River of Rosewater

Salt Lake City’s Municipal Ballet Co. recently presented River of Rosewater, a reimagining of The Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s score was arranged by local band, Pixie and the Partygrass Boys, and the bluegrass background and prominent saxophone begged you to familiarize yourself with Tchaikovsky’s iconic work all over again.

River of Rosewater was a time capsule transporting the audience to the early 1920’s from the moment they walked in. The motif was justified throughout the performance by every detail; the costuming, the music, and the choreography. This particular performance of Municipal Ballet’s was specific to the historic McCune Mansion located in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City, but the limited audience capacity of 60 sold out weeks in advance. I was lucky enough to attend an open dress rehearsal at another historic space, Salt Lake’s Clubhouse. Clubhouse was once home to the Ladies’ Literary Club but is under new ownership and open and available for use. The art-deco architecture fit perfectly with the Gatsby holiday vibes Municipal Ballet originally anticipated with the Mansion site.    

Sarah Longoria is the director of Municipal Ballet Co. Along with the help of her dancers, Longoria wrote and choreographed River of Rosewater. I’ve seen the past few shows of Municipal Ballet’s and I can’t help but notice and fall in love with Longoria’s themes that set her apart as a choreographer but particularly, as a ballet choreographer. Longoria prefers to dance to something other than classical music and she has deep-rooted support for live, local music. Longoria is constantly finding musicians throughout Utah to bring into her self-created spotlight. While Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite is the most classical and typical “ballet” music I can think, Sarah was able to find the means to reinvent the score to meet her aesthetic.

Longoria pays attention to detail, and not just in the dance. She pays attention to every costume, every performer’s character nuances, the energy of the venue, etc. For example: I was wondering why the company did not charge for the open dress rehearsal. Come to find out, Longoria wanted the audience to be able to bring their own drinks because it was fitting to the theme and vitality of the performance (Utah’s laws won’t allow you to charge for a private event with alcohol being served). That attention to detail sets Longoria’s artistry apart.  

Photo by Temria Airmet of Municipal Ballet Co. in a dress rehearsal for River of Rosewater at Clubhouse

Clara Silverhouse, danced by the always lovely Tristana Yegge, is about ten years older than we know her. The show begins with a holiday party where Clara sips a little too much absinthe and has a vivid dream full of dancers and a mystery man. Each dancer sets the tone by wearing unique and custom-made, 1920’s-inspired dresses. The choreography mixes line-dancing and the Charleston as the dancers weave in and out of formation. The performers and audience were smiling and clapping along to the music.   

The dancers in Municipal Ballet Co. possess flawless technique and it’s incredible to witness the execution of their lines in such small quarters. Their movements do not shrink even though an audience member is mere inches away. As a concert audience, we have become overly familiar with viewing dance, particularly ballet, in a theatre setting. And I wouldn’t say it’s rare to see dancers in a close setting. Modern dance does not surprise its audience with the use of an obscure or forcefully unique venue, but in the ballet world, I believe Longoria is in uncharted territory, at least for Utah’s dance community.

An array of soloists then performed for Clara, each with a contemporary rendition inspired by the original work. The standout piece was the Arabian duet performed by Brian Craig Nelson and Cynthia Phillips. Smooth, almost acrobatic movement kept continuously curving and kept the energy twisting. My eyes couldn’t look away.

Photo by Temria Airmet of Municipal Ballet Co. in a dress rehearsal for River of Rosewater at Clubhouse

The magic of River of Rosewater came in Tchaikovsky’s music. Pixie and the Partygrass Boys took on the daunting task of arranging the score. They gave me a new appreciation for Tchaikovsky and how timeless his work is. The classic melodies of "Waltz of the Snowflakes" and "Trepak" were rebirthed with saxophone and distant vocal harmonies leaving me stunned. Pixie and the Partygrass Boys took a score that most dancers know all too well and made it sound brand new. I feel the same for Longoria’s story line. The Nutcracker is a story many of us know all too well. The roaring 20’s-take on Clara’s experience made the whimsical world of The Nutcracker much more relatable and, in my opinion, more enjoyable because I could connect to it. Municipal Ballet Co. did a beautiful job at reinventing a classic. I am sad that I missed the actual showing at the McCune Mansion, but if the performance went even half as well as the dress rehearsal then I would call it a charming success.

