Repertory Dance Theatre: Current

Repertory Dance Theatre’s Current included five dances presented one after the other, after the other, and yet... another, because they were all made recently; they are a reflection of “right now”; they are current.

To begin, the silhouettes of Justin Bass and Tyler Orcutt spoke their way across the stage beginning “Still Life With Flight” by former RDT member Sarah Donohue. The faces of the dancers were illuminated once they landed their popping (not locking) bodies on a bench. They shifted ever-so-slightly with harmonized pulses of their torsos that incidentally occured to execute the larger movement of wringing hands, crossing legs and shrugging, casting quick glances at one another before interlocking to perform cartwheels over the bench. Through a series of turns en dehors with their legs in arabesque (legs held behind, turning counterclockwise) the two moved around the bench, holding each other often and expertly.

Cut to Ursula Perry dancing to herself in a mirror with a scrim hanging downstage, creating a hazy, sepia effect. “Aloneness,” choreographed by Francisco Gella, contained a lot of unison phrases, all considering its subject of solitude. Or, not solitude - loneliness. The choice of being alone. I sometimes get lost on the bridge connecting etymology to physicality; are the movements representing different definitions of aloneness? Are they enacting solitude? They wore black so they must have been mourning the loss of community. Nothing was certain save for the calm and careful movement of Perry, who pierces space with her gaze. Even her fingertips and shins saw what they were moving towards.   

“Flood” began with the company in line, facing the audience, shifting together on the pads of their feet, creating a “tiny dance” of utmost specificity. (Choreographer Nichele Van Portfleet is specific.) The dancers wove in and out of this line throughout the piece, pushing and displacing each other from the line, and carefully buttoning up their shirts in a mime-like fashion ending with a gesture to form a suffocating collar made of flesh and bone (their own hand). This sequence communicated internal flooding - perhaps a flood of information, perhaps something else entirely. I was reminded of “The Green Table,” choreographed by Kurt Jooss, depicting pre-World War II “peace” negotiations and their ultimate futility. In both pieces, the dancers embody caricatures of those in power, whether world leaders or parts of themselves. The performers in “Flood” were not at peace with themselves nor with one another. They were often on the edge of physical stability, twisting themselves with movement overlapping and interweaving dynamically, likewise putting me on the edge of the seat beneath me.

Justin Bass and Jaclyn Brown in "Schubert Impromptu" by Francisco Gella. Photo courtesy of RDT.

Next on the program was a bonus duet by Gella, aptly called “Schubert Impromptu,” as if one of many Schubert compositions was picked out of a hat to entertain us after “Aloneness” and “Flood.” Justin Bass and Jaclyn Brown appeared to have been directed to move in sync with the music, and it was very satisfying, if not predictable. At one point, Brown slows down a cartwheel on her forearms over Bass, leaving me impressed with her ability to resist gravity. The two wore black, like the costumes in Gella’s previous piece. Some of the movements were similar, but, in “Schubert Impromptu,” there were no mirrors reflecting long beams of light into the audience, slicing through the space between stage and seats. “Schubert” seemed purposefully intimate - the dancers’ light did not come to us, but we could go to it for a diversion or a shelter from darker subject matter.  

“Material Tokens of the Freedom of Thought,” choreographed by Angela Banchero-Kelleher to the music of Wojciech Kilar, ended the evening. Many of the movement phrases in the piece were punctuated by the dancers pausing at length to look out into the audience, arms placed at their sides, forming a slight oval around them. They stood this way, waiting for their turn to move again, and in these moments I saw their eyes searching, perhaps to find the meaning of “mother” in the midst of the fan-like movement surrounding them.

Current flowed - or careened - like a recital. One can only do so much to connect a playful duet with a reconciliation with one’s deceased mother to a socio-political abstraction to an exploration of being “alone together,” without any transition other than closing and opening a curtain. However, the members of RDT moved through the evening with grace and deep breaths. They exhibited a cohesion that prompted the friend accompanying me to wonder if some of the choreography throughout all five pieces was extremely similar, if not the same.  Each moment of contact carried with it a familiarity stemming from continued physical practice as a company. The dancers are fully integrated, if not the dances they are dancing.

