Movement Forum aka mofo

below check out the review from Belle Baggs of the 9th & 9th showing by Movement Forum. if you caught them today at Liberty Park feel free to send reviews and make sure to check out their work on stage at the Rose Establishment tomorrow night at 6pm ($5 at the door).

On a Friday summer evening it was refreshing to catch our local dance improv-ers parading in a local outdoor setting.  Movement Forum (aka Mofo) presented The Surreal World on the 9th and 9th intersection, an hour-long improvisational show that interweaved between traffic lights and pedestrians.

I enjoy that ambience of performance art because the craft just lives in the space that one is occupying and is available for viewing at your convenience. You don’t feel obligated to stay focused and ideally present as with staged performances. Instead it feels casual enough to chat with friends and drink some coffee while at the same time reveling in the motions caught by your eye, in this case the silly and purposeful awkward transits of the dancers.

The mobbing of the 7 dancers formed around the perimeter of the intersection as the soundtrack blared a chorus of chirping crickets. They waited for the walk signals and proceeded in clumps with varying types of locomotion:  hopping, skipping, and jumping. It started more low-key and soon became a string of people twitching, jolting, and jerking in a ripple effect as if they had directly been shocked with electrical voltage. Next followed a section of mirroring, as the dancers separated and followed each other in spontaneous movements from their diagonal posts.

I admire this form for the way it almost forces the non-audience members to become involved. Local consumers and traffic are coerced into watching the absurdity taking place in the cross walks. Imagine waiting at the stoplight in your car and witnessing a trio of people walking nonchalantly across the street, yet one of them is being carried inverted with her legs erect in the air.  On the other side you view a group of strangers beboping across the street on their hands and flinging their limbs in the air. While in the corner a soloist is like a proud warrior practicing his balance skills and flowing with strength and peace. You can’t help but laugh as a free will audience member. Watching the onlookers’ reactions was one of my favorite parts of the experience.  Some opted to completely ignore the circumstances (which was even more hilarious) and some decided to react or ask questions.

What I respect about the company is that all of the movers are unique and interesting to watch as individuals. As with any improvised show my inquiring mind always wonders what the score is (if there is one) and how did they make their plan of attack? I found myself waiting and anticipating the drive of the show, especially in the transition moments of waiting for the “walk” signal.  But at the same time it was nice that as a whole the surreal effect was curbed (pun intended) All in all they are a dynamic group of performers and completely likable characters in this performance as they kept their cool while erupting semi-chaos on the 9th & 9th grid.

After the show I saw a family of layman skipping and hopping across the street—that is the power of taking art directly to a public forum. As Erica Womack, dancer and audience member, said, “ I’ll always think “how” I will cross the street and perhaps try something more “creative” or “interesting” next time.

Belle Baggs is an Idaho native & holds her M.F.A. from the University of Utah

a review of Now the Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam Hanson

the very BEaST

 

In anticipation of attending last night’s concert, I imagined the VERY BEaST of SB DANCE to be a unicorn—a mythical beast of which I had heard fantastic stories, but had yet to see with my own eyes.  Since moving to Salt Lake City in 2008, well-intending people have suggested on more than one occasion that I should check out SB Dance.  Three years later, here was my chance.

The VERY BEaST of SB DANCE is a sampling of the company’s greatest hits from 1997-2006, including one hit from each of the selected 10 years.  As excerpts of longer works, each piece offered a glimpse of what SB Dance must have been like in its glory days.  Through the use of his adept dancers, props, and lighting (kudos to Glen Linder), Stephen Brown creates an entire world in a matter of moments.  He is a choreographic master of images.

Like catching a glimpse of a unicorn through shadowy evening mist, I see Juan Adalpe’s shining face staring into a silver bucket that seems to glow from within.  I see Nathan Shaw and Jenny Larsen gliding across an eerie green stage via an industrial kitchen table on wheels.  I see Stevan Novakovich dressed in a long flowing blue skirt, tumbling in the wind of an upstage corridor of light.