Temria Airmet is the Artistic Director of Myriad Dance Company. She received her BFA in Modern Dance from the University of Utah and currently teaches with Ballet West, Tanner Dance, and Millennium Dance Complex.

It's Not Cracker

I really don’t like the Nutcracker. To my relief, this wasn’t the Nutcracker, but It’s Not Cracker by NOW-ID, December 16 & 17 at UMOCA. With choreography by Charlotte Boye-Christensen, performances by the Bboy Federation, Brad Beakes, Tara McArthur, and Gary Vlasic, and lighting by Cole Adams, It’s Not Cracker was a collage that commented on, and ultimately transcended, the framework of the iconic holiday ballet.

The evening’s performance began with the snow scene, Tchaikovsky’s triumphant music from between the first half of the Nutcracker - the party scene, and the second half - in the land of sweets. Any 12-year-old aspiring ballerina who spent more than one year performing as a party scene girl (raises hand) knows that snow is when the show actually begins. It’s the moment when we get to leave the mundane world of sibling rivalry and tipsy parents to experience a magical other realm.

Performer Tara McArthur took us there. She entered from a door on the left side of a two-story painting of the Salt Lake Temple, an existing installation from UMOCA’s current exhibition, taking a quick sprint around the circumference of the stage. On her second sprint, Brad Beakes joined.

Their side-by-side run morphed into a duet. Deftly weaving lifts, abrupt beginnings and endings, and complex floorwork, these two moved like a flurry of snowflakes. Their adept performance highlighted the flux between starkly angled arm gestures and circular, fluid weight shifts characteristic of choreographer Boye-Christensen’s movement aesthetic. McArthur’s nuanced interpretation of the steps made the dance sing.

An aptly matched duo, I was intrigued during McArthur and Beakes’ brief side-by-side unison phrases, momentary punctuations to their run-on whirling, lifting, falling sentence. I expected Beakes to evolve into McArthur’s Nutcracker Prince, but as the work unfolded, I instead saw her little brother, Fritz. Though a skilled partner, Beakes was at his best when competing for a moment in Clara’s spotlight.

It took me a while to place myself within the score. Once I realized where we were, I sort of fell into Tchaikovsky’s falling snow. We didn’t stay at snow for long, with DJ Artemis re-mixing the  iconic score, we went in and out of sections of the Nutcracker, and other musical genres. At the close of this specific scene, performers from the Bboy Federation sprinted onto the stage as the music shifted. McArthur and Beakes noticed their entry, slowly fading off stage as the Bboy Federation began to dance.

Throughout the work, this kind of integration of multiple styles was evidenced. The Bboy Federation would perform break-out solos, overlapping with Beakes and McArthur’s ongoing duet. To me, the integration of these two different kinds of performers allowed the performers to speak for themselves, in their own aesthetic experiences, something that the original ballet could be rightly criticized for failing to do.

For example, during the Arabian music, six members of the Bboy Federation and Brad knelt on stage in two columns, facing inward. In the center, each artist took a turn improvising with their most specific tricks. This section, in other Nutcrackers that I have seen, is usually a celebration of the female dancer’s flexibility and sexuality, while she undertakes a series of acrobatic tricks in a skimpy, Orientalized Jasmine/Aladdin costume. To see this music re-narrated sans the racialized tropes, by performers speaking in their own voices, provided a more complex understanding of the musical score. Arabian transfigures into something mournful and struggling, while performers grapple with gravity in spins and headstands, and with the weight of the space in their upside-down freezes.  

The performer who really ran the show was Gary Vlasic. While attendees mingled and drank very mulled wine before show (raises hand), Vlasic lay on an iron bed frame positioned between bar and makeshift stage. He had his face covered by a hat, a black-painted nutcracker standing by his side. Floating overhead was an upside-down Christmas tree, also painted black.