Emma Wilson received her BFA in Modern Dance at the University of Utah and has since been making solo works, choreographing for Deseret Experimental Opera (DEXO) and working as the Salt Lake City Library’s Community Garden Coordinator.

Ballet West: Journeys and Reflections

For the close of their season, Ballet West presents a program that spans over 80 years of dance making with three astoundingly diverse works. Beginning with George Balanchine’s Chaconne, dancers in softly draped dresses cover the stage as Gluck’s pastoral score drifts through the theater. They gently weave symmetrical patterns and float into statuesque poses as Emily Adams and Adrian Fry impeccably set the tone for the ballet. Chaconne is blissful, regal, pure in its clarity. The ballet’s movements are deceptively simple, creating a peaceful ease for the viewer. Your eyes can relax and take pleasure in the tranquil balance of Balanchine’s masterful organization of dancers. Katherine Lawrence and Christopher Sellars offer a bright break from the calm with a sweetly uninhibited duet flourished with jester-like wrist twirls and Mercurial attitudes. Jenna Rae Herrera also stands out with her warm and girlish energy. Another dancer might feel overdone, but Herrera’s bubbling-quality comes across as genuine.  

The high point of Chaconne is Adams and Fry’s second pas de deux. Both dancers possess an intriguingly royal quality, luxurious and crystalline without being cold. Fry, with his delicately flicking wrists and sudden drops into deep second, is endlessly gracious in his performance. The brighter yet still regal tone of the pas de deux showcases Adams’ gift for performing Balanchine. She joyfully plays with the music, flirting with timing until you can no longer find the boundaries between her dance and the orchestra. Her movement has an invigorating dignity and feels spectacularly spontaneous.

As heavenly as Chaconne is, Façades offers a more fraught mood. Opening with two baby-blue suited men in white wigs and heavily powdered faces hidden by lace fans, Garrett Smith’s revised ballet uses abstracted Baroque references as a way to address ideas of reflection.  Utilizing the ballet trope of two dancers creating the illusion of a mirror, Smith matches Adams in a red tutu with Allison DeBona in black. At first an impressive feat, the trick devolves into predictability as the relationship between the reflections never develops. Though their costumes are inversions of each other, the pair’s movement remains identical. I wish Smith had heightened DeBona’s mirthful quality against Adams’ timidity.  

Façades is satisfyingly fluid and Smith has a gift for crafting transitional moments. One of the more interesting sections found Adams staring into a string of dancers, giving the illusion of an endless hall of mirrors. As Adams moves, they echo and the slight delay of passing motion adds richness to this simple idea. I particularly enjoyed a moment where the two baby-blue Baroque men from the opening conduct the ensemble in a sweep of the stage, each woman lifted with stabbing legs to give the impression that the room had shattered.

However, the clear highlight of the evening is Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table. Created in 1932 on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power, The Green Table is indisputably a masterpiece. Dissonant, foreboding chords resound as the curtain rises to reveal The Gentlemen in Black spread across a green table. To a sarcastic tango, these ten masked diplomats with cavernous black eyes and white gloves cartoonishly converse. A veneer of politeness diffuses the ever-present violence in their gestures. As one man offers his hand, he raises his other in a fist. One bows to hide another shooting someone in the head. Two fingers point like a pistol across the table. The audience around me began to laugh. The Gentlemen in Black were funny and innocuous until the unexpected shot of a gun. Suddenly, we arrive in Death’s stark world. A glowing skeleton with wide luminous eyes, black boots, and a Trojan helmet, Beau Pearson as Death moves with precision and relentlessness. His eyes glow and widen, imbuing his percussive movements with powerful terror.

