Ririe-Woodbury: Bloom

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s Bloom featured two new works, one by artistic director Daniel Charon and one by University of Utah professor Stephen Koester, as well as a piece by Tzveta Kassabova (2010) that Ririe-Woodbury first performed in 2016. The concert was well-formatted, with Charon’s dynamic and daring work splicing two more humanistic explorations of relationship and transition. I’m not convinced the title Bloom accurately described my experience, but how does one accurately name a diverse repertory program? If the title didn’t portray what was happening on stage, it did sum up the beautiful Salt Lake City spring that is happening outside.

Kassabova choreographed “The Opposite of Killing” as an exploration of emotions pertinent to losing a close friend, and the piece has been performed by multiple casts, including by students at the University of Florida, University of Maryland Baltimore County, and Middlebury College. Amy Falls did a thorough job of describing and unpacking the piece at its Utah premiere; I will add that I especially found meaning in its arc.

The beginning was an exploration of movement, absence of movement; sound, absence of sound. The dancers confidently found their places making parallel lines and right angles, clear in their mission and devoid of emotional ambiguity. As the piece unfolded, it slowed down, weighted with grief. Breeanne Saxton found herself upstage and alone, bathed in a warm spotlight, isolated, watching the movement carry on without her.

There were the more obvious moments of experiencing loss, such as soft embraces and collapsing bodies. Particularly resonant, however, was the constant shift of dancers’ costumes. As the choreography moved the dancers on and off stage, each subtly shifted what they were wearing; one who was wearing shorts came out in pants, one previously showing skin next appeared in a turtleneck. The costume changes never departed from a gray palette, but morphed enough to signal that each dancer was, in fact, changing; as if to say, “I may be similar on the outside, however, with loss, there is a shift.”

The end was the beginning, the dancers lying down in horizontal and vertical lines. What felt self-assured and expectant in the opening scene now felt unresolved and heavy. What we experienced in the middle shifted everything.

Charon’s Dance for a Liminal Space, divided into two parts, buffered either side of the intermission, and each part diverged from the other in their definitions of “liminal.” From the program notes, the first section related to a transitional or initial stage of process, while the second explored occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary. I found both parts showcased the five dancers beautifully (Brian Nelson, who joined the company in 2018, did not appear in the piece), as well as challenged notions of how to convey something both in transition and arriving from transition. That is to say, I liked it.

The first part began with the three women of the company (Megan McCarthy, Melissa Younker, and Breeanne Saxton) as clear, directional, and undulatory, their bodies bright and severe against the darkness of the stage. Then, just when I started to put my finger on the piece, text by Meredith Monk began. Phrases such as “he salted his empty plate first” and “she wears the same bow as her dog” refused to relate to what was happening on stage, and scrambled any definitive meaning. This absurdity paired with the robust physicality was oddly satisfying, and forced my mind to open and receive instead of to close and define. Undoubtedly, there will be those that find the disparity jarring, even frustrating; but when the closing image was settled and fixed, two groups having taken their places, statuesque and clear, I appreciated it even more.  

The second part of Dances for a Liminal Space was highlighted with bold and geometric lighting by Ririe-Woodbury technical director William Peterson and relentless music by Michael Gordon. Did I mention that the dancers looked fantastic? Because they did. Bloom is also the farewell concert for both Yebel Gallegos and Breeanne Saxton, two versatile dancers that will be greatly missed. They, along with the others, were in perfect form, and this section of Charon’s piece in particular showed off the company’s range and virtuosity. Bashaun Williams and Megan McCarthy travelled from one side of the stage to the other, flying, twisting, and turning, and when they leapt into the wings, I wished they would run back around and soar through the phrase again. The stakes were high in this section, the position had been chosen, and it was time for the dancers to confront the consequence with intensity and resolve.

The final piece was Koester’s “Departure - A Last Song, Perhaps a Final Dance Before a Rest.” As the program note detailed, Koester is retiring from his position at the University of Utah in the School of Dance, and perhaps from dance in general. I was his student at the U during graduate school, and thus feel a personal connection to his retirement; he has been a strong figure in the Utah dance community for decades. I have admired him as a choreographer, and found his pieces bold and impactful -- even the few that I did not enjoy would run through my mind for weeks after, as I tried to find a landing place for them (arguably the biggest compliment of all).

To that end, I found myself anticipating what his final work would be. Conceptually challenging? Movement-driven? Autobiographical? Trying not to be too melodramatic (although the piece’s title doesn’t temper this), it was as if we were all huddled around him, staring intently: “What are your parting words?!”

His parting words in “Departure” seemed to be, “Find community. Help one another. Be together.” The piece featured the entire company, clad in pedestrian clothes, with music by David Lang. There was form to it, but that form sprouted from relationships as each dancer seemingly took a turn at being supported, or at least seen, by the others. Sometimes the relationships poked, nagged, questioned, or insisted; there was little movement for movement’s sake, each vignette attaining an emotional resonance that could also immediately shift or drop.

The final image was a terse wave from Yebel Gallegos, as he and Brian Nelson retreated upstage, the lights fading.

