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.

LMN Mov't No. 1 at Sugar Space

Long associated with DIY art-making and performance, warehouse venues demand a conscious balance between activating cost-accessible spaces and making them both functional and inviting to viewers. LMN Mov’t No. 1, a collaboration between Meagan Bertelsen, Natalie Gotter, and Peter Larsen, fully realized the production potential of Sugar Space Arts Warehouse more so than any other performance I have experienced there. The thoughtful staging under the technical direction of Larsen framed compelling works from artistically mature creators and performers. The white flooring contrasted with the dark drapes to delineate the stage and beautifully captured the shadows cast from diffuse lighting (otherwise often unequal to the space). Barn-door framing later shaped this same soft light into hard lines that effectively limned stage sections.

LMN Mov’t No. 1 was an hour-and-a-half-long work comprised of four pieces, fronted with the admirably concise artists’ statement, “The works seen tonight invoke the role of the individual and their surroundings, examining how we interact, work, and create with the world and other people around us.” After viewing the show, I interpreted the statement in the following way: “Experienced people making the art they want to make, with the people they want to make it with, in the way they want to make it.” This was, I think, a very successful composition from artists who are not defensive about their work’s intention and value, who collaborate willingly and meaningfully. It was certainly an exploration of human action/interaction within the scope of the intersection of subject and environment - but it largely did not demand that you acknowledge it as such. The theoretical underpinnings were less visible than the experience of dance, which I took to be a great sign of maturity and aesthetic confidence. I was personally struck with the notion that a solo can be a remarkable encapsulation of collaboration, and to a greater degree than ensemble pieces.

The opening solo, “Hunter,” illustrated this beautifully: the stage was set with a lovely tableau - two chairs, one holding a lush houseplant and the other a box fan, with several can lights loose on the floor. Bertelsen first activated the fan, and later played its grid like a harp (after the recorded notes of Alice Coltrane’s harp were several minutes past, a wonderfully subtle evocation); she adeptly inverted a long buttoned coat and turned on the lights, trailing them along the path of their floorwork, and, memorably, affectingly embraced the fronds of the houseplant, all of which made Bertelsen an immediate and sustained active agent in the space. Bertelsen’s performance seemed to simultaneously inhabit and connect on several layers of abstraction - the venue, the stage, and their body - with an ease informed by years of thesis research in solo improvisation. Under the direction of Brianna Lopez, “Hunter” fluidly passed through discrete ideas, each with a radically different movement quality and intensity. This was accurately and succinctly reflected in the program notes, invoking “the evolving role of subject and its surroundings” and “constant shifts of attention...through the explored body states and interactive environment,” a description which was met and exceeded.

The accompanying notes for “Carry From Below” were less illuminating. A quote by famous NFL coach Vince Lombardi was gender-inverted to evoke ideal woman as triumphant samaritan-warrior. It was presented without author attestation of Lombardi or otherwise, so I assumed the substitution to be choreographer Natalie Gotter’s. The conceit was very interesting - an act of reaction and also creation, claiming something in a way that thoroughly unseats it. However, there was little evidence of this notion in the work itself. I was inclined upon viewing to examine some aesthetic biases I personally hold - namely, the feminine-but-pragmatic ensemble conventions of hair half-back-half-down and similar pedestrian clothing (here, flowy florals) with black sportswear, accompanied by overtly lyrical singer-songwriter music. I realized I dislike these conventions not because they are traditionally feminine (which is wonderful as a deliberate choice) or not-quite homogenizing (which uniform costuming can achieve and individuated costuming can belie), or overly emotive. Rather, because they are so familiar as to provide a blank slate that the work then is responsible to fill, which “Carry From Below” never quite achieved. Partner contact appeared under-motivated, without the physical weight or gestural context to lend it gravity. The lyricism of Nico’s “I’ve Been out Walking,” paired with on-the-nose walking-path choreography, borrowed emotional content from the external musical modality without embodying its own.

The pure movement created by Gotter and the dancers, and their performance of it, was truly strong and graceful; notably, a solo moment by Christine Glidden and a duet by Xochitl Marquez and Ashley Creek, each of which I wished would have lasted longer. I did, however, appreciate being given cause to examine my biases and have concluded that at their root, my dislike of these conventional forms rests on how much harder this nullity of stagecraft makes it to appreciate the hard work and interesting product. I wished the identity theory cleverly used to such effect in the notes had been used visibly in the performed work - otherwise, I am not, as an audience member, able to credit its presence.