As Death presides, the patriotic Standard Bearer enthusiastically waves his blank flag and welcomes soldiers past Death’s clockwork arms. The Young Girl says goodbye to her sweetheart and The Woman comforts the Old Mother. The Profiteer slithers through, scanning the ranks for his next goldmine, and each soldier passes under the arm of Death who cooly turns his head to the audience as if asking if we understand yet. The next five scenes enact different atrocities of war. The soldiers grapple over the stained flag as Death circles the stage with unforgiving whips of his arms. The Profiteer slides through the carnage with greedy hands to steal a coin from a corpse. The Young Maiden sways listlessly from soldier to soldier until Death protectively hovers over her limp body. In a heartbreaking solo, Beckanne Sisk as the Old Woman offers herself to Death with small resigned steps and clasped hands. Sisk was transcendent in this role, her pained gaze reaching beyond the audience with a weighted resonance that brought me to tears. Death welcomes her gently and softly carries her passive body off stage. Katlyn Addison as the Woman (a role also called the Partisan) rushes the stage with uncompromising pride. She powerfully challenges the audience as she stands in front of a firing squad of soldiers, refusing to bow to anyone save Death.

Pearson as Death approaches each scene with astounding nuance. He greets the Partisan as an equal, meets the Old Woman with tenderness and is menacing towards the Profiteer. He is efficiently cold with the soldiers. After each new kill, he looks directly at the audience, silently asking us again if we understand. In the last scene, Death bears the flag as each broken sacrifice parades past. Death returns to his earlier solo, even more powerful as if fed by the destruction. A shocking fire of a pistol brings us back to the green table. As the pianos begin the now familiar sarcastic tango, the Gentlemen in Black repeat their polite charade. Witnessing the futility of the diplomats’ twirls and bows, the audience did not laugh this time.

Ballet West’s choice of The Green Table for the last performances of their regular season is unbelievably, even disturbingly, prescient. Jooss’ seminal work, relevant as long as men profit from war, feels even more necessary given that our country, barely a day before opening night, bombed a nation to whose refugees we refuse to offer asylum from a devastating six-year-long conflict. The Green Table, a masterpiece already, becomes more vital. The ballet rises above the rest of the evening. It transcends the concert, unequivocally and eloquently speaking of the futility of war in all circumstances. I cannot imagine a more timely and needed message.

Mary Lyn Graves dances with Ririe-Woodbury, appearing in a new work by Ann Carlson this week. She will also be seen performing in the upcoming ‘very vary’ by Molly Heller in May.

Jessica Lang Dance at Eccles

Jessica Lang Dance, the Long Island City-based company of choreographer Jessica Lang, performed at the Eccles Center on Friday night*. Lang founded her company in 2011; prior to this, both new commissions and re-stagings of Lang’s work have been prolific in the rep of many ballet companies internationally, from Ballet West to Richmond Ballet to Birmingham Royal Ballet. Friday’s performance featured JLD’s own nine dancers in five selected works, all created by Lang within the last ten years.

JLD dancer Jammie Walker opened the program with “Solo Bach”, a compelling and concise solo replete with nuanced musicality and exultant gestures, as well as some very impressive tricks (a back somersault into a handstand, and a moment where Walker popped up into a contraction, with only the arch of one foot holding him up in this position). The solo’s choreographic structure mimicked that of Bach’s composition in its reprises, but Walker’s delighted performance made each repetition new again. He ended with his arms opening upward and toward the audience, inviting us in until the very end.

“Sweet Silent Thought” featured a quartet of performers and recitations (trance-like, a quality enhanced by static crackling added to the recording) of Shakespearean sonnets. At first, men danced to recitations by men, and women to those by women. Eventually, that pattern was broken; two men partnered each other, and ambient music gave way to some more traditional partnering between the two couples.

While there was nothing especially memorable about “Sweet Silent Thought”, there was a moment for me that capitalized upon the company’s strength as a whole. A couple of the dancers slid into push-up positions with incredible grace and delicacy, yet exhibited a stalwart strength in doing so: a fitting analogy for the dancers’ ability to exude both an elegant, balletic sensibility as well as a contemporary sense of attack and strength (and always finding the simplest route to the next movement, for a streamlined effect).  

