The Nijinsky Revolution

While introducing “The Ninjinsky Revolution,” Ballet West director Adam Sklute recalled the riotous shock with which much of Vaslav Nijinksy's work was met. Sklute described the boundary-pushing nature of Nijinsky's movement and libretti, inviting the modern audience seated in the Capitol Theater on opening night to see if they, like their historical counterparts, are scandalized by the three ballets offered. Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun, Helen Pickett's Games and Nicolo Fonte's The Rite of Spring are re-imaginings of three of Nijinsky's four choreographic works. They are presented as contemporary continuations of Nijinsky's ideas. It seems appropriate to view them in that context, albeit with varying degrees of success. Robbin's Afternoon of a Faun is a masterpiece in its own right and Pickett's Games is an energetic rendition of one of Nijinsky's lesser known ballets, simultaneously dense and flippant. Fonte's The Rite of Spring, however, misses the mark having little of the revolutionary zeal found in Stravinsky's still shocking masterpiece.

As the first languid notes of Debussy's score, beautifully conducted by Jared Oaks, drift through the theater, the curtain opens onto a hazy, sunlit scrim, beckoning the audience into a dream world inhabited solely by two dancers and their elusive courting ritual. Robbins is a master at creating a world on the stage and Afternoon of a Faun is no exception. The entire ballet takes place in a bright, softly illuminated studio against a sky blue backdrop. The audience voyeuristically occupies the place of the studio's mirror. Throughout this short poem of a work, the gazes of the dancers are constantly directed towards that mirror, piquing the audience's curiosity without inviting them in. This outward gaze directly contrasts the Nijinsky original, which echoes a Grecian frieze in its two dimensionality and stillness.  As Adrian Fry and Emily Adams, look out toward the audience with subtle curiosity, boredom, vanity, and shyness, you find yourself growing more deeply interested in the dancers' exploration of each other and themselves and the unspoken rituals of courtship they are enacting through ballet's familiar forms. Adams and Fry cautiously approach one another, Fry mesmerized by the quietly bold Adams. I relished Adams' glamorous and confident interpretation of the female character; Nijinsky's Faun featured nymphs that spend the majority of their time running away in fear and modesty. Adams, however, directs the scene, drawing the eyes of the faun as she sensuously combs her dark hair and luxuriously extends her limbs as if basking in the warmth of afternoon sun. As Adams' withdraws from the gossamer studio leaving Fry to recline in reverie, you wonder if the sweet, dreamy interaction was even real.

Robbins' purposeful choreographic contrasts to Nijinsky's Faun and occasional references to the iconic movement were particularly satisfying. A flexed wrist and pointed hand, picturesque moments of suspended pause, the dripping veil of Adams' hair and Fry's mystified fixation upon it. Of the evening's three works, Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun is most successful at reaching beyond the revolutionary ideas of Nijinsky precisely because it has a solid and full understanding of the original.

The second piece, Helen Picket's Games, opens with dancers Alison DeBona, Arolyn Williams, and Christopher Ruud standing isolated in pools of light against the hint of an urban office building. This is the last moment of pause before the non-stop energy and exertion of the dancers' flirtatious romp begins. Throughout, the dancing is quick-witted and sharp. Each dancer engages the other two with a solo that can't decide if it is trying to entice one or the other or neither. DeBona's biting sparkle was a delicious counterpoint to Williams bright and enchanting girlishness, an especially seductive combination.  The score, another by Debussy, and the dancing are incredibly dense, changing tempo and theme almost constantly without ever letting up energetically.

Nijinsky's original, entitled Jeux, used the trappings of a tennis game to explore a romantic tryst between a triad of dancers, two women and one man.  Pickett does away with the metaphor of a tennis game, placing the story in a modern day office.  Cautions against office romance (especially office threesomes) aside, the removal of the tennis metaphor doesn't serve the ballet: though the sexual draw among the three dancers is more openly acknowledged, it is not more openly expressed, save a few kisses near the end. The action of the ballet hints at scandalous behavior without ever fully exploring or displaying either the behavior or its consequences. Largely light and playful, I was quite aware of the absence of actual game-playing. The dancers flirted and giggled but exhibited no jealousy or any other ill-feeling, guaranteed emotions in such a romantic arrangement. Games is short however; perhaps it would have been too much to fully explore the emotional landscape of polyamory in its brisk twenty minutes. Or maybe I'm reading too much into an unusual but frivolous one night stand.