Vlasic’s Drosselmeyer was reminiscent of the creepy things about the character in the original, (Drosselmeyer is an uncle-y character who showers one child with affection, but not her sibling, comes into her bedroom, and takes her to a place called the land of sweets - ummmm….), but Vlasic turns these creepy things into something else. He listened to his nutcracker, whispered in its ear, and together they hatched a plan. As the dance unfolded, Vlasic and his nutcracker slowly migrated from bedframe to a black plastic Louis chair center stage. When the nutcracker told Vlasic to join McArthur and Beake’s duet, he began to lead the two towards the edge of the stage, pushing on Beakes’ arm while Beakes carried McArthur on his shoulder. The piece culminated when McArthur reached high overhead, sending a glass circle swirling, shimmering circles of light flying around the room.

It’s Not Cracker wasn’t the Nutcracker. I was swept up with the dance in a way that maybe others, who still find the Nutcracker a magical part of their holiday season, experience. I wondered if the experience was the same for those not as intimately familiar with the original score and plot? A cursory investigation (I asked my non-dancer husband) revealed that some of the nuanced comment on the original which I saw, he did not. However, an experience he did have, and since that’s what NOW-ID sought to provide, it was indeed holiday magic.

Liz Ivkovich is the editor of the print edition of loveDANCEmore. She is putting her MFA in dance (Utah ‘16) to work for the University of Utah’s Sustainability Office and Global Change & Sustainability Center.

Articulate at the Provo Library

below is a review of Wasatch Contemporary's show at the Provo Library. we often miss shows in Utah and Weber country because we don't get press releases in time or lack writers who live in those communities. if you are interested in covering shows in either county, or present your own work there, please e-mail liz@lovedancemore.org

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Upon entering the ballroom of the Provo Public Library, I felt washed in shades of white, gray, and tan: white walls supported by four columns in the center, delineating the performance space; large swaths of tan fabric stretched between the columns, diagonally and across the back, slicing the space into four segments; everything bathed in bright gray light coming from projectors and conventional stage lights. The dancers, wearing various shades of maroon tops and dark pants, were warming up with unison movement, separated into three groups by the swaths of tan material. Their confident execution of tendus and plies energetically filled the space already brimming with dramaturgy. Even though some sections of the stage were concealed, I was guaranteed by measured continuity (of set, costuming, and unison warm-up movement) that I could sit anywhere and experience the performance exactly how I was intended to, without any risk of indeterminacy or room for free-association. Wasatch Contemporary Dance Company was in control.  

The company describes Articulate as, “a narrative performance that explores the theme of human connection and how it has been changed through time by the development of communication technology.” We were explicitly invited to indulge in our phones during the show as long as we posted photos and videos of the piece to the company’s facebook and instagram pages. We could also “get involved” in the show by turning our phone’s flashlight on during one section. These invitations were taken lightly by most audience members.

The piece began scratching. This sound was contextualized by a projected image of a pen writing calligraphically on paper. Hidden behind the fabric that was being projected upon, a dancer moved a phone light in a similar fashion to the movement of the pen. The comparison was understandable if not overstated since most people actually hold their phone still to communicate, the light beaming up, illuminating their face.

Articulate’s narrative was primarily driven by projections beginning with black and white footage of female telephone operators, then fingers typing on typewriters, followed by a lengthy interlude comprised of a compilation of vapid DIY videos found on the internet today. And finally, the work incorporated projections of the dancers themselves posing for “selfies”, live, throughout the dance. This final type of projection was intriguing because of its disorienting effect: what is the location of the subject being projected? How is the rest of their body moving? Those questions were usually answered conventionally – the choreography alternated between how ridiculous we look when we take photos of ourselves, and duets and solos that were combative or pained, illustrating the company’s perception of our relationship with technology. The swaths of fabric also served to demonstrate a literal web of problems and complications that come with communicating virtually - namely, the fact that it feels like a sheet is shrouding interactions in real life now that we interact on our phones more frequently.

