Park City Institute presents Parsons Dance

Presented by the Park City Institute, Parsons Dance returned to Utah to perform an energetic and exhausting program at the Eccles Center. Founded in 1985 by David Parsons and lighting designer Howell Binkley, the nine-dancer company maintains a large repertory and touring schedule. This program included four dances choreographed by Parsons between 2003 and 2018, an earlier work of his titled Caught (1982), and a new Trey McIntyre piece commissioned for the company this season.

Following one frazzled volunteer checking in a will-call line that extended out the door, a shortage of programs, and a lengthy speech from Park City Institute executive director Teri Orr thanking a plentiful circle of generous donors, the evening began with “Round My World.” The curtain rose on six dancers in blue, under a bright overhead light. Choreographed by Parsons in 2012, “Round My World” was a lyrical/contemporary-style piece that featured, as its title suggests, a lot of circles. The dancers swirled around as a group or in pairs, linking their arms and positioning their bodies with and around each other to form various circular images. The costuming was starkly gendered, an approach also reflected in the choreography and pairing of dancers, with the men in flowy, light blue pants, sans shirts, and the women in knee-length, light blue dresses.

Parsons’ “Hand Dance,” from 2003, employed a back light to illuminate five sets of hands. Glowing orange, the hands skittered about in time with a racing piano score; at their best, using the freedom of untethered, abstract shapes to create wonderful, Fantasia-esque magic, and at their worst, elbowing the audience repeatedly in the gut with some groan-worthy gimmicks. When “Hand Dance” began, I wondered if (and how) it might develop into anything further - unsurprisingly it didn’t, echoing the single-note approach of the first piece.

The new McIntyre commission, “Eight Women,” came next. It utilized a trope that now seems to have become a persistent and pervasive standard: a stage doused in warm reds and oranges, choreography that liberally borrows from social dance forms, and a musical assortment of the swelling, oxygen-gobbling voices of the iconic greats of jazz, soul, Latin, Motown, etc. I’ve seen a version of this same piece at least a half dozen times over the last few years, from both touring contemporary ballet and modern companies: the dancers swirl around, ambiguously fiery, in this case to Aretha Franklin’s “Spanish Harlem,” but the content falls short when held up against the emotive legacy of the familiar musical selections.

Following intermission were three more pieces, the first of which, “Microburst,” was perhaps my least favorite. Four dancers were costumed in black jazz pants with one leg covered in fringe. The women also wore asymmetrical, ab-baring tops that were, frankly, terrible, resembling a purchase from a discounted dancewear catalog, such as for a children’s jazz competition number, rather than a choice made by an internationally renowned company with more than three decades of experience and resources to draw from.

The dance itself was a conceptual tangle of familiar artistic and cultural appropriations. The dancers performed popping and ticking movements in a swaggering, dance battle set-up to an original score by tabla player Avirodh Sharma. Overall, the piece was not sharp, quick, or together enough to be convincing, or to stand up to the music’s complex rhythms as the dancers traded places back and forth. A trend, as identified in the first half of the program, to centralize Utah native Zoey Anderson was further solidified. Clearly at home in the (literal) spotlight, Anderson tossed her ponytail and milked the vibe of “Microburst” for all it was worth, her aggressive energy and attack edging out any chance of focusing on the other dancers.

“Caught,” the heritage solo that Parsons dancers have been performing for the last 37 years, was predictably the standout of the program, again featuring Anderson. The piece began with her moving through a series of spotlights on the floor. Then darkness descended and wild sequences of traveling jumps were illuminated at their moment of full height by a flashing strobe. The effect was such that Anderson appeared to float, impossibly, around the stage. This simple, but complete, idea and the exacting execution of its technical trickery made the conceit work perfectly. Anderson performed “Caught” with impressive force to shock and awe, as well as elicit a mid-program standing ovation from, the Park City audience.

While “Caught” may have provided an exhilarating natural ending to the evening, the final piece was an example of another overused trope - the exhausting yet aimless, jazzy ensemble send-off, airlifted out of its natural context as a background diversion or transition in a busy musical theatre number. Anderson once again wiggled and jumped from spotlight to spotlight by herself while the other dancers wiggled and jumped around her. Although her energy and presence were undeniably striking, her competition-style “cheesing” was ultimately distracting and the spotlight which pushed her to the forefront throughout the entire program forced the other (capable and lovely) dancers into the uncomfortable role of accessory, belying the mantle of Parsons Dance as an “ensemble” project.