The opening oboe solo of The Rite of Spring is undoubtedly iconic. It signals the beginning of one of the most revolutionary musical scores of the twentieth century, one which caused an actual riot at its premiere in 1913 and continues to challenge audiences today. Instruments pierce through wild discordance, blossoming into musical themes that are equal parts unsettling and captivating. Rhythms and harmonies interweave into a chaotic system that seems incomprehensible.  Stravinsky's score is a celebration of creation and the inescapable destruction that accompanies it, a hymn to the bloody, violent, cyclical process of artistic birth. In Nicolo Fonte's interpretation of this musical masterpiece, the stage is dominated by rusted metal monoliths and spider-like dancers clad in black leather and rhinestone leotards. There is little of messy spring in the scenery, much less the choreography. Fonte's interpretation is menacing and fierce like the score but it does not sweep you up. The ballet is filled with hyperextended legs, arched backs, splayed ribs and hands. There are unclear references to a narrative but little investment in its development. However, there is a pervasive sense of something being at stake; I just couldn't figure out what. Though the choreography is uneventful, the dancers perform it beautifully. They are sinewy and sensual in acrobatic twists and contortions, lending the movement intensity with their arresting gaze. I just wish they had been given something more substantial to work with.

Mary Lyn Graves dances for Ririe Woodbury Dance Company alongside other local teaching and performance. 

This review is published in collaboration with 15 BYTES, Utah's Visual Art magazine

“What We See” from learning to loveDANCEmore volume 8

The latest edition of our performance journal, edited by New Media Coordinator Samuel Hanson, will arrive this coming week. Volume 8, displacement, features the work of many talented artists and critics from Utah and beyond. It’ll be available at Daughters of Mudson, get your tickets here. To whet your appetite, here is a piece by Ashley Anderson, which deals with how we see dance from ballet to Monica Bill Barnes.

What We See: Thoughts on Ira Glass, Monica Bill Barnes and The Rite of Spring

Several weeks back I got to see Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass perform Monica’s choreography as part of Ira Glass’s show at Kingsbury Hall, and later on I got to see Ballet West’s Rite of Spring. Both experiences left me asking questions about what frames my experience as a viewer, and also placing myself in the position of other audience members. The writing below is my way of grappling with my identity in relation to my peers in an audience. I am trying to see what they see, which is a task I don’t always consider while writing (or thinking) about dance.

I have long loved Ira Glass’s radio show This American Life on NPR. The show transports me to other parts of the country, but also to empathetic and interior parts of myself. When I had finished my MFA and was feeling extremely deflated at the difference between the work I was creating in the supportive environment of a liberal arts college versus my first apartment in Philadelphia, This American Life was one of the only things I enjoyed about my week trudging to and from a day job as a paralegal.

When I learned that Ira Glass was sharing the work of Monica Bill Barnes as part of This American Life performances and later, planning an entire tour, I got heated. My feelings about her works I’ve seen are best summarized by a piece by Andrew Boynton in the New Yorker (November 13, 2012). The title of the article is “Dance that tries too hard”. I’ve always felt that the jokes were just to get a laugh, and that it made me feel talked (or danced) down to. In addition to my hesitance about the creative work itself, I became frustrated that Ira Glass got to  “discover” modern dance for all these people in the audience. In descriptions of the project, modern dance, a vast tradition, was deemed generally unlikeable or un-gettable, by Glass himself. It made me wonder why people couldn’t discover something without it having been curated as extremely palatable for them. What if, instead, I was the person curating someone’s first viewing of modern dance through some of my most favorite things…

…Emily Wexler with walnuts pouring out of her skirt in Yvonne Meier’s Mad Heidi or better yet, her black boots narrowly missing colorful glass bottles in her own solo Fact or Fancy inspired by her grandmother’s radio program of the same name.

…Naughty Bits by Jen McGinn where some dancers wear tails, feathers or priest collars while performing the most difficult and intricate musical patterning I can imagine.

…Children’s Dance Theatre teenagers embodying Water Study and trying to explain to their parents the importance of silence and breathing.