Other moments were less like glimpsing a unicorn–Corinne Penka sporting a ball gag and Nathan Shaw baring all–but I presume Brown’s world must include some dark magic as well (perhaps this is the “adult themed content” I was warned of at the box office).  In fact the last three pieces centered on the theme of nudity, which I found to be a bit of an overkill.  However, Shaw’s full-frontal in the final piece of the evening, Waltz of the Dog-faced Boy, offered a cheeky discussion of the use of nudity onstage that reminded me of Dorothy and her gang venturing behind the curtain at the climax of the Wizard of Oz.

In the program notes, Brown writes, “SB Dance’s funding has drooped to a 10-year low.”  I wonder, which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Has the company not made any new work in the last five years because of low funding or is it the other way around?  Either way, my guess is that The VERY BEaST of SB DANCE is a call to galvanize SB Dance supporters for new work to come.  Overall the evening was a wonderful tease, like a series of decadent hor’dourves with no entrée to follow.  Now that I have seen the magic Brown can create in a moment, I am hungry to see how he sustains that over an hour.

Elizabeth Stich completed her MFA at the University of Utah

Two SaltDanceFest Reviews

What Just Happened?

A review of the Guest Artist Concert Series for SaltDanceFest 2011

There are lots of new performers in town right now, as part of the University of Utah’s SaltDanceFest, a first annual for the Department of Modern Dance. It is wonderful. I hope it comes back next year. The artists (three sets of married couples!) are teaching masterful classes for a wide variety of local and from-afar participants. This past weekend, each couple presented work in the Concert Series at the Marriott Center for Dance.

Sign of the Sparrow, performed Friday night by esteemed improvisers Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser, may be a harbinger of things to come, but only if nothing much is coming. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Aiken and Hauser are poised and quietly graceful, and if they do not bring fireworks then perhaps explosions are not the point. I was never nervous for them, which speaks to their palpable confidence, though I did suffer in moments of lift-off which never quite managed to soar. Throughout the 50 minute improvisational evening, which they shared with a musical collaborator, the fabulous Jesse Manno, the dancers walked, they stood, they looked, they sat, they left and they came back. With finesse, they probed the thing that they were making, and with measured glances they probed us as well. Perhaps they did not find what they were looking for. In the end, I felt that the greatest risk they took was to arrive. Sometimes that’s enough.

Eiko & Koma opened Saturday evening with Duet, premiered in 2004. Time stood still. A window was opened. I was reminded of grandparents, fishing villages, and crumpled tissues on the floor by the couch. The performers, with their fierceness and their fragility, threatened to expose every part of a love story that you don’t want to see. When she bowed forward, I waited a year for Eiko’s rough hair to finally drop towards the floor. She breathed, and I saw every bone and sinew in her back pull taut. How much of the power of this duo rests upon her proud shoulders, although she is skinny as a plucked chicken and seems ready to blow away in the dust?

Duet was 20 minutes long, and I just barely had enough time to think all the things that I wanted to think about it. It is incredible that their characteristically glacial timing could hold so much suspense. In the last moment, finally the two are together, and they begin to recline backwards towards the floor. Their faces drop out of sight, like the sun setting behind a hill, making us wait for the end like a lingering twilight on a long evening in summer.

The final couple, Teri and Oliver Steele, take the stage with their formidable dancers in Still Waters Run, which was premiered in 2002. It starts in quiet, but the flouncy yellow dress gives us a hint of the coming rumpus. There will be rap music, a trampoline, and lots of smeared lipstick, but the strongest moments are in the beginning between these two veteran performers. The delicacy of an articulated foot, and an expertly paired counterpoint phrase give us a sense of the quality in the Steele partnership. This promise is not often fulfilled by the deluge of dancing to come. The younger dancers, though sweaty, are not quite vibrant. Everyone seems to be in a different piece, and when the piece hangs on group theatrics, the humor falls flat. Everywhere there are three dance moves when one would do. Occasionally, the speed and strength result in a stirring momentum. There is some tricky work with some lyrics which happen to be from my favorite song from 1991. It’s clever, but when the catchy riff comes on, shouldn’t something happen?