One of my colleagues described Lang’s dances as painterly, and I would add to her description two qualities of JLD dancers and movement that work in tandem: elongated lines and geometric shapes derived from a classical ballet vocabulary, fleshed out by curves and sweeps, derived from a classical modern vocabulary.

“Thousand Yard Stare”, the first larger work on the program, was set to the adagio movement of a Beethoven string quartet. As inferred from its title and several markers throughout, “Thousand Yard Stare” explored themes of war (the term “thousand-yard stare” has been used, probably since World World I, to describe to the vacant gaze of a battle-weary soldier).

The full company entered the stage, clad in olive-drab trousers, with a marching, weight-shifting pattern that occasionally accelerated into a layered, stomping rhythmic sequence - very effective both in its precise execution and in the silent theater. The intricate stepping patterns were danced, like other choreography throughout the evening, as though they were incredibly simple. A strong suit of the performers, and perhaps also of Lang’s choreography, is that everything appears distilled down to the most essential movements of leg and limb.

Both the formations and variations on a theme of marching took clear inspiration from military drills, and were also the more interesting and successful invocations of the war theme throughout the dance. More literal were army crawls underneath a line of dancers in downward dog and dancers slung limply across the shoulders of others, inevitably evoking the casualties of war.

The group, in formation, took turns sinking down into grand plies in parallel first position- a difficult task, and an impressive display of physical strength and strength of will (obvious parallels can be drawn to combat here). They formed one long line lying down, nestled into each others’ bodies, spooning. Dancer Kana Kimura was spun, several times, held at the waist, so that her limbs gathered centrifugal force, flying out effortlessly from her partner’s center.

“Thousand Yard Stare” contained many individual points of interest, but also contained some less interesting or obvious, and often-repeated, references to war. I enjoyed the opening marching sequences and the return to those in the end, but it was the rest for me that meandered away from a varied exploration of the dance’s subject matter.

Maybe it is even the subject matter itself that is difficult to explore through dance. Given that both battle and dance involve physical experiences, perhaps an exploration of one with the other can only offer an experience with similar physical motifs, motifs that leave less room for interpretation; I felt some similar reservations about Shapiro and Smith’s war-evoking “Bolero”, on RDT’s Brio program in 2016.

It does feel callous to dismiss work that aims to tackle difficult subject matter, and I do not wish to say that war should not be addressed in dance (from reading the Tribune’s preview of JLD’s performance, I understand that Lang worked with veterans and their stories in conjunction with making “Thousand Yard Stare” - bridging such a connection between two often disparate communities is absolutely commendable). For this reason, I should say I am excited to see Kurt Jooss’ “The Green Table” live for the first time, when Ballet West performs it in April. Though made in 1932, “The Green Table” engages with those who call us to war in the first place, exploring themes of war, and death, without scenes of literal combat on stage.

“The Calling”, an excerpt of Lang’s larger work “Splendid Isolation II”, is frequently depicted in JLD marketing so I was thrilled to finally see it performed. Though it ended before I wished it to, the dance is a lovely vignette featuring one female dancer (Kimura on Friday night) in a long white skirt, so long that a team of people accompany her onstage to set it up.

Kimura contracted, touched her abdomen, extended an arm out with a Martha Graham-like hand, firm but charged, at its end. Lush reaches outward and simple, elegant turns of her head were abruptly punctuated.

When Kimura kneeled, the skirt folded inward, giving the illusion she was shrinking as her legs disappeared beneath it. As she pivoted, the skirt twisted and wrapped around her, gaining pleats as she turned.

Only once did Kimura diverge from her stationary stance. Lifting her skirt with one hand and her leg into a low arabesque, she defied what we had come to know as her world in the short time we experienced it. By the end of the dance, she had returned to her stationary pivot point, both feet firmly planted, but I was left wondering if there were more to this within the context of the larger work, or if Lang was purposely tantalizing us with just this small taste of freedom.

The closing work, “Tesseracts of Time”, was an epic journey through a series of realms, again employing the entire company. The metallic hammering of David Lang’s “Anvil Chorus” ushered in the first universe, the dancers clad in various black unitards buzzing frenetically below a projection of a yet-unidentified metal object.

