Dance Theater Coalition's "Microdance"

Earlier this week I wrote a preview for 15 BYTES about MicroDance; a performance that tasks choreographers with making dances for a 32-square foot stage in the Blackbox Theater of the Rose. Audiences view the work in the round and because of the limited seating, I am writing my review from tonight’s dress rehearsal. While a rehearsal lacks the vibrancy of a packed house, it certainly showcased the intimacy that DTC hoped to achieve with the use of this new format.

The evening opens with The Perfect Pirouette made by Ai Fujii Nelson for Juan Carlos Claudio. Juan Carlos spends the piece avoiding the task of one pirouette opting instead to warm up, discuss what teachers have always been saying to him (up!) and use the audience to demonstrate “spotting.” For as much as the piece uses dance vocabulary, I think it will read to a larger audience. Juan Carlos shows, in a purely physical way, how even the most simple movements are constructed from the body with all its idiosyncrasies. Having watched Juan Carlos perform numerous times with Ririe Woodbury and SB Dance I thought I was familiar with his dancing but up close and under the choreographic eye of Ai Fujii, I get to see so many more interesting aspects to how he initiates movement, how he describes it and also a window into how he experiences it. The Perfect Pirouette doesn’t interrupt my expectations of concert dance as the marketing suggests but it does something better — it distills and magnifies them.

Jerry Gardner & Kimberly Schmit have similarly contemplative works but rather than using text they rely on visual images. For Schmit those are created using small lights to illuminate the performance and for Gardner a projected floor and collapsable pole that extends beyond the stage. The slow nature of each piece wasn’t always matched by myself as an audience member. After watching so many dances with the same ambient music and general flow I’m not sure I was giving back to them the energy their performances were offering me.

Both Impact by Ashley Mott and Vida Ride by Emily May utilize traditional idioms within partnering and I wondered whether the works would be different if made for the larger stage. While certainly consolidated, they maintained a consistent energy with one of the Wasatch Front’s more common threads — matching virtuosity with emotionally laden subtext. Although I didn’t see the space completely transformed there were many moments to enjoy. In Ashley’s duet Efren Corado and Sofia Gorder were fluid and engaging and being so close revealed the delicate transfers of weight that audiences may not always notice from a distance.

Each piece on the concert invited my curiosity about “ten tiny dances” the Portland-based series this event was modeled after. As a biannual event their (slightly higher) platform has been moved to sites beyond the theater space. With the diverse casts and methods curated by DTC I know that the MicroDance series could similarly expand in numerous ways, all of which I would welcome enthusiastically. The more I considered each dance as “site non-specific” and let my imagination roam to a place I could see the work again (a hillside, a seashore, a parking lot, my laundry room) the more I knew there is more micro-dancing to be done in SLC.

Ashley Anderson runs this blog as part of her 501(c)3, ashley anderson dances

Bowfire in Park City

Bowfire, which came to the George S. & Dolores Dore Eccles Center for Performing Arts on March 8, is advertised as Flying Fiddles, Stepping Feet, Glorious Voices.  The fiddles were definitely flying, but the stepping feet and glorious voices were few and far between.

While there might not have been many numbers with step dancing in them, the little dancing there was was quite good.  The two step dancers were Linsey Beckett and Stephanie Cadman and each danced in two numbers by themselves and two numbers together.  Their styles were a bit different; Beckett seemed to be a more traditional step dancer while Cadman had hints of rhythm tap dance in her style.

Cadman stood out a bit more to me than Beckett.  She had a nice “call and response” section with the drummer.  The drummer would drum out a beat and Cadman responded with the same rhythms on her feet.  They would keep trying to one up another, making their rhythms harder and harder.  And in true tap dance fashion, Cadman performed some fun steps that I am going to try to “steal”.  But arguably the most impressive thing that both dancers did was when they fiddled and danced at the same time.  They were traveling about the stage, turning and jumping around, and yet they never missed a single beat.

Overall, both dancers were energetic and caught the audience’s attention.  The most unfortunate thing was that many of their sounds were lost because the stage was not equipped well to capture tap sounds.  Sitting in the front row it was sometimes hard to hear their sounds.  I can’t imagine their sounds traveled well to the back of the theater.

So, if you are looking to go to a dance show, Bowfire is not it.  If you are looking to go hear some good fiddling with a bit of good dancing thrown in, then look no further.

Carly Anderson is a longtime tap dancer who teaches classes for Janet Gray Studios. She also works at the Marriott Library.

co.da's Romance Novel

Last night co.da confirmed what I noticed at their first concert last year; they are a collective of strong women who know that if you want to be a dancer in this cultural climate you may just have to make the dances yourself. The cooperative company is made up of adept movers who are genuinely invested in the choreographic processes of their peers. But you do get the impression that on the whole, they just want to be dancing, a lot.