…Katie Meehan lying on the floor listening to the Beach Boys playing out of a seashell covered television; Leah Nelson & Cortney McGuire pulling dresses over pregnant bellies before a re-staging of a duet they made as fivefour; Linda Denise Fisher-Harrell performing Cry in rehearsal in the smallest studio at the American Dance Festival; Dawn Springer breathing life into cover song after cover song in a token of one’s affection; Tara McArthur first performing Duet for Ririe-Woodbury, looking so unbelievably cool; Miguel Gutierrez working on Retrospective Exhibitionist in the small basement studio of the Dana Science Building at Hollins University as my childhood best friend Sarah Crass strides through having no prior knowledge about the artist she will witness and no suspicion of how well-known this piece will become…

Why would those introductions to modern dance be things that anyone would get “less” than highly choreographed jokes? They might not be inherently better than the introduction provided at Kingsbury Hall that night, but would they be as awful as Glass made the rest of “dance” sound?

A week or so later, in the Capitol Theater I watched Ballet West’s The Rite of Spring. The evening featured the title work by Nicolo Fonte, Forgotten Land by Jiri Kylian and Divertimento No. 15 by Balanchine. I experienced the same phenomena of an audience viewing something fresh while I saw different things living inside the dancing.

In the opening piece by Kylian, the audience gasped as the dancers did backbends or offered any kind of yielding in their partnering. What they found surprising I found to be comforting, as I could see inside it the dancing of Jose Limón and Helen Tamiris, or Alvin Ailey’s careful groupings, Doris Humphrey and every other modern dance choreographer who was inspired by the Shakers. While I know the piece is uniquely inspired by visual art, I can see inside of it numerous dances that share the same themes or physicality.

This isn’t to say the choreography is derivative because it wasn’t, it was complex and fascinating. But, in my viewing of both concerts, dances became houses for memories of other performance experiences. And in both cases, the people around me seemed, for the most part, to be watching something new, something singular rather than simultaneous. It almost gave me envy, of what I might experience if I had seen somewhat less.

After Kylian, an overlong Balanchine piece rolled around. The friends I was with asked how I could possibly like something so boring and conventional. My only reply was that based on my experience in ballet class, it seemed like it would be fun to do. I’ve always loved the slightly off kilter petite allegro of Balanchine because I’m good at it; that’s why I was watching his work enthusiastically. Maybe Balanchine is my Monica Bill Barnes, something I find infectious or likable despite my objections to the particular hierarchical structures of ballet including endless pas de deux and stationary corps. It’s something I like just because it makes me personally happy.

Ballet West’s final piece, a new Rite of Spring by Nicolo Fonte, was another exercise in viewing a real life performance simultaneously with other things, namely, Pina Bausch’s dancers running through the dirt and my toddler son watching a T-Rex brutally murder a brontosaurus on a VHS tape of Fantasia in the living room of my childhood home. For others in the audience this Rite, leather clad and featuring an industrial set characteristic of the choreographer, was their first taste of a narrative that, to me, was already distinctly experienced.

Despite it’s newness, ballet audiences can recognize The Rite of Spring the same way they recognize a Bolero, as a system where new ideas can play out rather than a purely new work. I remember in college learning that during the reconstruction of the original Rite, pointe shoes were examined to explore the steps. We all called it “Ballet CSI” but really it’s more magical than that, and speaks to what I’m after here–– that steps performed fleetingly do hold a lot more of a moment inside them than we offer credit for when we engage in conversations about the way in which dances disappear in time. While this wasn’t my favoriteRite, it does remind me just how many exist and that’s a kind of gift.

Despite my preferences, or those of the New Yorker writer mentioned above, the audience at Kingsbury Hall and Capitol Theater on those nights seemed to be eating up what was presented, whether it was because of a witty radio host or an astute artistic director. The landscape of performance is inevitably dominated by what we are told is likable or good rather than what we may find on our own.

As I write this I can already predict the response from my peers: “but don’t you think Ira Glass opened the doors for people to think differently about dance?” My answer is unequivocally no–– it only opens doors for people to think differently about Monica Bill Barnes, a person they’ve now been given permission to understand. I significantly doubt that anyone left Kingsbury Hall choosing to look into what modern dance offerings were made by comparable regional artists. Similarly, I’m curious if Ballet West audiences were motivated as viewers to seek out other Rites, or if they simply enjoyed the work of Nicolo Fonte, who will make many more ballets for the company, then left the theater.