Bloom concludes tonight, April 20, with a final performance at 7:30 p.m. at the Rose Wagner Center for the Performing Arts.

Erica Womack is a Salt Lake City-based choreographer. She coordinates loveDANCEmore’s Mudson series and contributes regularly to the blog.

Ririe-Woodbury: Winter Season

Ririe-Woodbury recently performed its Winter Season at the Capitol Theatre, just a few blocks from the Rose Wagner (the Rose is RW’s rehearsal residence and where they most often perform). The evening included four separate works that dually complemented and contrasted one another, all curated like a well-balanced meal, including vintage and contemporary portions as well as environmental and social side dishes.

The company typically performs the work of the late choreographer Alwin Nikolais around this time of year. However, Winter Season did not include a Nikolais piece; alternately, “Physalia”, choreographed specifically for the company by Alison Chase and Moses Pendleton (who together created Pilobolus Dance Theater) in 1977, was reconstructed as this season’s playful, postmodernist dance.

The work was a delightful float through oceanic ecosystems. The Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish, also known by its scientific name Physalia physalis, and other sea organisms were all embodied with sustained, acrobatic movement by the dancers dressed in speckled, spandex bodysuits to clearly create unified shapes with one another.

Guest dancer Ching-I Chang Bigelow had a darker solo in which she was sprawled on the ground, belly down, her whole body precisely flapping and slapping like a fish out of water.  Mary Lyn Graves was separated from the group with a crouched, sticky foot solo. The piece was dated with the projection of various still images of deep ocean life that weren’t necessary, as the dancers already evoked  those images so fluidly.

“You and the Space Between” was choreographed by Miguel Azcue of the Swedish company Memory Wax. The piece began strikingly with sound, curtain, then lights, revealing Alexandra Bradshaw and Bashaun Williams center stage. They performed a mirrored duet, and were joined by the rest of the company paired off in duets, all moving one another’s body parts in a disjointed way as if they weren’t used to touching one another. Then, the dancers descended to the ground where they were captured live on camera from above and projected onto the cyclorama.

They moved through scenarios playfully, jumping from one horizontally-moving body/platform to a higher one, play-fighting, swinging from each other’s legs, and generally appearing to be in a video game. Eventually, everyone but Graves rose to standing, leaving her alone amongst the tops of heads on the video projection. This eye-level-to-bird’s-eye split was a compelling way to reveal two perspectives, literally and metaphorically, but after many minutes the comparison became belabored.

“Super WE” was created in collaboration between Tzveta Kassabova and Raja Feather Kelly in 2013, making this performance the Salt Lake City premiere of the work. On Saturday night, Yebel Gallegos and Graves took the stage. They rapidly executed phrase-work in circles, bobbing their heads while bent over, and trying to hold hands while also smiling at each other. The duet was fast and friendly with a frantic edge supported by Kelly’s original sound score: birds tweeting joined sporadically by a repeated “ha-ha-ha-ha” á la Laurie Anderson’s song “O Superman”. The dancers themselves sat down and began chanting “ha-ha-ha-ha”, effectively commandeering the soundtrack by making it themselves.

Graves and Gallegos had a litheness like that of the dance’s choreographers and their unison movement emphasized physical rituals - locomotion, holding hands, pointing, sitting in a chair – that the majority of humans do: sometimes robotically, sometimes with abandon, sometimes with gusto, always amidst personal dialogues, and creating meaning beyond the action itself.

I would like to take this opportunity to honor that this season is Bradshaw’s last performing with Ririe-Woodbury. The inclusion of many University of Utah dancers in director Daniel Charon’s “Snowmelt” prodded me to imagine a future member of the company, perhaps even one of the students on stage, and how they might fit into the current community of RW dancers. Bradshaw’s strong, elegant presence will surely be missed, though it is an exciting time for the company to continue to re-create itself.

“Snowmelt” concluded the evening starkly, but without very much explicit commentary on the subject of snowmelt itself due to global warming. The projections accompanying the piece depicted pieces of glacier falling into water, wind turbines, snow literally melting, a log on fire, the sun through orange haze, and bird’s-eye views of a freeway system. Sometimes the image would flip upside-down. The images were all very sharp and similar in compositional quality to the “natural” scenes of Utah displayed on giant screens in the new 111 Main building in downtown SLC. Both are highly produced and curated to demonstrate some kind of institutional acknowledgement of the natural world juxtaposed with the industrialized world. Charon’s piece did seem to acknowledge the interrelatedness of the two worlds, but only with the projections themselves which dominated the performance. “Snowmelt” was danced with rigor and physical acuity, but lacked moments of stillness to punctuate the movement or connect it to the projected images. I am interested in experiencing this highly kinetic piece without projections blatantly telling the story instead.

Winter Season was a cohesive yet eclectic evening of dance. We were plunged undersea, then swept up to the ceiling, pressed into reality of rhythm, and finally, confronted with a taste of our nature and nature itself.

Emma Wilson is a graduate of the University of Utah and a regular contributor to loveDANCEmore. She frequently jams with Porridge for Goldilocks and was a choreographer for Red Lake at the Salt Lake Fringe Festival this past summer.