By far, the most exhilarating aspect of the program was the sheer energy possessed by the company. From start to finish, they were exhausting to watch, as each piece they performed was packed with huge movement, constant jumping, and neatly executed but dizzying turns. All that expended energy never quite made up for what it seemed was missing from the program, but it was nonetheless incredible to fathom how the dancers were able to sustain that dynamic.

Emily Snow is a Denver native who now calls Salt Lake City home. She has most recently been seen performing with Municipal Ballet Co. and with Durian Durian, an art band that combines electronic music and postmodern dance.

RDT presents Danielle Agami

Internationally acclaimed artist Danielle Agami is a considerate host.

Agami is also the founder and artistic/executive director of Los Angeles-based dance company Ate9, in addition to being a renowned choreographer, a Batsheva Dance Company alumnus, a Gaga movement research instructor, and a masterful, incredibly expressive dancer. Each of these many roles informed Agami’s powerfully realized and embodied solo, Framed, presented by Repertory Dance Theatre in the intimate black box theater at the Rose Wagner.

Agami is in town to restage Theatre for RDT, a piece first set on the company in 2016. She is known primarily for creating innovative works and collaborations that utilize the specific strengths of the dancers of Ate9; having her in Salt Lake as the repetiteur of her own choreography and the presenter of a career-first solo is a privileged look into the wider scope of her artistry.

First a hand and an arm, then a foot. Slowly, all of Danielle Agami emerged from the stage-left drapes in silence. She moved laterally across the floor, her image hazily reflected there by the effective low lighting designed by Pilar Davis. As the silence continued, the top light was brought up to reveal the shadows of Agami’s gestures on the white floor, over which she crouched and shifted. Her movement was grounded even in its moments of frenetic repetition, such that it never sacrificed clarity for lack of control. A fluid, graceful counterpart revealed her maturity as a dancer, as she reached absolute full extension before returning purposefully inward, her limbs turning in and out completely. An introduction, performed in silence, felt like a private, vulnerable moment we were allowed to access through chance and good grace. Then the music began, with the strings coming in and Agami walking out.

Upon her re-entrance the audience was fixed with the intensity of Agami’s direct gaze for the first time, perhaps realizing how much emotion had been conveyed before without it. She walked briskly down the diagonal, bearing a tray of popcorn and snacks which she proceeded to distribute among us. The host had emerged; we were meant to, and were made to, feel the dynamic shift of being explicitly and literally catered to, along with the complex of gratitude and discomfort that the reception of such performative accommodation may entail. Agami rode out the momentum of the gesture to great comedic effect, immediately escalating its scale with a precarious stack of gift boxes and a mini fridge. She chose not to be subtle in treating the relationship between artistic and material consumption. But malice and resentment were notably absent, as though Agami is personally compelled to be generous - almost as though what we do with her gifts is our own affair. Her last offering was a camera handed to a patron seated front and center, for whom she struck a provocative pose of dramatic curves.

The camera’s flash initiated another tonal shift. Agami established a series of too-familiar “dance” poses, freezing them for the static photographic medium. She then moved through the poses again, frantically articulating and re-articulating the assuming of each before moving on to the next, taking an iterative approach within the sequential progression. Rather than the more familiar repetition of themes varied across movements, Agami’s Gaga-informed repetition was immediate, exhausting one thought to depletion before moving on to the next. Cohesion was not achieved simply by revisiting motifs but rather through creating fully motivated, fully realized ideas. The forty-minute work was a series of these complete vignettes with thoughtful transitions that constructed a singular emotional landscape.

