Home Run

The things I miss most about the theater are the requirements. I have enormous respect for the fourth wall not just because I routinely decline participation opportunities, but because it is a mandate to observe and a notice of import. In this new world, there is the fifth wall of my computer. This fifth wall is where all the things are: the legislative website where I am tracking unique abuses to trans people by our state government, the fourteen Canvas pages open for me and children, the playbill, the endless stream of texts, the sticky note about the Valentine’s Day parties on Zoom I’ve yet to plan as the room mother, “Class 6” from Brenda Daniels that I meant to do at 9 am.

All these things pull me away from what I like to do most – sit in the dark and quietly watch. 

Winter’s Light by Daniel Charon does its best to bring me into the dance. Rather than staging a majestic scene (as much screendance does) the videography reveals the body and patterning. It makes undercutting feet and elbow/wrist/hand sequencing more sensory; it shows how satisfying those things are when you get to do them yourself. The dance is like the best parts of a good class that you wish you could do together. If I wasn’t a dancer, I think the falling and recovering would still be more or less recognizable as beautiful. 

Photo by Daniel Charon.

Because my fifth wall comes with the expectation of being able to fast forward, I lift up my hand to the mouse when a gestural phrase begins midway. My impulse might be a worthy critique or it might cement my belief that part of the pleasure of viewing a dance is the requirement to do so. 

Next I’m watching Woes, the durational installation by Megan McCarthy and Dominica Greene which has paint reminiscent of Shen Wei’s Connect Transfer. Accidentally, I swipe the desktop and I’m kicked off the streaming platform. I’m sent a new link (nearly immediately from RW’s own fifth wall) but I miss Don’t Chew With Your Mouth Open. Please send me your own review. 

Still from Wash.

Next is Wash, an excerpt of a film choreographed by Joan Woodbury in the seventies. I have seen some of this footage before and I love it still. I have always thought these earlier collaborative projects from Utah’s modern dance scene are much zanier than today’s fringe works, in part because they take themselves less seriously. Claudia Sisemore once notably filmed Utah dancers coming out of a sewer and this scene is similar in tone. What would it be like to run through a carwash fifty years ago? What it would be like to do modern dance with traffic superimposed on your artificially pink body? Everything is inexplicably pink and orange. Everything is slow. It’s very Nikolais in that humans are forms as much as people. Maybe that’s problematic but it’s also sublime. A face becomes a T-Rex. You understand how Pilobolus became what they are. You wonder where Martha Clarke is now. 

I’m distracted because someone in the chat named TalkativeSelf says “omg wash is so good.” More unfolds, the credits of the film visibly shake. 

Martha Myers was known to say “if you want to show difference, use unison,” and Again by Bashaun Williams and Fausto Rivera does this. Their symmetry shows what I know about Bashaun and will miss watching live as he leaves RW — clarity of motion, depth without noticeable striving, and a central place from where the dancing happens. I can see Fausto performs with a different sense of weight and without the same aplomb. And that’s okay. These are two friends dancing. Fausto is settling, Bashaun is shedding. The dance ends in a hug that’s felt, even with the limitations of my device.

Fausto Rivera (front) and Bashaun Williams (behind). Courtesy of Wonderstone Films.

Full View is the last dance on the bill, by Molly Heller. It’s colorful and stylized — dancers in a pale green set (chair, blanket, phone, picture frame, potted plant) with an amethyst cloud hanging above. It looks like a modern dance taking place in the Wing (on my fifth wall, I google what will happen to co-working spaces after the pandemic?).

Many of the idioms in Full View have been present in other Heartland Collective projects. I think the exaggerated facial gestures, pronating, straining, and repetitive tics are meant to be the contemporary version of Wash: an absurdity that is familiar yet hard to perfectly place. Yet, as my sister has been known to say about current concert dance: “why are they impersonating disabled people? Why are people laughing?” 

I do think that ataxic movement has a unique feeling to a trained dancer and thus has gained visibility in concert dance nationwide. However, in our culture, recognizable contemporary dancers like Maddie Ziegler are taken to task for playing roles including autistic artists. With that context, I’m unsure why concert dance has become not only exempt from but lauded for co-opting some of the common movements of disabled bodies for visual pleasure. 