During the brief intermission, it felt as though the lobby might break into a contact improv jam. The local dance community was out in force to support LMN Mov’t even at a matinee, testament to the contributions of its creators to this scene. The second half began with a request to hold all applause to the end, as there would be transitions - an injunction that was perhaps unnecessary. For one, because it is always destined to go unheeded, but also because the slightly contrived visual continuity of lighting was superfluous. The works shown were all capable of standing alone, cohesive because of the strength of their refined craft and artistry.

Choreographer/performer Emma Sargent began  “Firmament” in an upstage corner, and immediately held every gaze with a series of progressively intensifying leg swings, her grounded torso static and shadowed. Thus obscured by her own legs, Sargent subtly stroked the floor with her toes, an image later mirrored with her fingers in a standing inversion, and in the final supine gesture of sweeping circling hands. These variations of levels and distal articulation were thematic touchstones in an utterly captivating performance. In contrast to the opening solo work, “Firmament” was fierce but also spare and contained, even insulated, which created a gratifying sense of observing, of beholding. Side light was brought in and out, which created shadows that contributed to the sense of communion and dialogue with the space. The quote included in the program was deftly chosen, speaking to natural universal enfranchisement in personal isolation from the artist Björk, and which, in consideration of the well-chosen music of Sigur Rós and Jónsi & Alex, bespoke a certain Scandinavian brand of lonely and lovely.

“Fractals” began with directed light illuminating alternatingly one far lateral third of the stage and then the other. Bertelsen and Larsen each occupied one segment, in well-chosen, completely matching minimalist attire that flattered their strong builds, and the two executed powerful phrases in silence as they were lit in turn. The lights came up, they met on center, and began a partnership of inversions, rolls, and lifts, laborious over-the-shoulder carries accomplished by each in bursts of energy. Gotter’s staging choices and movement creation/direction were extremely effective here. You were given no choice but to appreciate two driving forces whose encounters were continuous, dynamic power shifts without any internally acknowledged power disparity. It worked, and wonderfully, leaving the viewer to confront any expectations to the contrary and their internalized source. The dancers exited the stage only to be reproduced as projections on the wall in Gotter’s screendance iteration of the work.

“Fractals” was a very well-made piece, but I generally question whether a screendance paired with live performance is incorporated meaningfully, whether it literally or figuratively reframes the work in an additive manner, and if it does or does not undermine the live component. The video piece shown in ‘Part One’ of “Fractals” touched briefly on the continuation of a single movement from one dancer to another, and the accelerated reiteration of movements, like the oft-repeated handstand, which are attainable only through editing. These were prominent enough to enrich the texture of the evocative screendance alone, but not enough to appreciably speak to their conjunction with the live work.

‘Part Two’ of “Fractals” finished the show with a duet between Gotter and Bertelsen. They took their places with heavy footfalls in athleisure neutrals and knee pads, as though to promise floorwork and weight-sharing and good times ahead. They absolutely delivered, establishing an intensity borne out until the end. Bertelsen’s movement was controlled even at difficult speeds and phrases, her energy continuing beyond the line of the limbs, and with a steady gaze. Gotter’s initiated movement from the center, which then exploded outward, even in a posture as ostensibly staunch and static as a held développé to the side, with a gaze consistently fierce and challenging. Watching these very distinct but complementary artists embody moments of unison and contact was endlessly appealing - with endless appeal being a preferred way to finish a show.

I viewed an in-progress presentation of “Fractals” at the last Mudson at the Marmalade Library; I was intrigued then, and am very gratified to have had the opportunity to see how the work has evolved and grown. Indeed, seeing these local artists utilize local platforms to produce works of such full realization is an inspiring look into what is happening in the Salt Lake dance community. Much of the best dance I have seen recently has occurred at two branches of the public library system. The consummate accomplishment of this LMN Mov’t collaboration reminds me that the dedicated work of public servants and independent artists is creating and maintaining the infrastructure of this community in an incredibly heartening way.

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