Kitty Sailer in a M.F.A. candidate at the University of Utah

_______________________

The first annual SaltDanceFest has so far been a surprisingly rich experience. The coupled artists including Chris Aiken & Angie Hauser, Eiko & Koma, and Teri & Oliver Steele all bring unique talents and artistic views on movement, dance, and performance. It is a treat to be able to stay in Utah for the summer and have such notable artists come to the Marriot Center for Dance. The festival is small and intimate, which has allowed more space and time to interact and cultivate deeper relationships with visiting participants, artists, as well as with my own research. In particular I am savoring the afternoon performance improvisation intensive class from Aiken and Hauser titled, What Just Happened? Piggybacking the classes the festival included two evenings of performances sharing the work of the featured artists.

Performance improvisation is a fragile act—a vulnerable endeavor. I can’t help but think of this reality as I’m viewing the piece Sign of the Sparrow by Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser. What is “good” performance improvisation and how do we look at it as audience members when it straddles the ravine between the known and the unknown?  Aiken and Hauser both seasoned performers in dance improvisation previewed a workshop of a piece that highlighted the complexity of their field. Admittedly, I feel torn by my respect for them inside the workshop and having a soft heart for the bravery required to do their work, but still have to say I found myself absent from the specific content/product of the show. Maybe it was the wall and the formality created by the proscenium stage? Instead I was drawn in by my own interest in the technicalities of the process. Would I have looked at the dance differently if I didn’t know it was improvised?

The duet is a project inspired by visual artist Joseph Cornell, featuring live music by Jesse Manno, a short textured film, and 60 minutes of what they claim to be 99% un-scored improvised movement. Due to my heightened state of awareness of choice making during the performance I felt engaged by the shifting landscapes on stage and hoping for new information. What is going to happen next? They share the stage with intimate gestures and the soft catching of limbs or body parts, as if it is a translucent appearance of their off stage relationship. Manno’s vocal undulations along with his accordion accompaniment are bold, brilliant and swell the empty space while occasional shadow boxes appear for the dancers to enter.  Their silhouettes adjust from small to big adding an element of spatial perspective taking.

At once their vibrating arms synchronize while they face upstage to reveal the video, which appears to be grains of salt slowly descending. The tension of many moments were built, but lost. I could barely latch on to the substance or communication of the movement then the next impromptu lighting cue would send the dancers into a new direction.

I do have to say it is refreshing to watch improvisation where I don’t cringe or feel nervous for the performers. Both Angie and Chris can hold their own. Aiken bounds his small-framed body into many effortless inversions, while Hauser is enticing with her occasional outward gaze, confidence and easeful flowing joints. The most powerful image was her solo downstage. Her white draped costume glowed blue like a sylph as she glided across the space; light, peaceful, and calm. The physical contact section of the piece displayed their comfortablilty in playing with weight sharing while their bodies flung over, around, and on top of each; smooth like butter. But I kept asking and torturing myself…but why?

All in all, I have an enormous amount of respect for the work that they do and how eloquently they speak about and guide the process of improvisation. It’s a training that is a remarkable journey. One to love and one to hate. And when it comes to watching these kinds performances it can feel the same way. So to answer what is “good” performance improvisation is very complex, because it stands somewhere in the middle of honoring both process and product.  But what I’ll take away from this work is an introspective look at my own improvised life. What is memorable? How can I constantly re-invest myself to create those moments? I would be interested to see how this piece develops in the future as they are planning on evolving the performance under the title ‘Utopia Parkway which premieres in Chicago sometime next week.

The workshop will culminate in a panel discussion with the guests artists on Wednesday 6/8, 8PM @ the MCD and another improvisational performance with festival participants on Friday 6/10, 8PM @ MCD. I would encourage the dance community to come, ask questions and take advantage of their knowledge.

Belle Baggs holds her M.F.A. from the University of Utah

What Type are You at the Rose Est.

“WHAT TYPE ARE YOU?” brought together talented local choreographers Juan Aldape and Sofia Gorder at the Rose Establishment in downtown SLC.  Each choreographer created a work, with a 10-minute intermission in between to absorb the material and grab a cup of coffee.  The two works have in common a thread of social commentary, and the evening’s name is aptly presented in the form of a question, as each piece begs of the audience a certain degree of introspection about their own role in the surrounding society and culture.

