Nancy Carter @ Sugar Space

This weekend at Sugar Space, Nancy Carter premiered her performance company Rumble Motion Jawbone with “Tale from the Land of Frightful Dreams,” as well as a short piece by Paul Wirth as a part of the New Blood Dance Project.

 New Blood Dance Project is a new for Salt Lake City; “non-choreographer,” Paul Wirth made a piece with professional dancers in the city and with the support of an experienced choreographer. This short piece, “At Last a Spell,” began the concert. When the lights came up, dancers dressed all in white were seated in a tight ball downstage left. They began slowly rolling out of their tight balls, up the diagonal. The piece continued, mostly on that diagonal, with the dancers first jiving by themselves to the music, then acting as forces on each other, and finished with them dancing to their own rhythms. It was great to see a work by a “non-choreographer.” It made me wonder what his process was and how it might have differed if an “experienced choreographer” since the end product was not as different as I might have expected. This is an exciting and admirable project; I hope that it continues.

Next up was “Tale from the Land of Frightful Dreams,” which was the majority of the concert. I was excited to see this new work by Nancy Carter, knowing that it combined contemporary dance with circus, acting, and butoh-like movement. Combining all of these seemingly disparate elements is no simple task and I was curious to see how the concert might come together.

“Tale from the Land of Frightful Dreams” did not disappoint. Carter beautifully and seamlessly wove together all of the elements, creating a unique and interesting world for the performance to exist in. Each character had their own unique movement signature that was completely different from every other character and yet each one seemed to fit with the whole of the performance.

    The piece began with Lumlum (Tatiana Mixco) peeking out from under the curtain—using different body parts to explore the stage space. She tentatively made her way out, becoming more and more confident. Her movement was playful, even squirrel-like, barely ever coming more than three-feet off the floor.

Next to enter was Iao (Michael Watkiss). First, just his hand and arm appeared upstage right, fluttering and slightly jerking. Then the rest of his body appeared, echoing that fluttery, jerky movement style—which soon became evident as his movement signature. Both of these dancers fully embodied the movement signatures so that there was a definite, unique and even three-dimensional impression for the audience. The same was true for Itst (Mary Oliver), Wetseek (Tanja London), and even for the Three (Cody Tahmassebipour, Lynn Bobzin, and Maryann Lang).

The Seer (Scott Maddix) was a lovely actor, but because his part was acted, it felt less embodied and not as three-dimensional as the other dancers. As an audience member, I was brought out of the “Tale” for a moment to adjust to the difference in his performance style.

Similarly, while the aerial lyra section with Chaise (Aleisha Paspuel) was beautiful to watch, this character also felt slightly less developed. There were not quite as many distinctive layers to her movement as the rest of the characters. However, the aerial work fit perfectly with the rest of the piece, which is often hard to pull off in a contemporary or even experimental dance forum.

The duet between Itst and Iao was intensely stunning. The complex relationship between the vibrating Iao and the bird-like Itst was fascinating. I found myself vacillating between feeling like the two were a perfect match for one another and feeling like Itst was manipulating Iao, forcing him to do or be something he didn’t want. I couldn’t quite grasp if she was helping or hurting him—which was what made it so interesting.

At the end of the piece, Iao is trapped in some kind of jail, and Lumlum and Wetseek are unable to free him. At that point, I was ready for something even more exciting to happen. Maybe Itst would reappear or the Seer. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I was excited. But then—it just ended. I felt let down. I wanted to know more, to see more, to experience more of this world. It didn’t feel like the piece had really resolved—but rather that it was cut off.

Overall, though, “Tale from the Land of Frightful Dreams” was a very well-choreographed and performed piece, which did “blur the limits of codified dance forms,” at once bringing together a variety of styles and forming a cohesive and intriguing whole. It will be exciting to see where this piece or other pieces created by Carter’s newly-formed performance company Rumble Motion Jawbone go from here.

Rachael holds a BFA from VCU and will finish her MFA at the U this spring. She regularly contributes to the loveDANCEmore blog and publication.

 

 

notes on the dance for camera fest @ the U

On Friday, I went to see a retrospective of the work of the main draw of the festival, screendance legend Katrina McPherson. Her work brought up a lot of interesting issues and a lively, valuable discussion ensued with the artist after the show. Eric Handman, a professor in the dance department who also makes work for stage and video, asked McPherson to elaborate on the role of repetition in her work, which was evident in the first three abstract dance shorts of the evening This is a place, Moment and Sense-8 (which offered a glimpse at a partially blind contact improv group). McPherson ruminated on the difference between repeating movements on stage and repeating the same piece of footage in a film. This got me (and the friends I was with) thinking in new ways about how the filmic idioms of montage versus the kind of reality-fracturing mis en scene Maya Deren did function and interact as screendance develops through the years.

McPherson also showed a documentary piece about a dance company in Addis Ababa founded by a British ballet teacher who taught largely homeless Ethiopians “contemporary dance”. There was a lot to discuss here too, in the lobby, and in the car on the way home. We started to dissect what we thought of the film and of the project. It seemed undeniable that he’d done a lot of good by bringing new ideas and opportunities to these kids and also that a lot what he said suffered from some Colonial attitudes toward the value of “contemporary” versus “native” dance. That said, it got us all thinking, both about issues of culture, poverty and dance and about the idea that dance could change the world for the better.

Sam Hanson holds a BUS from the U & makes dances & films about town

RawMoves: Babble review

Maybe I was the only person that didn't enjoy "The Story of Eight," RawMoves' prop-driven escapade of 2009. Then again, maybe I wasn't. But I think I had a unique reason for my dislike. 
I thought the poster for that show, which featured ropes and ladders and such, looked like the scene from a ship, I thought the title referred to pieces of eight and I assumed the show would be about pirates. Needless to say, I was mistaken and a little disappointed. I walked into this year's show with a taste of regret still on the tongue.  

Then, 

I was astounded. The first ten minutes of "Babble" fulfilled my need for textual banter and fast, classy moves. The dancing from this troupe is often fierce, but the choreography is not always this seamless and complex. I found my eye roving from one pair of cheeky fork-lovers to the next with gleams of anticipation. The text elements continued to push boundaries, striking an engaging balance between chaos and clarity. There were very impressive Russian sounding rants, a few lyrical motifs (When A Man Loves a Woman -- yes!!) and an incredible lack of gesture-driven phrases where dancers cover their mouths with their hands and sprinkle unsaid words to the ground like dust. 

The smaller ensemble dance sections were often quieter, but still enjoyable. Tyler Kunz left his paperwork behind for an evening and rattled us with a macabre solo. A notable trio engaged in a beautifully interwoven set of phrases. The larger ensemble pieces, especially the finale, fell a little flat in my opinion, though they were full of fine dancing. Perhaps too full. Arranged in cumbersome lines, the dancers seemed to tread water instead of stir the space. A fellow audience member mentioned that the dance sections seemed like the "safety net" in an otherwise daring show. 

I have always been impressed that choreographers Natosha Washington and Nicholas Cendese manage to find room in the busy SLC dance scene for their professionally produced, but small company. This year, my respect for them as choreographers has grown. Here's hoping that they keep surprising audiences for years to come. 

Kitty Sailer is a MFA candidate at the University of Utah

 

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