Danielle Agami began to speak directly to us, and the introduction of her voice heightened the experience as much as her gaze had previously. She spoke of dissatisfactions with her body, with aspects of her history and lived experience. Truthfully, had my viewing companion and I not been weeping more or less consistently since the silent exposition, we would have begun to during this brief and uncontrived address. It was pointedly framed as a decision to make disclosures, with the corollary “I wanted you to know that I know…” in the interactive orchestration of give-and-take. Agami had in fact snatched back several of her props from the audience, a gift box and a can of cola or two, but would proceed to draw many more objects forth. These included a stuffed cat, a punching bag and boxing gloves, club clothes and headphones, a cheese knife, and a cocktail shaker and chocolate syrup. All of these were utilized effectively, but none more so than the “prop” partner planted in the risers, Ate9 company manager Jordan Klitzke. Agami drew him down the stairs from the top row and began to duet with his inert form. It became a partnered piece that somehow encapsulated every rewarding and disappointing aspect of interpersonal action, including violence and intimacy, as well as tension and release, to a degree I had never seen before. In the Q & A following the showing, Agami stated that the two were careful never to over-rehearse the duet, which no doubt contributed to its force.

RDT company member Ursula Perry also lent her voice to the performance, several times selecting fellow audience members to suggest to Agami as potential romantic prospects, enumerating their fabricated or cheekily veridical names and attributes. This was the rare recapitulation of a motif in the piece, and it served as an effective transition between ideas. At each suggestion, Agami would demur with a gesture. Finally, she firmly stated an imperative, “Stop; enough.” This was a definitive end to the bit, and it signalled a return to silence. The piece came to an end with a series of interspersed gestural invitations to leave, which some of the audience haltingly obliged, even as the work continued. The movement became more akin to personal research as the invitations became less obliging. Agami came to rest supine on the floor, before exiting with a nod of acknowledgement. The Q & A that followed was much like the piece itself: uncompromising honesty in the insights that Agami shared, with the sense that no choice in what was disclosed or withheld was made lightly or unconsidered. It was the last in a series of generous acts.

Nora Price is a Milwaukee native living and working in Salt Lake City. She can be seen performing with Durian Durian, an art band that combines post-punk music and contemporary dance.

OSBA presents Living Legends

Living Legends, a company that tours widely and is based out of Brigham Young University’s dance department, performed their current program, Seasons, for a one-night engagement presented by the Ogden Symphony Ballet Association. The show consisted of a series of Latin American, North American, and Polynesian ensemble song and dance pieces by performers of native descent. Per the show’s title, the pieces were grouped into seasons, each transition accompanied by narrative voiceover and projection. These were not the four solar seasons, however, but social phases which the program notes suggested to be universal to all nations: Promise, Plenty, Prosperity, War, and Rebirth. The title and structure nodded to changes that may be iterative and continuous, but also cyclical, underscoring the company’s dedication to representing tradition but also expressing vital, ongoing contemporary cultural identities.

The show began and ended with an element of theatricality. A young person shrouded in low-flow fog was beset by overbearing technologies and swelling electronic beats; they crouched before projections of familiar social media icons and drew their hoodie over their head. A dancer costumed as the eagle, of native North American origins, entered with and maintained a drifting triplet step reminiscent of flight, acting in the role of guide. Small groups in traditional costumes representing each of the three broad cultural sections filtered onstage and formed static tableaus recalling historical dioramas. They sequentially animated, guided by the narrative roles and song, and began to move, seemingly foreshadowing the series to come.

Until the final piece, there was no further pageantry external to the dances, and I did not miss it; the execution and energy was more than enough to captivate an audience. The first piece, a festive Bolivian Tinku, was among my favorites. It was danced to a musical recording of heavy drums and panpipes and featured steady marching and tight circling, the performers pitched forward in a half crouch while rhythmically throwing clenched fists, which alluded to the dance’s combat origins.

Another stand-out occurred later, in the “Season of Plenty.” This Samoan series featured live percussion, a welcome addition, and the playfully cocky interaction of a charismatic leader, or fa’aluma. After hyping up and drawing out the crowd, he was joined by other men for more sauntering and posturing, and then by a group of women, to form the large ensemble that he directed with shouted cues in performing the seated Sasa. A vernacular of iconic and everyday gestures became a unison sequence of impressive speed and infectious energy. The men resumed their satirical braggadocio to perform the Fa’ataupati, known also as the Samoan slap dance. The whole ensemble performed in startling unison, with the addition of coconut stalks in the Lapa Lapa, which were struck fast and loud against bodies and the floor to great effect.