A Comic Hero of Two Cultures by Juan M Aldape/DANZAFUERZA examined the relationship between México and the United States as seen through the lens of one individual straddling the two worlds.  Juan integrated text and movement, a difficult thing to do successfully in a performance.  The text, both live and recorded, was one of the strongest aspects of this piece.  The opening text was recorded, and sounded mechanical, detached, as it asked intimate questions about marriage, in the form of a naturalization interview.  As an audience member it was impossible not to begin to examine one’s own relationships with a lens as wide as Big Brother’s.  “What do you like most about her?  What do you like least about her?  If you had cancer, do you think she’d stay with you?”

Comic Hero illuminated the experience of an individual oscillating between marginalization and thriving, living in a place in which the surrounding culture makes up only one-half of his cultural identity.  Emotionality and empathy were elicited in the last section, in which the recorded voice impassively described what was clearly a very charged experience for Juan, an experience described as a “racial bike drive-by.”  Juan’s clever wording of the material and earnest execution of the movement helped the piece to not feel too heavy, while still maintaining its integrity.  The text provided poignant messages about identity, self-realization, culture and love over a backdrop of piñatas, Lucha Libre masks and more.  Perhaps a lot to pack in to one evening’s work, but it felt cohesive.

At one point,  Reggaeton-inspired movements gave way to more traditional modern dance-inspired cadences as the music transitioned to a droning rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.  The metaphor here was most likely clear to the dancers in the audience, but I found myself wondering if there was another way to express this thought in a more accessible way.

When She Becomes Un-Easy by Sofia Gorder opened with three women wearing cutoff jean shorts, printed aprons and colorful tops.  The three created a mosaic of bright plastic smiles to a soundtrack of an old record talking about how to “gain an appreciation of your role as a homemaker.”  The soundtrack provided a humorous backdrop to the frenzied movement of the dancers as they baked, pressed, cleaned and prepared.  Their smiling exteriors and increasingly anxious actions conjured images of the Stepford Wives.  True to this form, the three collapsed by the end, apparently overtaken by their efforts to maintain the perfect household.

Following the collapse, the rest of the dancers entered the performance area as a crew, efficiently maneuvering those that had “failed” off the stage.  The remaining six took turns dancing out of a line, and being helped and adjusted by the other women.  Eventually, each dancer was painted with permanent marker, in a clear allusion to plastic surgery.  The zombie-like expressions of the performers indicated acquiescence, if anything.

The most intriguing section was actually the most difficult for me to watch as an audience member.  All nine women huddled close to the middle of the performance space, and began to dance when one yelled out “yes!”  A Brittany Spears song then played while the women took turns dancing in the middle of the stage, in a way much like “Brittany” probably would.  The others yelled, in fierce support or defensiveness of what was taking place.  Eventually they all collapsed.  The through-line became clear here, and the point that even though we as women may feel liberated from the “stifling” past in which we were expected to cook and clean and please “our men,” overt societal expectations still abound, which we actively endorse.

Gorder proved to be an effective communicator regarding women’s perceived role in society, and was able to raise significant questions regarding whether certain expectations remain relevant, or even more so, in the current social context.  Her movement vocabulary was succinct and well-executed by the talented cast of women involved.  While the issues raised here by Gorder are important to consider in any social context, the piece at times seemed quick to revisit already familiar territory, rather than to consider the material in an innovative way.

About halfway through A Comic Hero of Two Cultures, Juan spoke the words, “All writers only ever write one story- their own.”  This is true of all art, and was well-reflected in “WHAT TYPE ARE YOU?”  Both Sofia and Juan drew on their personal stories to create their art; Sofia’s, of being a woman, a mother, and a provider for her family, and Juan’s, of being a man who identifies with two cultures, in two places nearby in geographical proximity but perhaps worlds away in reality.  I much appreciated being able to listen to these stories.

Emily Haygeman is a graduate of the University of Utah dance department and a graduate student in psychology. She regularly choreographs and performs in SLC.