces in the program as well. Sara Pickett and Nathan Shaw showed impressive command of formations, the former most notably in passing lines and the latter in the transmutations of unison trios. Nancy Carter’s piece was well-rehearsed and intricate, fully exploring range and levels through the modality of bungee. It was quite stylistically cohesive, such that the inclusion of different instrumentations of the same Bach fugue was a confusing choice. Elle Johansen seemed especially confident and at ease dancing tethered to an aerial rig. 

Sounds Familiar achieved a sense of history, diverse voice, and community presence, all of which I am grateful to have witnessed. In so doing, it also showcased the incredible caliber of its company, which performed 15 discrete works with tireless commitment. The show was a success belonging to many, certainly not least these eight strong dancers.

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.