Perhaps my sentiment here is strong because in a non-pandemic world I have the pleasure of watching young adults with intellectual disabilities and movement disorders perform through my work as a teaching artist. One of my classes also made a dance with a cloud. In ours, the cloud rose taller and taller. In Full View the cloud turns from purple to white and sinks toward Florian Alberge whose hands gesture around his heart. After the sweeping solos and duets from varied directions, it felt like it was coming to rest in his lap. 

Ashley Anderson is the founder and director of loveDANCEmore and Ashley Anderson Dances.

Ririe Woodbury's Fall Season

Ririe Woodbury’s 2016 Fall Season presented a re-staging of Tzveta Kassabova’s “The Opposite of Killing” (2010) and Jonah Bokaer’s “Fragments” (created for the company in 2014) alongside the world premiere of artistic director Daniel Charon’s “Elegy.” Linking the three works conceptually was the idea of processing, and its subsequent variations.

“The Opposite of Killing,” which Kassabova notes to be about the “absence of a close friend,” presented an extreme on the spectrum of processing. Throughout the dance, the audience experienced little time to do so between sections of the dance and even between choreographic moments. Transitions were abrupt, quick, and often unexpected - making for a sometimes jarring but always fresh and exciting arc as the movement vocabulary and sections unfolded. Dancers repeatedly changed clothing, the color spectrum morphing as a whole for the group, which also contributed to a continual yet unpredictable impetus forward in a multiplicity of identities.

Kassabova’s movement language is neither completely postmodern nor dancerly, but a surprising combination of the two. Yebel Gallegos had a frantic solo that was imbued with fine detail in gesture and weight-shift. Daniel Mont-Eton negotiated a contorting solo throughout which he maintained hold of his heels. Gallegos and Mary Lyn Graves had a duet in which she pushed him backward along his knees, the two then quickly shifting into position for him to place her down on the floor in a Pietà-like arch.

Moments of unity (all dancing immediately following Melissa Rochelle Younker’s finger snap) bumped up against moments of loneliness (scattered dancing among several lone windmills with spiraling arms). Explosive jumps and lifts (Gallegos tossing Younker up and catching her, all while she was above his head) morphed into reflective moments (Graves in a down pool, appearing to contemplate her relationship to her surroundings). Even transitions between groupings felt uniquely timed within Kassabova’s structure, such that by the time all six ended the dance lying down, it was yet another surprise.

The surprise came first in Bokaer’s “Fragments.” The curtain came up on a triangle on the floor created by blinding fluorescent lights, mirrors hung at different heights and orientations throughout the space. The combined effect of the piece’s ambient sound score and restrained choreographic choices was durational, but it felt more like a test than a purely intentioned question. As an effect of the lights, certain parts of the stage were often or always in shadow. This served to obscure parts of the dance from our fixed viewpoint as audience members; the suspended mirrors also played with obscuring, as in a duet between Graves and Younker where only Graves’ legs were visible from underneath.

Bokaer’s somewhat passive movement language in “Fragments” could be labelled meditative, but I found it frustratingly removed, the dancers appearing deceivingly far away from the proscenium’s fourth wall with no chance of meeting the audience halfway. This could of course be an intentional choice on Bokaer’s part, but I continually wanted to jump up on stage and wander around the environment in order to give myself a new perspective on the action and landscape.

Similar to Kathy Adam’s observation about the piece in 2014, I too felt I could have accessed it better as an installation, free to wander amongst props and bodies and check in and out as needed. Bokaer has created abstract bodies doing abstract things (while Kassabova may feature human bodies doing abstract things), and I craved just a small glimpse of humanity in “Fragments” to draw me into that visually overwhelming, though not completely captivating, world.

Charon’s new “Elegy” is my favorite so far of his new creations for Ririe-Woodbury, and it brought together human bodies doing human things for a powerful conclusion to the evening. The piece was billed as a response to senseless killings, specifically the recent tragic nightclub shooting in Orlando, and it grappled with this subject matter deftly, appropriately, and poignantly. Though the dancers began somewhat separately, almost creature-like, a connection amongst them was palpable from the start. I credit this both to Charon’s choreographic/directing skills and also to the finely-tuned instincts of the dancers. This connection, which manifested even when the dancers were not physically touching, drew me into Charon’s work kinesthetically.