Many of the dances similarly incorporated skilled manipulation of traditional material or costume elements with visual or musical impact, including feather and hand fans, the bells of the jingle dress, the expressively wide skirts of the Mexican folklorico dances, staves and bows in the “Season of War,” spinning poi of Maori origin, and the many hoops of the Hoop Dance.

The Hoop Dance closed the series of discrete cultural heritage dances and left a dramatic and lasting impression. Two dancers each artfully arranged twenty or more hoops on and around their bodies, both taking a unique and measured approach to achieving imagery in motion and striking static poses. The Hoop Dance was both showy and personally expressive.

A solo dance with many hoops originated in the 1930s and was performed in films and on the traveling show circuit, and was popularized by another touring show: the Lamanite Generation, formed at BYU in 1971 as a Native American performing group, and which became Living Legends. Also dating from that time was the closing song, “Go, My Son,” which espoused the values of family and education. As the closing bookend to the overwhelmed, hoodie-wearing youth’s arc, this number was a reminder that identity is always complex and never monolithic.

Faith in, as well as the institutional support of, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is an intrinsic part of Living Legends’ legacy and continuity, and although this was the least explicitly noted cultural heritage in the show, especially in terms of touring outside the cultural context of Utah, it is an inherently valid aspect of the group’s experience.

The show ended in earnest with a simple group song, bow, and ovation, following which the cast of performers headed out into the lobby alongside the audience. After giving such a committed, animated, and technical performance, the company was incredibly generous with their time and energy, engaging with patrons, especially the many kids in attendance, and offering a closer look at their incredible costumes. This level of ambassadorship from the cast in its entirety once again emphasized the company’s commitment to sharing and taking pride in tradition, and doing so as visible, present, and individual, but also interconnected, representatives of living and evolving cultural identities.

Nora Price is a Milwaukee native living and working in Salt Lake City. She can be seen performing with Durian Durian, an art band that combines post-punk music and contemporary dance.

UtahPresents: Bollywood Boulevard

UtahPresents’ Bollywood Boulevard, a journey through Hindi cinema, was performed for a lively audience in a packed Kingsbury Hall. Brooke Horejsi, executive director of UtahPresents, introduced the show, and recalled seeing the company at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series, loving it, and wanting to bring it to Utah audiences for the purposes of both entertainment and to showcase of a different part of the world.

Bollywood Boulevard combined the talents of Heena Patel (executive producer and artistic director), Rushi Vakil (executive producer, music director, and composer), and Rohit Gijare (choreographer and dancer) to create an homage to Bollywood, chronologically taking us through Hindi cinema’s black and white era, Golden Era, and into present day. Musicians and singers flanked the stage as the combination dancers-actors performed each snippet of the featured film. It was colorful, lively, celebortary, and incredibly nostalgic (based on audience reactions) for those that are familiar with Hindi cinema.

I have limited experience with Bollywood, but my friend I attended with, Srilatha (Latha) Singh, has much more -- she was born and raised in Delhi, India. Her voice will be included throughout, as her opinions and perspective shaped my experience of the evening.

Latha explained Bollywood pulls from various cultural and religious forms (for the dancing, music, and costuming) and then makes these forms not only widely accessible but also secular. She pointed out moments during the performance that hinted toward various groups living in India: Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, and tribal groups. In this way, I could see the important role Bollywood has played in bringing diverse groups together and celebrating universal stories of love, hardship, triumph, and family.

Each scene, never lasting more than a couple of minutes, was introduced with a graphic on the cyclorama that gave information about the movie it was drawing from. The pacing was quick, and when the show landed on local guest artist Sonali Loomba performing Kathak (modern dance entry point: Akram Khan’s formative training is in Kathak), I wished that time could be suspended to dwell longer on this classical form. Kathak began in Hindu temples as a means to convey scriptures but, similar to ballet, eventually made its way to the courts and is celebrated in various ways today, one being concert dance. I felt a desire to delve into the pulsating footwork and detailed upper body of the form, but the performance’s structure did not accommodate this.