All of that is fine. Beyond my curiosity over my relationship with other dance goers, I ultimately left both theaters glad that people enjoyed dance. It’s the same way I felt when my young students at the American Dance Festival enjoyed Pilobolus. You couldn’t have payed me to watch the concert, but when something seems magical or fresh to you, it just is.

Ashley Anderson is a choreographer based in SLC. Her recent work has been presented locally at the Rose Wagner, the Rio Gallery, the BYU Museum of Art, Finch Lane, the City Library, the Ladies’ Literary Club, the Masonic Temple and Urban Lounge.

Upholding Tradition, Defying Definition in BW’s Innovations

Ballet West produces Innovations each spring as a platform for the company’s dancers to explore their own choreographic pursuits alongside more established guest choreographers. While a great opportunity, it is still rare nationally to find full evening programs devoted to dancers’ own choreography. Ballet Arizona, Ballet Arkansas, Ballet Idaho, Ballet West, and Kansas City Ballet are a handful of companies that present such a program in their annual season.

Innovations inspires initial expectations for me as a viewer: that the evening’s works will innovatein some way: structurally, choreographically, musically – in any or all of these ways – diverging from the typical classical, neo-classical, or contemporary ballet. Some work diverged more than others from these existing categories, but all presented mastery in their crafting.

Emily Adams’ Homage is a narrative work, inspired by Salvador Dali’s “Homage to Terpsichore.” A conflict between the dancers in flowing pink and their shadow-like counterparts emerges both through emoting and a sharp contrast in movement qualities: Adams’ choreography lends itself well to storytelling. While Homage falls more under the classical umbrella, Adams (somewhat of an Innovations veteran) shows that she is capable of producing a full act ballet that understands narrative arc. Adrian Fry’s Pulse, which draws inspiration from qualities of the human heart and a commercial for Google Play, is abstractly movement-centric. The dancers weave in and out amongst each other to create a pulsing quartet. Abandonment of narrative, alongside the Dvorak score, feels in this case neo-classical , and the choreography stays within the realm of classical ballet. However, Fry’s choreography does prove a deft vehicle of expression in Pulse, even if not one of exploration.

Katlyn Addison’s The Hunt was the most successful piece in terms of risk-taking and divergence from familiar forms. Addison places live drummer Cameron Hodges onstage, which contributes to a heightened sense of urgency and more physical abandon. The dancers place emphasis on both elevation and groundedness, a certain qualitative divergence. Structurally, Addison does not provide a rigid narrative, but the dancers engage in constant movement dialogue with each other and the drummer. Addison’s choreography draws from a variety of influences, both modern and African dance forms; this reinforcesThe Hunt’s sense of purpose to convey a new idea.

Professional guest (and resident) choreographer Nicolo Fonte’s Presto is shorter and features a smaller cast than much of his other work in Ballet West’s repertoire. Yet even in this distilled format for four dancers, Presto is an iteration of what has become a contemporary ballet stereotype: mostly classical movement with affectations (a flexed foot, a tilted pelvis, a claw-like hand), a minimalist score (Ezio Bosso, in this case), an exposed lighting grid, and “futuristic” costuming (silver lamé). Presto is clearly distinct from and more contemporary by definition than the likes of Petipa, Nijinsky, and Balanchine; however, it exhibits ideas that have become so familiar in the Era of The Contemporary Ballet that I question if these qualities of a work continue to exhibit innovation on their own.

Professional guest choreographer Garrett Smith’s world premiere Facades could be described as “Jiri Kylian meets Phantom of the Opera.” Facades combines Baroque aesthetic and music with elements found in classical ballet, contemporary ballet, and even commercial dance. The costumes have Baroque and classical silhouettes, yet are flashy and made of non-traditional materials (the men’s “waistcoats” were sheer, tutus were red and sparkling). The canvas drop painted like an ornate gilded mirror provides an interactive visual aid for the exploration of reality and its reflections or distortions. Smith draws upon classical choreographic devices, yet strays from conventions. The entire women’s corps de ballet, though in classical tutus, appear kneeling in profile and continue lying down for a gestural sequence highlighting body-halves. Male/female partnering sequences employed head tics and quick parallel swivels that were more wind-up doll than pas de deux. Use of a narrative thread is ballet at its most familiar, but the other layers ofFacades are Smith’s own innovation.