The dance portrayed the frenzied movement required of mechanical communications of the early twentieth century. The quick choreography was constant throughout the work, possibly to illustrate the frantic mental/internal activity of people obsessed with curating their internet presence, but they did not seem to investigate the concept of communication technology kinesthetically. External/physical aspects of communication like sitting in one place, or pacing around, or trying to gesticulate via skype on a frozen computer, were not included. The movement was a continuous stream of poses, partnering lifts, and impressive weaving with the swaths of fabric, but manifested the equivalent of a run-on sentence using only three vocabulary words. There was no stillness or repetition of movement acting as punctuation or emphasis. Just as the movement vocabulary was limited, the representation of ways in which people communicate via technology was also limited. If an extraterrestrial being were to land at the Provo Library and witness this show, they would have no idea that entire social movements like Black Lives Matter and the Arab Spring have been fueled by online communication, or that there is a thriving net-art scene, and myriad memes, or even that there are much darker aspects of the internet besides people fixated on making themselves look better for the sake of taking photos of themselves.

Although limited in scope, Articulate was a genuine representation of how members of Wasatch Contemporary Dance are processing their relationship to technology with flowing movement tumbling constantly from strong, precise dancing bodies.

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

Ragamala at Kingsbury

On Saturday at Kingsbury Hall, Utah Presents hosted an evening with Ragamala Dance Company.  Directed by the mother-daughter team Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, the internationally touring company holds a venerable reputation as purveyors of the traditional Indian form, Bharatanatyam.  During a time where the world is brimming over with unrest and antipathy, the evening felt like finding the calm sacred eye of a storm.  Ragamala opened up space to share a blooming enthusiasm for life and to examine the threads that tie us together at the heart of it all.  

Performances by two local companies preceded Ragamala.  The dancers of Salt Lake City based Nitya Nritya Dance Company started the program with a traditional offering to the space known as Pushpanjali.  Although not always in total synch, the Nitya Company radiated youthful energy and charm in dances inspired our very own Utah mountains and the god Lord Shiva.  Chitrakaavya Dance performed next, another local project that aims to use the tradition alongside new collaborations to explore inter-cultural commonalities. They presented one piece fusing Bharatanatyam with the movements of modern dance, and another where Indian dance was meshed with English poetry. Chitrakaavya’s performance expressed themes related to the shared joy of moving and our connection with each other and the earth across generations.

The second half of the program was devoted to Ragamala’s Sacred Earth.  Conceptualized and choreographed by Renee and Aparna Ramaswamy, the piece mingles Bharatanatyam with two other great Indian traditions: the poetry and song of South India’s Tamil Sangam people, and paintings in the style of the Warli of West India.  Sacred Earth is designed to “explore the interconnectedness between human emotions and the environment that shapes them.”  The extensive program notes on the different cultural aspects at play were a welcome supplement, as they helped to further contextualize the musical and visual aesthetic.  The symbiosis of these elements was even clearer knowing that the Warli people painted to celebrate the spirituality they found in a balanced coexistence with nature, and that the Tamil Sangam poets created characters to explain and teach us about the human condition by linking different landscapes of the natural world to specific emotions.  

Although Sacred Earth contains eight clearly defined segments, it really draws a single golden line from the musicians’ first breath to the last dancers’ last.  Never truly pausing, variable combinations of dancers, songs, and poems shift together and apart to embody distinctive feelings and stories.  As they navigate these complex ranges of emotions, the dancers ultimately gravitate to a central tenor of harmony.  Even when the emotional tone dips towards the negative they don’t stay there for long, choosing to re-center on joy instead.  Bharatanatyam is extroverted and overtly presentational; the dancers engage in direct conversation with the audience and an emphasis on animated facial expressions is an integral part of that communication.  The dancers also rely on a highly gestural movement vocabulary and literal interpretations of lyrics to convey their stories.  Yet, it never feels pedestrian or cheap, and there are no “filler” steps.  Every flutter and twitch of muscle is precise and dense with meaning.

The five women of Ragamala showed absolute mastery of technique and control over the body. Whether imperceptibly slow or whirlwind fast, each movement was made razor sharp. Their ability to concurrently move each part of the body, at such dizzying speeds, to distinct and independent rhythms is mind-bending.  At one point Aparna Ramaswamy’s limbs were flying and contorting so quickly, I’m almost sure I caught a glimpse of her transformation into one of the many-armed Hindu deities.  

I also noticed that in Bharatanatyam the torso appears to remain largely calm and suspended upright, and everything else then unfolds and revolves around a manipulation from a midline at the heart.  This centering force present in each body provides a complement to the overall shape and directionality of movement, which is more so created by groups moving and flowing together rather than contained separately in each individual.  Bells around the ankles became another tool for interconnection as the dancers playfully added up an intricate game of sub-rhythms and accents that bounced from one body to another.