Bollywood as a movement genre is not really a concert dance form; as Latha says, “it is a participatory art form.” It is at its strongest when you are celebrating alongside the performers, as was clearly demonstrated at the end of the show. The audience was invited to get out of our seats and fill the aisles, dancing alongside the performers. It was joyous to see so many audience members enjoying movement, music, and community. It was the perfect release after spending the evening watching the performers evoke the stories of this beloved form of entertainment.      

There was a moment, about halfway through the show, when I leaned over to Latha and asked, “Do you know most of these movies?” She replied, smiling, “Every single one. They would take the most popular songs and play them on Doordarshan (the official television channel owned by the Indian government) every Wednesday night.”

In that moment, I was struck by the beauty of being able to sit with a friend who recognized and understood every cultural reference, while I recognized none. What a world! I did appreciate the bright colors, the swirling and circling, the shimmying and bouncing, the upbeat and rhythmic dancing, the soulful singing; but Latha could connect each vignette with a specific time and place in her life, or decode the theme of a dance or the words to a song. My enjoyment wasn’t based in nostalgia (though I enjoyed watching and listening as others’ was) but rather on being introduced to a fresh view of aesthetics and entertainment.  

Erica Womack is a Salt Lake City-based choreographer. She coordinates loveDANCEmore’s Mudson series and contributes regularly to the blog.

Ballet West: Swan Lake

It’s hard not to be impressed by Swan Lake. The heavy, dripping sprawl of its monumentally megalithic iconography is… eternally overwhelming. The music and choreography live outside of themselves in my brain, and maybe in yours too. Working its way from a dismally received premier through many revisions to its present form and engendering a vast cultural legacy and innumerable derivatives; Tchaikovsky’s most fêted handiwork has been performed for 142 years. I have learned it and performed it and seen it performed countless times, both live and in recordings from all over the world. And I have to say I’ve never seen one I truly enjoyed more than Ballet West’s current production.

The Capitol Theatre itself isn’t overly grand or spectacularly sprawling. But it’s cozy and charming (as prosceniums go), which makes it a wonderful locus for intimate, storybook detail and concentrated, emotional storytelling– a strength Ballet West has been cultivating with excellence in its story ballets of late. As in recent productions of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, they have again created a thoroughly illustrated, richly peopled world full of color and character and spirit, distilling something exquisitely different and special from a story I thought I knew very, very well.

Beyond nuanced updates to choreography, aesthetics, and staging, spectacular performances by the dancers made the ballet thrilling in a way that had me mentally calculating if I could return for a second viewing before I even vacated my seat. The company is full of skillful and smart actors; more and more, I seen in them the impulse towards a descriptive expansion of humanity and the slow razing and retrofitting of old prescriptive tropes. From the smallest page to the featured soloists, the production was awash in distinctive, fresh, and textured personality. Brought to life in vivid saturation by David Heuvel’s richly colorful costumes, they formulated a collective depth that kept the stage buzzing electrically the entire evening.

The parade of national dances in the third act, the princesses proffering themselves as candidates for Siegfried’s hand, was especially enlivening. Usually, that scene is when I find myself most empathetic toward our hapless Prince Siegfried in his exasperation with his matchmaking mother, the Queen (“Come on, another one? Really? Give it up mom.”). This time it hit me completely differently, like I was eight years old again and watching Act II of The Nutcracker for the first time, each of its series of divertissements wildly new and colorful and exciting. Here, each princess had a unique personality and all were terrifically funny in their various reactions to princely rejection. Throughout the Czardas, the repetition of grave, delicate gestures, the dance’s whirlwind finish, and the shivery intensity of Lillian Casscells, Dominic Ballard, and their ensemble had me on the edge of my seat. They smoldered and I found myself taking back every curse I’ve hurled under my breath at that particular folk dance in the past.

Even better was the Neapolitan. Jenna Rae Herrera is an incredibly warm, bright spot of sun in the company. I love watching her dance in every production, her joy always palpable and generous. It fills you and lifts you straight up. Here, both dressed in yellow and each with a tambourine in hand, she and partner Alexander McFarlan stole the show during their variation. The choreography for Ballet West’s version of the Neapolitan was fantastic and everyone around me was elated, cheering and laughing aloud as the pair’s antics took them spinning and dashing wildly around the stage.