All the works in Innovations show excellence in crafting of movement or narrative. But the works that stand out and stood up to my expectations of innovation drew upon many influences to create a unique statement. Recognition of tradition may always be important to ballet as a form, but ballets that feel truly “contemporary” will continue to defy definition.

Photo by Luke Isley of BW artists in Garrett Smith’s Facades

Amy Falls used to be a bunhead, and is still a ballet enthusiast. She coordinates loveDANCEmore’s Mudson series. This review is published in collaboration with 15 BYTES.

Classics Shine in Ballet West’s Triple Bill

Ballet West’s annual mixed bill presents the work of neoclassical icon George Balanchine (Square Dance), Ballet West’s resident choreographer Nicolo Fonte (Almost Tango), and contemporary ballet pioneer William Forsythe (In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated). While the evening’s program is titled Almost Tango after Fonte’s newest Utah premiere, the choreography of Balanchine and Forsythe retain a timeless luster that outshines the new, many decades later.

While the ballet premiered almost 60 years ago, Balanchine’s Square Dancecontinues to challenge the technically supercharged dancers of present-day with its swift, demanding choreography. Ballet West chose to reinstate the caller, of American Contra dancing tradition, though the ballet has been performed without a caller since the 1970s. The role of the caller is taken on by artistic director Adam Sklute, who puts his own delightful and whimsical spin on this movement-centric ballet. Aside from evoking giggles from an otherwise serious audience, Sklute’s clever rhymes and references, often calling out the dancers by name, add an accessible window into the onstage world. As Sklute calls out “Here comes Rex [Tilton] to dance with Katherine [Lawrence],” the dancers are introduced as humans, rather than anonymous moving objects on the stage. Sklute’s rhymes about cowhides and his onomatopoeia-like descriptions of steps give the dancers a true reason to sustain smiles through Balanchine’s quick petite allegros and fast pirouettes. As Sklute chants to the dancers, “the more you dance, the better you feel”, they all appear to have taken this line to heart. A slow, brooding solo midway through the ballet danced by Rex Tilton provides a palate cleanser between upbeat sections. The solo is a refreshing take on the usual showy male bravura, coupling emotional expression with physical prowess.

Fonte’s Almost Tango, while a company premiere for Ballet West and the program’s namesake, provides some disappointment. The ballet opens with an all-male tableau. As they begin to move, soft yet strong arms and torsos and male-on-male partnering exhibit often underexplored possibilities for male ballet dancers. Adrian Fry stands out amongst the men of the ballet; his lusciously extensive yet grounded limbs possess an innate musicality, and he successfully melds softer, more effeminate nuances into moments of  strong, sweeping virtuoso. Alex MacFarlan also shows an ability to perform on a qualitative spectrum, as his duet with Jordan Veit toggles between support and surrender. While the all-male sections of Almost Tango feel like new ideas, the introductions of female soloists throughout the ballet are typical and uninteresting. Clad in low-backed leotards with chokers, the women are hoisted around by the men, flex their pointe-shoe clad feet a few too many times, and generally feel like a tired trope sprinkled into a new all-male ballet with potential unto itself. Fonte’s intricate partnering work can often appear dangerous, and that is exciting; however, the use of women in this ballet feels merely like a choreographic obligation to show off favored female soloists.

The ordering of the evening’s triple bill proves to be a relief, and the program ends on a high note with Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. The company appears more sure-footed than ever in this 1987 ballet. The dancers of In the Middleexude a newfound contemporary confidence and pelvic mobility that exhales to allow visceral engagement with the choreography. Perhaps it is the crashing, pulsing Thom Willems score that drives the dancers to this new place, perhaps it is the invigorating sensation of performing one of the single-most renowned contemporary ballets; perhaps, both. Regardless, the dancers reach an emboldened climax through a sense of urgency in this ballet that Ballet West does not always achieve in its contemporary explorations. Forsythe’s subverted balletic forms accelerate into attack mode and indulge in the extreme positions of the extremities; simple green leotards and sheer black tights emphasize the sinews and contours of the dancers’ bodies. It is this brazen fascination with the potential of the body’s mechanics that allows Forsythe’s ballet, which is not so new these days, to feel fresher and more audacious than, say, Fonte’s Almost Tango.