I found the duets where mother and daughter or the two sisters danced together powerful as well, feeling in the choreography a subtle acknowledgement of their familial ties.  Often times on stage a dancer exists as an isolate blank, their identity and relationships totally subverted.  Allowing their personal and performative identities to coexist was yet another way the Ramaswamys illustrated deep connection and a sense that all are part of a whole.

To tie the work together, the Warli paintings were projected in vivid monochrome behind the dancers.  Depicting images from differing natural settings, they shifted to match the dawn of each new segment.  As the piece drew towards its conclusion the scenes began to repeat and recombine, ultimately zooming out to reveal that all are connected as one.  

With a furiously joyful meditation on our shared place in this world, Ragamala Dance produced one of the most finely articulated performances I’ve seen in a long time.  It feels extremely rare and precious to see a work realize its intentions so absolutely and plainly in presentation.  The message of these classic traditions is ageless, and the reminder that our personal inner world is really part of something larger we must all share and protect together is more vital and compelling than ever.  

Emily Snow is a new contributor to loveDANCEmore. A graduate of University of Utah's Ballet Department, she most recently spent several seasons dancing with Central West Ballet in CA.

Photo (top) courtesy of Utah Presents

SALT at Eccles Regent

Lehi-based SALT Contemporary Dance, founded in 2013, was the first performing group to reserve space in the new Regent Street Eccles Theater this past weekend (a black box - or in the Regent’s case, a purple box). As mentioned by founding artistic director Michelle Nielsen in her pre-performance speech, SALT’s self-professed mission is to present contemporary works by local and international emergent* choreographers. While the members of SALT, and of second company SALT II, proved their technical prowess many times over throughout the evening, the programming choices themselves fell short of Nielsen’s boasts about the work the company seeks to present.

The first half of the program, three works by Ihsan Rustem, Jason Parsons, and Eric Handman, felt uncannily similar, particularly in movement vocabulary. Specifically, a leg extension in a la seconde - turned in, but with an aesthetically sickled foot at the end - made its indelible mark on each of the three. Other motifs were perhaps less memorable, but no less ubiquitous. I suspect that many of these choreographers in the program’s first half asked the dancers to input movement and that these similar choices might actually be a product of the dancers’ personal comfort zones rather than each individual choreographer’s vision.

Also in these early works, and despite the dancers’ facilities, I did not feel a kinesthetic use of weight and effort - instead, the movement seemed to stagnate at similar dynamic levels and gave the effect of many limbs gesturing with unclear intent and often at the same “volume” as each musical selection. The dancers’ internal, at times self-indulgent, foci further retracted the physical impact of the choreography from my viewpoint as an audience member.

In Rustem’s “Voice of Reason”, I enjoyed Elissa Collins’ counterpoint of stillness: seated facing the side with her legs outstretched, ankles purposefully extended like Barbie feet, she remained stalwart as duets unfolded onstage around her. However, the acoustic, singer-songwriter music that accompanied these several, all male/female duets - “But I wanna fall in love with you” - did not invite fresh perspective.

In Parsons’ “Tracing the Steps You Left Behind”, featuring SALT II, I was struck by a moment where one dancer, unveiled as the leader, controlled the all-female group to sink collectively, as if in a trance, to the floor; then upon rising, she conducted an orchestra of their seething bodies with her hands. There were several other such eerie, ritualistic moments, but their effect as a whole was diluted when the dancers walked slowly around the stage, staring warily at each other like many aimless deer in headlights.   

Handman’s “Omnivore” gave glimpses of greater dynamic variation than the two previous pieces, especially in a brief opening solo for Joni Tuttle McDonald. I am familiar with a significant body of Handman’s work, having spent semesters in class with him while at the U and having seen many of his pieces for Performing Dance Company concerts (albeit mostly work set on students). That being said, I noticed significant differences between this previous work and “Omnivore”, namely the movement vocabulary (which, of course, is subject to change throughout any choreographer's career trajectory) but also the kinesthetic effect and physical inhabitance displayed by the dancers, which has always felt singular and powerful in Handman’s work but felt less so in “Omnivore”.