Contrasting physicalities throughout “Elegy” also aided in a kinesthetic ride: At times, the dancers appeared frozen briefly in amber; at others, they moved continuously through viscous honey. Graves had a great solo that started off with frantic steps, wildly off balance, then morphed into a deliciously suspended, off-kilter arabesque.

“Elegy” could perhaps be viewed solely from an abstract perspective and would still be as strong, but it was in knowing the subject matter Charon tackled that I was most impressed. Rarely venturing into uncomfortably literal territory (maybe only at the very end, where Graves knelt over a completely still Bashaun Williams), the dancers offered honest glimpses into a group experiencing tragedy both together and in different combinations of being alone. A chaotic section had all six grabbing at one another, with scattered looks of confusion, but in an attempt to help or to usher one another to safety. As in this section, the narrative throughout the dance was most often rooted in physicality, not just in emotional content, and the improvisation tasks the dancers did in rehearsals for the piece must have further enabled this transparency through their physical bodies.

In a Q&A following the performance, Charon mentioned modern dance as a form that “transcends entertainment.” While maybe not always the case, this program specifically succeeded at just that. Important narratives and broad experiences were abstracted and explored in full transparence, yet still presented challenges to a viewer. Different versions of these narratives and questions emerged: processing by not allowing time to do so; processing by working through specific surrounding details; not directly addressing something and thus obscuring it from scrutiny.

A young girl asked the final question, wondering if the performers were ever so overcome with emotion that they cried onstage while performing. I think it is unique and special that the artists of Ririe-Woodbury transport us so genuinely through the work that they do, and not just through their talent as dancers. Their ability to participate in a dialogue with the community about their work is probably crucial to maintaining a captive audience for modern dance in general, and is helpful at offering additional lenses with which to view such varied and sometimes difficult work. 

Amy Falls regularly contributes to the loveDANCEmore journal. She also coordinates the Mudson series, which returns this Monday, September 19 at the Marmalade Library.

Ririe Woodbury in review

In the intimate space of the Rose Wagner Black Box Theatre, Ririe Woodbury opened Spring Season with two premieres and one reconstructed work, concluding the company’s annual season with a show that is as virtuosic as it is contemplative. 

Joanna Kotze’s commission, “Star Mark,” begins with increasingly rapid projections of floral prints. With dancers clad in matching floral costumes by Eugene Tacchini, “Star Mark” calls to mind a dance by John Jasperse, another fairly recent contributor to the company’s repertory. Although the two dances are different in a host of ways, both use the idea of matching prints to, at once, disguise and highlight the moving body. After performing inside the projection, the black traveler rolls in, clearing the space of colorful imagery. The audience is left to reckon with the dancers themselves, interrogating their movement without a shroud of external ideas. 

A program note suggests that the dance highlights performance as a multi-faceted role using a daily process which includes “investigating a person.” At times the thoroughness of this choreographic investigation pays off: Bashaun Williams making an exacting diagonal pass, performers trading momentary comic pas de deuxs, Melissa Younker ending the piece with a slice of her arms before disappearing into black. But at the end, the audience still sees only slivers of this wholeness, as they do in any other dance. 

A reconstruction of Ann Carlson’s “50 Years” gets at how these small slivers of knowing change over time. The dance is a chorus of base instincts. Wearing dirty, wet, dusty red rompers, the ensemble repeats an imagined chant while rolling through various states: fear, ecstasy and hesitance, among others. 

It was my third viewing of “50 Years” which was made as a celebration of Utah’s Bicentennial in 1996. Last night, Amy Falls and I sat together debating: Who was in the cast we saw several years ago? Was that magnificent tree from Shirley Ririe’s yard always downstage left? Wasn’t it a set of lightbulbs instead? 

Our miniature debate speaks to how “50 Years” functions not just as a series of shifting choreographic choices but also a reflection on the possibilities within the embodiment of social histories. In this iteration, dancers appeared frightful and adoring of the aforementioned tree. In past iterations those same impressions floated more ethereally. Both choices reflect ancient ideologies of hope and consternation in different ways. 

