Taylor Mac at Kingsbury

On Saturday night, I did not want to go to the theater.

My week had been busy and I’d already seen a show. I was having cocktails with friends who I never see outside of a lobby. Right before getting in the car someone said “this is the point in the night we always reach and we decide whether we are dancers or human beings,” implying that humans would stay and revel in their friendships, while dancers pile in and rush to shows they feel obligated to see.

But with a sense of obligation I went, like most dancers do.

Sometimes I wish I’d opted into being a human person who stays out on Saturday night. But last night, I didn’t regret my choice for even a second. As Taylor Mac, a drag performer and playwright, shared an excerpt from “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” I recalled that going to the theater is not only about a willingness to risk your evening but also about the periodic rewards that come with doing so.

This particular excerpt performed a brief history of civil rights through the lens of popular music from 1956 -1976. After feeling tortured by most shows that have similar aims (me engaging with a performer as they deal with identity politics) I was for once, a joiner, a willing participant:

I sang. I did unison gestures. I exaggerated cries to demonstrate the absurdity of white fragility (as Mac said, “this will go on a lot longer than you want it to.”) I threw fake red rose petals on the audience member acting as a deceased Judy Garland, her pallbearers taking her (starkly serious) out of the theater as Mac sang “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” The one thing I didn’t do was throw a ping pong ball at Mac and the Dandy Minions (costumed pedestrians facilitating some of the evening’s events) to represent homophobia. I felt like it was a “what would you do moment,” and I let my ball roll to the floor.

My willingness to involve myself appears to exist outside of a vacuum. I first heard of Mac’s work when modern dance choreographer Faye Driscoll was part of “The Lily’s Revenge.” A Variety write-up of that show indicates that “what could potentially be a grueling experience [is] something cool and fun and even communal, if you’re open to the possibility.”

Part of that success is found in the form of drag itself. Drag already lacks a topical earnestness in its willingness to upend the surface of identity. By contrast, earnestness is presupposed in dance, particularly in activist works. That earnestness may make intellectual sense but is, most of the time, misery for audiences. In drag, any questionable or weaker commentary folds into the persona of the presenter but I think some of us make a mistake in assuming queens are who they purport to be. Mac is no more obligated to be in accordance with the political topics addressed by the evening than a Butoh performer is obligated to be a contemplative Buddhist.  

But political topics aplenty are addressed over the course of the two and a half hour concert. From the jump, a center section is asked to become an urban area reserved exclusively for seating people of color, demanding white flight to the suburbs (standing room only). We are also asked to tweet government leaders in Flint (where water is still contaminated and where the costume designer for this project recently taught). Near the end, we listen to a Ted Nugent cover while problematizing homophobia and slow dancing with someone of the same sex to trigger Nugent’s metaphoric death. In this range, some moments are inevitably more resonant than others. While tweeting is largely ineffective, the junior prom moment is evocative and beautiful. This politicized ebb and flow (covering Stonewall, marches on Washington, even the death of Prince) coincides with the representation of band members themselves, a group that seems to represent a wide range of both genre and geography*. How these political events shake out in the 24 hour version of the same concert only beg more questions about what comes out on top.

To be fair, Utah Presents didn’t do many favors in securing me as the audience member I became. Utah’s culture prescribes a mandate that prior to a performance, ticket-holders receive abundant warning about adult content and telling us that we should prepare for a long show with no intermission. I resent this and want to mention here that these e-mails leave out an asterisk that should read: “we have to say this because the people who fund art don’t actually engage with it and that’s a long-term political and historically religious problem and furthermore, ignore this message, because this show is not only transgressive, it’s fun.” Mac additionally addressed this during the show by requesting that we give an ovation for the curtain speech (administrative labor is labor!) but also admonishing the naming of wealthy sponsors who may not, in fact, need our earnest thanks.  

I’m willing to wager that not only would more people have attended if presenters marketed a less undermined truth but also that they’d be willing to engage with more local art-making that uses the same concepts or methods as the artists they present. For example: when Ragamala toured to Kingsbury they invited local Bharatanatyam openers for (presumably) audience development. Why then were there so many caveats to this concert instead of an equal invitation to the Bad Kids (although some of them may have been the minions described above) or to Janice Janice Janice, a grad student performing university thesis work at Metro? Whether or not there was time to include them as in Ragamala, there was most certainly the opportunity to offer them the advertising they need in support of their work to make it as effective and ubiquitous as this particular evening.

Maybe that sort of connection is to come tomorrow, Tuesday January 17th at 7:30pm in Kingsbury Hall when Mac meets with Bill T. Jones and Niegel Smith to dialogue about art and activism. The event is free but requires tickets.

Ashley Anderson directs loveDANCEmore using the resources of her 501c3 “ashley anderson dances.” ashleyandersondances.com

Step Afrika!

Step Afrika!, which performed this past Saturday at Kingsbury Hall, is the first professional dance company dedicated to the practice to stepping. Step-dancing uses the body as an instrument to create complex, percussive rhythms. I could go into detail about the structure of each individual piece, or talk about how talented the dancers in this company are, with their high energy and flawless technique. What was more important about this performance was how Step Afrika! made a 2,000-person theater feel as intimate as a small black box. This nine member dance company was able to bring every audience member into their community. You felt like you were at home and like the dancers were your friends.