The program, overall, is one that Ballet West excels in, perhaps more than in mixed bills of the past. However, it is disheartening when ballets of past eras exhibit more modernity and innovation than ballets of the present. Balanchine’s Square Dance, from 1957, provides the audience with a still-unconventional light-hearted and human window into the lives of the dancers onstage. Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, from 1987, continues to push modern ballet dancers to the limits of their physical beings, despite an increase in athleticism of the dancer’s body between then and now. But Fonte’sAlmost Tango, originally staged in 2002, seems to only glance along the surface of contemporary ballet tropes explored in the period of time between Balanchine and the present day. A future investigation of this all-male scenario introduced in Almost Tango could be an opportunity for deeper exploration of dancers’ roles and purposes in the landscape of the contemporary ballet. And as exhibited by this program, the dancers of Ballet West are ready to tackle any contemporary challenge the future may present.

Amy Falls is a choreographer, performer, and the Mudson coordinator for loveDANCEmore. This review, and others by loveDANCEmore are in collaboration with 15 BYTES.

Photo by Luke Isley

“What We See” from learning to loveDANCEmore volume 8

The latest edition of our performance journal, edited by New Media Coordinator Samuel Hanson, will arrive this coming week. Volume 8, displacement, features the work of many talented artists and critics from Utah and beyond. It’ll be available at Daughters of Mudson, get your tickets here. To whet your appetite, here is a piece by Ashley Anderson, which deals with how we see dance from ballet to Monica Bill Barnes.

What We See: Thoughts on Ira Glass, Monica Bill Barnes and The Rite of Spring

Several weeks back I got to see Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass perform Monica’s choreography as part of Ira Glass’s show at Kingsbury Hall, and later on I got to see Ballet West’s Rite of Spring. Both experiences left me asking questions about what frames my experience as a viewer, and also placing myself in the position of other audience members. The writing below is my way of grappling with my identity in relation to my peers in an audience. I am trying to see what they see, which is a task I don’t always consider while writing (or thinking) about dance.

I have long loved Ira Glass’s radio show This American Life on NPR. The show transports me to other parts of the country, but also to empathetic and interior parts of myself. When I had finished my MFA and was feeling extremely deflated at the difference between the work I was creating in the supportive environment of a liberal arts college versus my first apartment in Philadelphia, This American Life was one of the only things I enjoyed about my week trudging to and from a day job as a paralegal.

When I learned that Ira Glass was sharing the work of Monica Bill Barnes as part of This American Life performances and later, planning an entire tour, I got heated. My feelings about her works I’ve seen are best summarized by a piece by Andrew Boynton in the New Yorker (November 13, 2012). The title of the article is “Dance that tries too hard”. I’ve always felt that the jokes were just to get a laugh, and that it made me feel talked (or danced) down to. In addition to my hesitance about the creative work itself, I became frustrated that Ira Glass got to  “discover” modern dance for all these people in the audience. In descriptions of the project, modern dance, a vast tradition, was deemed generally unlikeable or un-gettable, by Glass himself. It made me wonder why people couldn’t discover something without it having been curated as extremely palatable for them. What if, instead, I was the person curating someone’s first viewing of modern dance through some of my most favorite things…

…Emily Wexler with walnuts pouring out of her skirt in Yvonne Meier’s Mad Heidi or better yet, her black boots narrowly missing colorful glass bottles in her own solo Fact or Fancy inspired by her grandmother’s radio program of the same name.

…Naughty Bits by Jen McGinn where some dancers wear tails, feathers or priest collars while performing the most difficult and intricate musical patterning I can imagine.

…Children’s Dance Theatre teenagers embodying Water Study and trying to explain to their parents the importance of silence and breathing.

…Katie Meehan lying on the floor listening to the Beach Boys playing out of a seashell covered television; Leah Nelson & Cortney McGuire pulling dresses over pregnant bellies before a re-staging of a duet they made as fivefour; Linda Denise Fisher-Harrell performing Cry in rehearsal in the smallest studio at the American Dance Festival; Dawn Springer breathing life into cover song after cover song in a token of one’s affection; Tara McArthur first performing Duet for Ririe-Woodbury, looking so unbelievably cool; Miguel Gutierrez working on Retrospective Exhibitionist in the small basement studio of the Dana Science Building at Hollins University as my childhood best friend Sarah Crass strides through having no prior knowledge about the artist she will witness and no suspicion of how well-known this piece will become…

Why would those introductions to modern dance be things that anyone would get “less” than highly choreographed jokes? They might not be inherently better than the introduction provided at Kingsbury Hall that night, but would they be as awful as Glass made the rest of “dance” sound?