The concert concluded with “Enter,” a world premiere by Artistic Director Daniel Charon and the second installment of his developing trilogy “Together Alone.” While the first portion of the trilogy presented a didactic representation of digital life, “Enter” is largely absent of such an approach, opting instead to explore the concept of dancers continuing to move through the idea of a “metaverse,” a collective virtual space. While the idea of “metaverse” is relatively new, dance has always lived between the real and the representational.

In front of geometric projections created by Charon (cycling lines, a minimalist clock, a grid) the cast performs alongside an evolving sound score mixed live by Michael Wall. There is something engaging about the stark repetition of the imagery and the unpredictable nature of how dancers can find momentum in space. The music augments this sensation by adding information to both what is actual (a human voice) and what requires envisioning (unidentified ambient soundscapes). 

The work ends with sounds emerging more and more clearly, like waves rolling on a beach, while Brad Beakes (who is leaving the company at the conclusion of Spring Season) dances with Yebel Gallegos. They are genuinely there but the beach is not. They are genuinely moving together but are also only a sketch or an illusion of who they, in fact, are. Their togetherness is a physical fact, but the success of the piece also relies on our belief that it might be so. 

Ashley Anderson directs loveDANCEmore events as part of her non-profit, ashley anderson dances. 

This post is co-published with 15 BYTES. "Spring Season" runs through Saturday at the Rose, tickets available on ArtTix. 

a review of Fall Season

Ririe-Woodbury’s Fall Season showcased three dances, two of which were world premieres, this past weekend.  Each piece showcased six dancers, the first two with guest Breeanne Saxton, and the last with Alexandra Jane Bradshaw making a return after an injury.  The company looked strong, dancing with confidence, nuance and polished athleticism.

Adam Barruch’s prima materia offered a clear sense of craft and traditional partnering where the women shine.  The stage was set with three transparent pillars that divide the space and blur the dancers into hazy forms as they move behind them.  This gives an otherwise crystalline work an air of ambiguity.  It was beautiful to watch the dancers show us line, breath and shape, and this is a piece that doesn’t polarize or offend.  It shows lovely dancing and clear emerging relationships; it is "the first material", before life (the show) unravels with questions and tension.

Shift, choreographed by Daniel Charon, wastes no time in establishing intent as the lights go up to Mary Lyn Graves dancing vivaciously in a bright red dress, while Bradley Beakes faces upstage pantomiming being on his phone, oblivious to the world around him.  This work, which is part one of the trilogy Together Alone, has several truncated sections; a fun dance party, an exploration of isolation within a group, a young couple in duet, and even a section evoking the beloved musical West Side Story.  All these sections add to a disjointed and non-linear experience, not unlike the experience of scrolling Facebook and reading statuses of civil unrest, displaced refugees, celebrity follies and cute cats.

The idea that our virtual lives are perhaps more interesting, or at least more commanding than our flesh and blood is again confronted when the dancers’ shadows are projected on the cyc.  On the cyc they are clear, sculpted, and larger than life, making their real bodies on the stage seem terribly ordinary.  When given the choice, what do we chose to see?

At times it was hard to decipher if Shift was being cheeky or was making an unapologetic departure from the cool abstraction many expect of modern dance.  A duet using the projection of texts (complete with emoticons) show us a juvenile tumult, a cellphone loudly ringing interrupts the dancing, the dancers stark and undressed become trapped in the image of their phones…whether serious or obvious, cheeky or scattered, the message was clear: Get Off Your Phone. But this message becomes more complicated when one considers all the exposure and advertising companies garner via social media.  Before coming to the show I had read a preview, promotional material, and several status updates surrounding Fall Season.  So maybe I should get offline, but not so fast that I miss ‘liking’ Ririe Woodbury’s status update.