Lang’s dances tend to appear propelled by their musical scores (most often in a good way), and this first section, “Under”, definitely did. Informed by minimalism and modernism, (David) Lang’s abstract, percussive score seemed to strip (Jessica) Lang’s choreography of its balletic sensibility altogether, the dancers moving fluidly through identities of several modern dance pioneers.

The projection screen then came all the way down, ushering in the next section, “In”, and revealing the results of an intriguing collaboration with architect Steven Holl. Surprising and mesmerizing, what looked at first like a live dancer lying atop a large sculpture was actually a to-scale video projection of that same scene. Appearing on, in, and between the sculpture’s many complicated facets, the dancers in the video defied gravity and reality.

At times a live dancer framed the projection, standing off to the side. It was unclear the relationship we were supposed to mine between the video and the stage, however, as the live dancers were always in shadow, lit only faintly by the blue light of the projection.

A striking moment in the video was dancer Eve Jacobs (a former high school classmate of mine from North Carolina School of the Arts) atop a whorl of the sculpture, promenading regally in attitude - a music box ballerina trapped in an Escher-esque universe.

Moving forward to “On”, the video screen flew up and away, revealing several white sculptures resembling origami across the upstage area. At first, the dancers seemed to fit less naturally into these real-life sculptures than their video counterparts into the virtual ones; moments such as when all the dancers peered out of one hollowed-out sculpture like prairie dogs solidified a connection to their real-life surroundings.

Color began to be introduced to a formerly black-and-white world: the cyc changed to orange, and then to blue; the dancers added orange swaths to their once-black, now-white unitards; pink light was cast upon the now-suspended white sculptures. The larger color changes evoked a journey from midnight to dawn, but the dancers quickly shed their orange swaths. 

Jacobs remained solely in white throughout, and seemed to serve as an anchor, a stalwart central presence, foreshadowed, perhaps, by her video-counterpart’s promenade. Once all other dancers had returned to white, they surrounded Jacobs as she balanced first in an angular penchee, then in a la seconde (she had also shown her balancing chops in an attitude en releve shortly before).

Yet another return had the cyc change back to black, losing the vibrant colors of dawn. The white-clad cast ended the dance in a rather Apollonian tableau (the Balanchine ballet, not the philosophical concept), Jacobs at its center.

While the four individual sections of “Tesseracts of Time” were complex and visually stimulating, I struggled to find a compelling thread that ran through all four, aside from the most basic - architectural elements and the dancers’ relationship to such. Though, with Lang’s adept vocabulary and her dancers’ technical grasp, I enjoyed “Tesseracts” for the ever-changing epic that it was (“Tesseracts” brought to mind Schlemmer’s “Triadic Ballet”, due in part to the score and also to the central and ever-shifting use of costumes and props, not always employed as heavily in contemporary ballet which is often primarily about the body).

Like the rest of the evening’s program, “Tesseracts” was danced incredibly well. While ballet companies always look fabulous in Lang’s choreography, seeing her own dancers perform her work was a different experience entirely. Her dancers’ often-dual sensibilities, many having spent significant time in the worlds of both ballet and modern dance, further illuminate the dynamic range and clarity of her movement.

I hope JLD comes through Utah again. Downtown Eccles Theater, I’m looking at you…

*I want to note, for anyone reading this who may have been in attendance on Friday night, that Jessica Lang is, in fact, one of many female choreographers in this country, rather than one of only a few, as indicated in a pre-curtain speech. Perhaps it was intended to say that she is one of a few successful female choreographers. In which case: while female choreographers may be underrepresented in the programming of larger companies/theaters/organizations, there are myriad female choreographers working in many cities, receiving vary degrees of recognition or success. It is commendable that Lang has had such success, and it is well-deserved, but her successes do not reflect a dearth of female choreographers in dance. For a more comprehensive list of current American female choreographers, check back on the blog in the near future.

Amy Falls is loveDANCEmore’s program coordinator. She also works for the University of Utah's School of Dance, her alma mater.