A week or so later, in the Capitol Theater I watched Ballet West’s The Rite of Spring. The evening featured the title work by Nicolo Fonte, Forgotten Land by Jiri Kylian and Divertimento No. 15 by Balanchine. I experienced the same phenomena of an audience viewing something fresh while I saw different things living inside the dancing.

In the opening piece by Kylian, the audience gasped as the dancers did backbends or offered any kind of yielding in their partnering. What they found surprising I found to be comforting, as I could see inside it the dancing of Jose Limón and Helen Tamiris, or Alvin Ailey’s careful groupings, Doris Humphrey and every other modern dance choreographer who was inspired by the Shakers. While I know the piece is uniquely inspired by visual art, I can see inside of it numerous dances that share the same themes or physicality.

This isn’t to say the choreography is derivative because it wasn’t, it was complex and fascinating. But, in my viewing of both concerts, dances became houses for memories of other performance experiences. And in both cases, the people around me seemed, for the most part, to be watching something new, something singular rather than simultaneous. It almost gave me envy, of what I might experience if I had seen somewhat less.

After Kylian, an overlong Balanchine piece rolled around. The friends I was with asked how I could possibly like something so boring and conventional. My only reply was that based on my experience in ballet class, it seemed like it would be fun to do. I’ve always loved the slightly off kilter petite allegro of Balanchine because I’m good at it; that’s why I was watching his work enthusiastically. Maybe Balanchine is my Monica Bill Barnes, something I find infectious or likable despite my objections to the particular hierarchical structures of ballet including endless pas de deux and stationary corps. It’s something I like just because it makes me personally happy.

Ballet West’s final piece, a new Rite of Spring by Nicolo Fonte, was another exercise in viewing a real life performance simultaneously with other things, namely, Pina Bausch’s dancers running through the dirt and my toddler son watching a T-Rex brutally murder a brontosaurus on a VHS tape of Fantasia in the living room of my childhood home. For others in the audience this Rite, leather clad and featuring an industrial set characteristic of the choreographer, was their first taste of a narrative that, to me, was already distinctly experienced.

Despite it’s newness, ballet audiences can recognize The Rite of Spring the same way they recognize a Bolero, as a system where new ideas can play out rather than a purely new work. I remember in college learning that during the reconstruction of the original Rite, pointe shoes were examined to explore the steps. We all called it “Ballet CSI” but really it’s more magical than that, and speaks to what I’m after here–– that steps performed fleetingly do hold a lot more of a moment inside them than we offer credit for when we engage in conversations about the way in which dances disappear in time. While this wasn’t my favoriteRite, it does remind me just how many exist and that’s a kind of gift.

Despite my preferences, or those of the New Yorker writer mentioned above, the audience at Kingsbury Hall and Capitol Theater on those nights seemed to be eating up what was presented, whether it was because of a witty radio host or an astute artistic director. The landscape of performance is inevitably dominated by what we are told is likable or good rather than what we may find on our own.

As I write this I can already predict the response from my peers: “but don’t you think Ira Glass opened the doors for people to think differently about dance?” My answer is unequivocally no–– it only opens doors for people to think differently about Monica Bill Barnes, a person they’ve now been given permission to understand. I significantly doubt that anyone left Kingsbury Hall choosing to look into what modern dance offerings were made by comparable regional artists. Similarly, I’m curious if Ballet West audiences were motivated as viewers to seek out other Rites, or if they simply enjoyed the work of Nicolo Fonte, who will make many more ballets for the company, then left the theater.

All of that is fine. Beyond my curiosity over my relationship with other dance goers, I ultimately left both theaters glad that people enjoyed dance. It’s the same way I felt when my young students at the American Dance Festival enjoyed Pilobolus. You couldn’t have payed me to watch the concert, but when something seems magical or fresh to you, it just is.

Ashley Anderson is a choreographer based in SLC. Her recent work has been presented locally at the Rose Wagner, the Rio Gallery, the BYU Museum of Art, Finch Lane, the City Library, the Ladies’ Literary Club, the Masonic Temple and Urban Lounge.