The show ended with States Rendered, a Doug Varone piece choreographed last year which features video design by Ellen Bromberg.  This piece hardly settles or solidifies; the dancers are like popcorn in hot oil, simmering and then exploding through the space. The electronic sound mixed with black and white video gives off tension and contributes to a rich, if not overwhelming, sensory experience.  Perhaps instead of showing us what our modern life with technology has become like Charon did, Varone exaggerates it until it becomes almost unbearable to experience.  Alexandra Jane Bradshaw has a strong solo juxtaposing breath and tension, and like the piece generally, hints at aggression and violence.  The grey muted costumes echo a structure that is just shy of finding one thing, and just as an image is found, it is broken and dissipates into another. The piece ends mid-sentence with the dancers barely making it into a pile downstage and then the lights go black and it’s over.

Erica Womack is a regular contributor to loveDANCEmore. She is also a choreographer, performer and adjunct faculty member at SLCC. This piece is shared with 15 BYTES. 

Spring Season in review

Ririe Woodbury’s “Spring Season” was a challenging program exploring abstraction as a method for viewing as well as moving. Artistic Director Daniel Charon’s program note suggested a hope for his premiere to be taken as an experience without a need for definition while visiting artist Netta Yerushalmy suggested that her work would be cumulative as well as contradictory. In that way, each artist met their own measure if still finding a predictably uneven audience response.

Daniel Charon’s premiere carefully explored the 53 musical phrases inside of Terry Riley’s highly structured musical score, “In C,” performed live by the Salt Lake Electric Ensemble. Modern dance is no stranger to looping electronic music accompanying contemplative moving systems, but hearing the score live was a welcome addition. SLEE’s presence generated an enthusiastic musical audience to whom the dancing was purely new while serving as a reminder of how many elements go into ultimately ambient sounds.

“53 Rooms” highlighted the six company members within various framing created by thirteen dancers from the University of Utah. The dancing develops organically alongside the musical composition and, in that way it reminded me of “Water Study,” another dance which only unfolds as its given concept allows. When I first saw “Water Study” (albeit in 6th grade) I thought was the most boring dance of all, and now, it’s one of my favorites. I suspect that “53 Rooms” is another piece that may continue to offer ideas from within itself, and, as anything which sticks clearly to its idea, will be something you either take or leave.

“NORWEGIA” a premiere by Netta Yerushalmy, is an interesting companion to “53 Rooms” as it utilizes a seemingly more arbitrary set of circumstances. Dancers are as likely to appear doing a gestural duet in leggings as they are diving blindly into space wearing fairy wings or a Shakespearean blouse. And, after several sections featuring divergent scenarios, viewing an ending of sparse (and articulate) duets and solos amplifies the quiet presence of each dancer — Yebel Gallegos and Melissa Younker in particular — as each finds footing and explores extension.

Tension emerges throughout the work as the decision making of earlier scenarios appears artificial but bumps against social truths. For instance, Mary Lyn Graves begins the dance sloppily sneaking around the orchestra pit in a black hoodie and later transitions into more virtuosic sequencing in cherry red underwear. Her performing body is able to move between these identities swiftly and even comically. However this imagery interfaces with a larger cultural context: consider that Trayvon Martin was killed while wearing a black hoodie containing a cherry red bag of Skittles, his physical identity less mutable.

In a different section, a visual pseudo-forest emerges from the ceiling and the cyc and the physical decision making appears on some level whimsical, and on another, out of control. The dancers perform affected mannerisms of inwardly turned wrists and unstable yet fixed joints. Within their new environment, it appears again that the performing body is free to move between identities with fluency, behaviors shifting from manically impulsive to technically stable. Again, when positioned in a larger context the material serves as a reminder that these postures aren’t so much quirky as they are referential to physical and intellectual disability and its frequent invisibility in concert dance. While the tension in limbs and abject expressions of the performers are handily replaced by a lift or balletic posture in the ever shifting utopia that is “NORWEGIA,” many people you see publicly moving this way have a profound longing for control of their face and limbs but may only see slight shifts over the course of their lifetime.

I can’t say that these cultural signifiers registered for all, if any, other audience members. But they remind me that to challenge how meaning is attributed is also to learn that meanings are not only multiple and layered but also competitive.

Ashley Anderson directs loveDANCEmore projects as part of her 501c3, ashley anderson dances.  This review, and others by loveDANCEmore are in collaboration with 15 BYTES.

Photo by Stuart Ruckman Photography and featuring Melissa Younker and Yebel Gallegos in NORWEGIA by Netta Yerushalmy.