In the opening work, Tribute, Step Afrika! paid homage to the roots of stepping. This African-American dance form was birthed in East Coast college sororities and fraternities. Introducing this history was vital in bringing the audience in. Dressed in matching fraternity sweaters and performing unison choreography and simple, readable rhythms; they broke the wall of intimidation that’s often felt in dance performances in the United States. Everyone started having fun right away.

Throughout the performance I never noticed a transition between dances. Everything was seamlessly blended together. The audience was as awake and energetic as the dancers themselves.

During the second half, Step Afrika! took audience involvement to a new level. They brought up about twenty volunteers and taught them a short step combination. As an audience member, you felt like it was you on stage learning the combination. It developed a huge sense of community. The volunteers not only stayed on stage for about ten minutes, learning and quickly performing the combination, but the performers used them as a backdrop during Indlamu, a Zulu dance that refers to the company’s origins— Step Afrika! began during an exchange program twenty years ago that brought American students to visit the Soweto Dance Theatre in Johannesburg. They had the audience volunteers sit in a semi-circle around a pile of drums and watch the piece from the stage. This made the sense of community even stronger because the audience felt like it completed the circle around the dancers. Everyone was clapping and cheering along as Step Afrika payed a tribute to the Zulu people of South Africa.

I think there’s a risk involved with putting traditional dance forms such as these onstage in a concert venue. You can lose the context and the initial motivation behind the movement. However, Step Afrika! was very successful in introducing the audience to history. They made it all entertaining and they kept the sense of community that comes with stepping alive.

Temria Airmet is a choreographer and dancer based in SLC. She’s recently been seen in the work of Ashlee Vilos, Shira Fagan, Ching-I Chang and Anne Marie Robson. She works administratively at Millennium Dance.

Rambling

I want to call Doris Humphrey up and let her know that not all dances are too long. In fact, The Rambler, presented this evening at Kingsbury Hall, was just the right length. Keeping me engaged with the thoughtful performance for one hour and then setting me free into the night before the predicted snowfall.

It’s perhaps foolish to write a critical review in total earnest since the show only ran one night. Additionally it’s toured all over the country so it’s not as though the Joe Goode Performance Group is desperately searching for a critical opinion on the record.

But I would be remiss not to reflect on the experience as a unique imprint on the Salt Lake dance scene which can be rich but often incestuous. Having a national guest reminds me where Salt Lake exists in relationship to other ways of making and seeing dance.

The performance centered around simple logic — vertical and horizontal traveling curtains framed small portals where vignettes emerged. The curtain might expand to further reveal the scene or it might stay confined around small happenings.

The vignettes ranged from theatrical monologues & sculptural interactions to more traditional movement composition alongside live singing. Each developed different ideas about the concept of rambling but left the audience with the comfort that the curtain would take us to the next scene.

Simple logic allowed for more complex experiences to emerge. Because each scene was freshly framed there was the freedom to go along for the ride without anxiety or expectation. This feeling extended to the very beginning of the piece where Joe strolls out in a cowboy hat, identifies that the day before he’d fallen off the stage in front of school children, and the dancing begins as he reads poems (more or less) about “felt movement”, something he’s known for teaching.

This casual approach, I have to point out, is also employed in Salt Lake at the Mudson performance series I run as part of loveDANCEmore. And the same way I find it demystifies art-making in that venue, it certainly demystified the evening’s performance for me. In a form where so much is unclear (where our paychecks will come from, how we will find resources to make work and how we persuade digital-age audiences to sit with us) it is nice to have a person walk before you and simply invite you to partake in what they’ve made.

There is a lot of freedom in rambling and this means the dancing, singing and acting are also free to be unapologetically intermingled. While his website refers to dance-theater and blurring boundaries the dance is really more an expression what dance can include rather than what dance is not. It deals with the limitless potential of the body to express ideas and identities whether with traditional partnering or the strain of a song.

This is another lesson that some Salt Lakers could learn — using elements of theater in a work is not an act that requires explanation and justification. It’s also not something that’s revelatory but rather, is a natural extension for the potential of the form. Living here I often I see work where the “more theatrical” elements don’t seem quite right and it’s because their inclusion isn’t always as organic as the Rambler might make it appear. They seem hesitant and careful but this evening suggests that hesitance is not the course.

I know this because even in this production there are things I’m not super keen on. A lit cyc has never been something I love, monologues that incite uncomfortable laughter give me nausea, old stand-by partnering lifts give me even more discomfort and the list goes on. But The Rambler creates and sticks to it’s own convoluted pathway, no apologies. I don’t find myself making a catalogue of my likes and dislikes as I might normally. I’m noticing instead the nuance of physicalized floundering in romantic or interpersonal relationships, the ways to seek adventure among a field of abstract cacti, a luscious disappearance and re-emergence into a field of hokey smoke.

This dance wasn’t too long but this writing is. I could go on and on, which in the case of a one-time show is probably a good thing.

Ashley Anderson