Sonder in review

Sonder, a collaborative immersive dance theatre experience choreographed and directed by Graham Brown and produced by Sackerson will run for two weekends at the Eagles Hall. This historic Salt Lake City site was built in 1911 and has served as a place to house social and cultural activities, provide medical services, and in the 1990s was re-opened as a nightclub called The Bay. It is a space that feels both magical and neglected, begging to be used once again and become the holding place of stories.

For Sonder, Brown uses material from his work You which has had previous iterations: one as a proscenium stage piece set on a BYU student performance group, and the more recent one as an immersive experience in the Rose Wagner. Like the show this weekend, both versions included professional and university students.

Modern Dance tends to move away from what is and what has come before. Sometimes that takes place in the construction of the body but it also means shifting how performances are presented. There have been several shows of late in Salt Lake that have been housed (literally)  Nomad, Dollhouse, and Municipal Ballet at the McCune Mansion, not to mention those using outdoor space The Mists or On Site at the SCERA public pool. And, of course, these local examples come in context of ample national projects.  

Taking dance out of the theatre has its hurdles; smaller audiences, ADA accessibility, and visibility (hello sight lines!). However, the possibilities of these spaces are too exciting to pass up, and using them creates new paradigms to explore and gives fresh context to the moving body.

The challenge with Sonder is the attempt, in this particular space, to show narrative with specific character development. What worked well at the Rose Wagner was sometimes lost at Eagles Hall. At the Rose, the audience was confined to one large space to experience the progression of plot and unfolding characters; at Eagles Hall we were directed to choose our own path and experience the scenes that we wanted. This was liberating, but also jarring, when plot points happened that were not developed by our own personal choices.

This difficulty notwithstanding, the show is well crafted and has stunning moments. If you go, you might not experience the following, but I suppose that is the beauty of the idea: knowing that your choices led you to your favorite moments (a modern dance Magellan).

• Eliza Tappan as Charlie and Jordan Simmons as Warner form an arresting duo.  I came upon them ‘hashing it out’ in an unlit space, which made the whole scene feel more spontaneous. Tappan is precise and lush without being overly dramatic, and Simmons is cool and casual, with a strong sense of self. Together they make it all seem special, and I wanted to see more of their interactions.  

• Someone sticks his tongue out at me through a window when I’m watching an otherwise mundane solo.

• Breeanne Saxton as a young girl Alex expertly plays her role. She is demanding and unaware, energetic but focused. At one moment she requests John Allen and an anonymous woman help her create a science fair volcano (“Science!” they say, with a ports de bras). However, when it is time for an athletic group phrase, her real age emerges, and her dancing prowess is on display.

• Francisco Avina as Marco is grounded and mature. He delivers a touching monologue highlighting the experiences of becoming a parent and how those experiences morph as your child grows. Shawnee Jo Haycock is Pascal, both a mother to Alex and wife to Marco, shows a woman struggling to balance these two identities, while hardly finding room for anything else.

• A woman breastfeeds her baby during a lively group dance and her baby subsequently observes and models a trio -- toddling, moving and bending to the beat, unaware that they had become the action for me as a spectator.

• Talking with Ashley Anderson and Ellen Bromberg throughout and in between the action,  wondering whether we were missing something and whether that was okay.

Sonder soars when Graham’s fast-paced, full-bodied movement is featured in this dynamic space. Get your tickets because they are going fast.  

Erica Womack is a choreographer based in Salt Lake, and an adjunct faculty member at SLCC.
Sonder is fiscally sponsored by loveDANCEmore and tickets can be found here.

YOU at the Rose

YOU, an immersive, interactive dance production choreographed by Graham Brown is running a total of six times at the Rose Wagner Black Box over this last weekend of January.  This performance invites the audience member you, (andme) to enter into the space and play a role in what is taking place.

My night started with doing the kid hand off with my husband (who made it just in time), picking up a friend who wanted confirmation that her pants were cute (they were), and scoring the perfect parking space right in front of the Rose. Together we walked into a completely open black box theatre where groups of people were dancing as if at a club, while others stood on the sides and watched or talked amongst themselves.  I wanted to dance so I did, my friend wasn’t as inclined, so we talked while I shook my shoulders and moved my feet to the beat.  The space was littered with everyday objects from home life; a fridge, a bed, a couch, clothes, a handwritten note…and we were free to rummage and explore.  I found an electric bill for $35 and thought that seemed pretty low; must be a small house or apartment.  It was refreshing to see several children at the show, and the loud music and free structure absorbed any extra noise or irreverence.

Suddenly the group that was dancing in the middle of the room started into unison choreography, a scene that I wish for every time I go out dancing.  The movement is a blend of the release common in Utah’s modern dance scene alongside what you may see at a rave. Eventually this dissipates, and at one point the words of a song are passed out and we all sing together as one group. Even though I was unsure of the tune and don’t sing well, I liked this, it made me feel connected to this impromptu community.  Little vignettes of everyday life start to unfold; a babysitter reads a bedtime story, someone makes an agitated phone call, a couple juggles the care of a child. Several things are happening at once and it’s hard to know what to watch.  I didn’t want to miss anything important, but at the same time am grateful for the dimensionality of the space.

The four main characters, Keanu Brady, Mikayla Ellison, Shawnee Jo Haycock and Jersey Reo Riemo move smoothly between the roles of dancer and actor, performer and pedestrian.  One moment they are developing a story line and the next they are asking an audience member join them in a dance.  Although I was enjoying all the pop-up scenes at one point I began to ask myself ‘what exactly is at stake here?’  Then, as if on cue, a more developed vignette appeared: Brady and Ellison at a table for two experiencing the passage of time in the form of love, passion, stress, alienation, children, frustration, adoration, tantrums…family.  The relationship between these two is very clear and emotionally moving, at one point in the show they again experience the passage of time and life in general through rapid and continuous wardrobe changes.  Less narratively clear, but deeply physically embodied, is the relationship between Haycock and Riemo.  These two fill the space with undulating torsos, quick aggressive strikes of hands and legs, and playful stances and breaks.