Throughout the two acts that take place in the royal court, it was plain to see the great care taken in subtly re-imagining and reinvigorating the classic choreography to keep momentum moving, every successive dance exciting and unique. The buoyant whirl of courtiers in beautiful, airy blue costumes flooded the stage in Act I before pulling back to reveal a delicately piquant pas de trois. The wide, laughing grin on Tyler Gum’s face was a sharp point of touching sweetness as he partnered Sayaka Ohtaki and Katlyn Addison. The large, intricately pinwheeling dance of the young courtiers and Ballet West Academy students, led by Mia Tureson, was funny, cute, and marvelously well-executed. As others have noted in earlier reviews from this season, the young Academy students are impressively capable performers and always exceptionally well-rehearsed. Tureson in particular was absolutely sparkling.

And then there were, of course, the swans. Rising out of just the right amount of billowing fog, their synchronicity and intensity made hearts soar (and my eyes sting). Sharp head movements and powerful sweeping wings gave this flock a little more strength and animal quality than others I’ve seen in the past. In the dance of the Cygnets, I loved the sharp focus of heads cast to each corner of the proscenium, rather than the often-opted-for slow roll down and around.

Also exciting was seeing the degree of variation in the corps de ballet. The dancers both looked and moved differently. Each was distinct unto themselves, and the double-down on a commitment to diversity that Ballet West has begun to enact over the last few years is starting to manifest in an appreciable way on stage. They were perfectly, ferociously, and crystalline-clearly in sync, as I remembered all the times in my youth that I heard that a perfectly identical body of bodies was the only way to achieve eternal and ethereal beauty. The satisfaction and elation of seeing a corps de ballet of swans like this one was piercing. I sincerely hope Ballet West continues to push in that direction.

Chase O’Connell portrayed Siegfried with signature elegance. Lofting about in technical excellence, his natural connection with Beckanne Sisk made for some beautiful moments in the two white swan pas de deux. I will say, though, that he appeared more at home in the moments when things were going well for his character. Harried despair didn’t hang quite as naturally on him, his moments of circling the stage in anguish maybe a little dry.

Sisk fulfilled the expectations that always precede her and then some. Fiercely technical with buckets of personality, I fully admit I expected her to hit the height of her shine as the black swan rather than the white. Both were excellent, but in fact it was almost the opposite. Forgoing some of the frailty of other swan queens, she had powerful wings like her corps, which served her better in highlighting the strength of her choice to trust the hunter and the eventual tenderness of that connection. She hit all the most iconic moments of Acts II and IV with a force that sent the room spinning, a rushing wave of divine recognition as her image lined up with the primary referent that lives at the back of my brain.

Her black swan was all sass all the time. Not even bothering to construct a facsimile of Odette and quiver her wings, she took over poor Siegfried with sheer force. I might typically expect a more paced build-up of devilishness to those fourth-wall breaks and that moment all the trickery is revealed, but honestly I’ve always found it hard to buy that the hapless prince really didn’t know the shiny new girl at his party wasn’t his true love from the forest. Whether it was a conscious artistic choice or not, I preferred interpreting that his character really does just fail miserably for a moment. It makes the betrayal even more wrenching and turns the final resolution into something much sweeter and more powerful, with layers of emotional verisimilitude that are more relatable. At any rate, Sisk’s wicked and hungry eyes are just so winning that it was incredibly fun to watch.

In the end, of course, Odette forgives her wayward lover and he continues to whirl her around tragically even as she starts to weaken and fall apart. In one especially striking moment during that final pas de deux, Sisk penché-d to the full extent of her powers towards a kneeling O’Connell before crumbling with almost ugly ferocity into a deep lunge. That simple horrifying fall into gravity carried all the weight of the couple’s despair as the evil Baron von Rothbart herded them towards death. Finally, the swan maidens returned to human form, their curse broken with the new light of day, bringing the story to a satisfying close.

Principal Artist Beckanne Sisk as Odette. Photo by Luke Isley.

Ballet West’s Swan Lake continues this weekend and next, through February 23, at the Janet Quinney Lawson Capitol Theatre.

Emily Snow is a Denver native who now calls Salt Lake City home. She has most recently been seen performing with Municipal Ballet Co. and with Durian Durian, an art band that combines electronic music and postmodern dance.