A section of “Ominvore” did transcend the dynamic plateau of mid-level choreography done at a moderate tempo: wild electronic music invited chaos and the change in speed viscerally heightened a group section. This section was short-lived, however, and quickly found its way back to a meandering duet to equally meandering music, rife with affectations (sometimes confusingly classified as “contemporary”) such as the turned in a la seconde leg. This new choreographic chapter Handman might be exploring has lost some of the physical excitement, involvement, and even exhaustion that characterized the old.

Opening the second half of the program, “Comes the Night” by Brendan Duggan began with a single stomping dancer, slowly increasing the tempo and setting the rhythm for the phrase the group would soon break into, also incorporating stomps. Breath was audible and one could hear bodies slapping together at times, finally giving the SALT dancers weight and purpose both in space and in relation to one another.

Duggan also defined relationships between dancers in his world more clearly, aided by dancer-delivered text about a relationship intertwined with a vigorous duet. The content paired with the male/female duet did feel campy at times, but eventually morphed into a larger group alternately delivering lines about compartmentalizing the past and letting others in: a concept much more universal, and perhaps open to investigation, than a female telling her male counterpart that he is “boring!”

Ketley spent several weeks in SLC over the summer teaching classes at Salt Dance Fest, and “A Particulate History of Friendship, The Trial and Absence of Stillard Mave” was a collage of phrases that I learned in one of these classes and spent hours workshopping. Maybe it was this prior connection to the choreographic material that hindered me from seeing the piece as a singular entity: the structure felt haphazardly patchwork, with the roster of phrases merely rearranged in time and space. Group unison was executed in contrived chaos, using different timing and facings, and duets were bolstered by swapping out partners several times.

Ketley’s phrase material itself was captivating and, by far, the most inventive on the program. He choreographs movement with an attention to, and even an indulgence in, gesture while still retaining a sense of matter-of-factness. Varying degrees of attack and delicacy further colored the surprising shifts in level, from soft gestures done standing to sudden, brash poses on the floor. As in several other pieces, an intricate duet that took place on the floor was difficult to make out, as the risers in the Eccles Regent offer a very low grade of steepness with many heads partly obscuring almost half of the marley.

SALT’s success in the community it seeks to serve is evident in its outstanding attendance. As a local dancer attending a community dance performance, I relish SALT’s success, and similarly relish all the many unfamiliar faces seen at Friday night’s performance who walked away having seen more dance and of a different kind than they may have ever seen before. At the same time, again as a dancer, I’m not sure SALT’s diligent marketing of “fresh” and “innovative” correctly describes the company: much of the work I saw over the course of the evening was familiar to the point of feeling derivative, even identical, despite featuring truly stellar dancers with a variety of backgrounds and the work of choreographers from all over the world.

In the future, let’s go easy on the qualifiers, and remember that invoking “contemporary” should just refer to dance that “belongs to or occurs in the present”, rather than dance that adheres to an arbitrary set of aesthetic standards. After all, it’s really only contemporary right now.  

*I wondered what, if anything, SALT aimed to distinguish by opting for the less-used “emergent” over the common “emerging” when describing up-and-coming choreographers in a section of their program notes. I thought an exploration of the company’s semantic choice here could further shed light on their mission. A Google search I conducted for the difference between the two yielded few results, as “emergent” is not in common use. The best definitions I could find, via The Difference-Between, were “emerging”: becoming prominent, newly formed, emergent, rising; and “emergent”: arising unexpectedly, especially if also calling for immediate reaction, constituting an emergency. “Calling for immediate reaction” is probably the intended effect of invoking “emergent”, but to me “emerging” remains more relevant when describing choreographers: becoming prominent, or newly formed, but not constituting an emergency. If SALT is making a purposeful distinction between “emerging” and “emergent”, it seems a superfluous one; that is, one that does not serve to change the nature of the work presented but rather only the language that surrounds it.

Amy Falls is loveDANCEmore's Program Coordinator and regularly contributes to the blog. 

Photo (at top) by Ismael Arrieta / Artwork by Lisa Marie Crosby