The evening culminated with what we all need: a hug.  A really long hug.  As the performers hugged I could feel that the intent was for us, the audience, to break down a barrier and hug one another.  We had shared an evening together: dancing, watching, and singing.  I wanted to hug the friends that I was standing next to, and I craved the human interaction that I saw the performers experiencing, but as no one else that I could see in the audience was taking the cue I let the moment pass.  Maybe I’ll just have to go tomorrow night to get my hug in.  You should go as well.  In fact, maybe I’ll see YOU there.

Erica Womack is a choreographer based in Salt Lake who also teaches at SLCC.

a review of Now the Show

I went to Sugar Space this friday night to see Now: The Show. The performance was the culmination of Now Practices, an improvisation and performance workshop for dancers directed by Graham Brown and Brandin Steffensen. Brown, who will move to Maryland later this year for graduate study, directed and co-founded the local improvisation troupe Movement Forum, which will perform at Sugar Space in July. Steffensen is a freelancer in New York, who grew up in Salt Lake and danced for Ririe-Woodbury.

Sitting in the round, the audience watched nine dancers enter the space to stretch, bounce and generally warm up. If the tactic here was to disarm us with their lack of performative guile, they did not succeed, though one did get the sense that they were enjoying each other’s presence. Soon the dancers (who looked like they had been asked to dress “casual professional”) were breaking out of their stretching, pilates and plies into concentrated clusters around suddenly elevated lifts and long suspended falls. This presumably demonstrated trust, physical listening and attenuated awareness. I followed the action on a printed program that looked like an homage to one of John Cage’s musical scores. Time could be traversed down the page against a lateral axis of four columns: THIS, WHAT, ACCOMPANIMENT, and BY. The first few sections (Come As You Are, Audience Arrives…Pentamodal Duet, Ill Spoil) were full of energy, a lot of very earnest dancing and not a lot of focus.

In short, the show was slow to start. It was bogged down by an indirectness of process and mind that has a place in the contact improv jam but that makes a live show drag. Maybe it’s just that I’ve already seen all the walls of formality come down a hundred times and seeing them taken apart brick by brick just gets tiresome. I am willing to admit that the parts that bored me might have served as a good introduction for people less familiar with improvisation.

Things picked up when Repo (a local performer and poet, I later learned) came up next to me and stole my program notes to use as a reference for Steffensen’s solo which was about to ensue. THIS: Solo, WHAT: Brandin happens. But clearly this was something that he had been working on long before the workshop. Steffensen tried, and mostly failed, to balance a water bottle on his head while commenting that he had no trouble with this task earlier that day in rehearsal. The workshop students standing supportively out of his way confirmed this verbally. It’s in my neck… he whispered at least once or twice to himself. As his balancing act devolved into an absurd series of bodily tasks involving the water bottle, I felt like I was intruding on a very private struggle. He suckled the water, lent it to audience members and took it away, and held it with difficulty as he put himself through a painful series of arm balances. There was something very surprising, sad and funny about Repo’s textual and sung interjections, which became a cryptic conversation with what Steffensen had mumbled during the doomed balancing act. She sang a brief and haunting quote from the famous Police song, “I’ll be watching you…” He thrashed, like the virtuoso version of some angry kid’s hotel bed dance, and then we learned cathartically that Steffensen had suffered an injury to his neck from a chiropractor at age 16 (but so what?, the dance seemed to say). The sparse facts of the case hung in the air as he walked off. There was a surprising eloquence to it that I can’t quite tell why I felt.

Another great moment came at the end of an athletic trio by Steffensen, Brown and Sean Keil. Steffensen’s cool-headed body perched with a previously unseen docility on various ledges offered by the assertive, committed Keil. Brown interrupted with his characteristic bombastic tackling and acrobatics, trying to chase Steffensen in a way that seemed to echo moments of vulnerability in the solo. Then, with superb comic timing, one of the women (I wish I knew her by name) walked out and declared, “Boys aren’t even supposed to dance anyway.” Maybe it sounds trite in recapitulation, but there was something funny and very real about the lagging sheepish exit with which the three boys seemed to agree with their colleague’s statement. Sometime after that, a tender duet evolved between Brad T Garner, a boyish charmer from Oregon, and Jordan Wonnacott, a contact dancer, performer and actor from Salt Lake. Wonnacott, a talented U of U dance refugee, cut through Garner’s exuberance with steeliness and a sense of when to be still that was lacking during the rest of the evening.

The evening ended on a hokey note, concluding with a modern dance hoe-down, replete with flocking to the four corners of the stage to Sean Hayes’s folk number “Alabama Chicken.” After the show, Steffensen confided in me that he plans to do the whole project (workshop, show, and Underscore practice, which happened here on Saturday) again in NYC. The evening here in Salt Lake was a reminder of our dance community’s demographic homogeneity (which is much greater than that of the city at large), and I wondered if doing the project with a more diverse group of performers (and/or the act of seeking such a group out) might challenge or add depth to the structures Brown and Steffensen imposed.

That said, all of the performers were engaged in the pursuit of improvisation as a performance practice, which is always a pleasure to see, even when it doesn’t yield the best choreography. And it is encouraging to see risk happening, especially in a city where that value is often so anemic.

Sam Hanson