This comes across most in the guest work of Camille Litalien, assistant professor from Utah State. The dancers come alive, divergent approaches to performance presence notwithstanding, and show us that their primary focus is navigating the work of others.

But that’s not to say that Camille’s work has the most choreographic legitimacy. In fact, it’s the work of Ariane Audd and Shira Fagan that stand out for me as an audience member. Ariane fostered excellent performances by Jane Jackson & Emily Weaver who truly took risks within the expected structure of women dancing to Billie Holiday. Shira Fagan’s “The Breakup” also transformed the somewhat predictable dance where women act sad and find empowerment through a gestural phrase on a bench. But the choreography sticks to its idea really well and the dancers do too, so it doesn’t seem cheesy or one-off, “The Break-up” is both honest and interesting.

These two works suffered the least from an attempt to fit into the overall theme of the concert, Romance Novel. While a theme helped centralize audience expectations, and certainly elicited laughs as each co.da member narrated a passage from a particularly odd pirate romance between pieces, it also caused some dances to deviate from from their choreographic objectives.

Anne Marie Robson Smock shared her work in progress not too long ago and it began a really poetic system which challenged idioms found in backup-dancing and music videos. As the dance evolved the additions, including a cardboard fake boyfriend and lots of popular guilty pleasure music, began to take away from the bold spirit of the first iteration. She concluded on a high note with a sweet and sad dance to the Magnetic Fields where Temria Airmet is seen as simultaneously confident and vulnerable.

Annie’s work spoke to a larger concern I had about the program. There is an alternating pleasure I take in watching people joyously and humorously dance alongside a nagging feeling that maybe co.da could take themselves more seriously. That isn’t to say address deeper concepts or include more ambient music (please don’t! never!) but instead to follow their own instincts rather than try to create themes or jokes that they imagine the audience will respond to. Some of those instincts might be funny or include allusions to The Bachelor but I think others would not. I think that having a guest choreographer also downplays the exceptionally earnest efforts made by all co.da members to grow as choreographers and dancers.

Based on the enthusiasm of the audience for each work I would say my criticism may be an outlier, but it is something I look forward to investigating in the next iteration as the group comes even more into their own ways of making and doing.

Ashley Anderson directs loveDANCEmore as part of her non-profit, ashley anderson dances. 

RDT, I mean, Stephen Brown!

Stephen Brown’s SB Dance is presenting another of its “Beast” performances this weekend. I went tonight, and sat in a sold out house where everyone seemed eager to see the choreographer’s collaboration with local band Totem and Tattoo.

The piece opened with an energetic romp to the music of Art Blakey, which introduced the cast. This crew, some new faces, some old, flew through space to land on each other or on large tin foil cushions. They rushed to dress and change clothes amidst the chaos, as if to suggest that some of them had not been quite ready when the show started. It was dry, with a not-quite-slapstick clockwork. I found myself thinking an old RDT favorite many of us will have seen- Shapiro and Smith’s Dance with Army Blankets. These two works are similar in tone and matter-of-factness. They both offer opportunities for the dancers to reveal themselves in a simple, task oriented environment. The arc of the works comes from the increasing complexity of the tasks. Nothing more, nothing less.

After the first black out, actor Dan Larringa appeared alone, dressed as a cast member from the last piece. He panted and unbuttoned his shirt, expressing exhaustion while taking credit for dancing in the work that had just unfolded without him. After this ice-breaker, he proceeded to explain to us our program notes, which had many empty spaces in them. This was another opportunity to parade the dancers and learn their names. He then pointed out that naming the dances was up to us. For me this was a turning point in the evening. It lead me to expect that the program -an evidently disorganized grab-bag of short work- might turn out to be more carefully put together than it at first would appear.

What the organizing principle was here I didn’t quite figure out. If I had to guess, I would say that Brown chose these pieces, early studies of possible dances really, to show us just how lucky he was to have dancers like Rosy Goodman, Jenny Larsen and all the rest at his finger tips. (We are also lucky to have them around to dance for us.)

In one section, Christine Hasegawa stood impressively on different surfaces of Nathan Shaw’s body, while Dan Larringa, dressed in a trench coast, recited a psuedo-noir text about “a once honest stripper” turned into a drug addled urban power monger. Hasegawa’s aggression lead her through a violently sexual encounter that included repeatedly performing erotiziced chest compressions on Shaw’s helpless frame. Again I was reminded of RDT, and seeing Daniel Nagrin’s Strange Hero again recently during their 100 Years show. I wished for a little more context for how these tropes might inform a large work, but the little study was dissolved almost before it began.

Ursula Perry’s solo also put me in a historical mood, causing me to reflect on my ambivilence about how the Nikolais tradition in Utah continues to play out in choreography. Perry trudged across the space on all fours while wearing an SB Dance anti-fashion statement- a pair of tulle pants, a sports bra and oversize boots. She stopped along the way to pass through positions that looked lifted from a yoga or pilates video. At the end, the big boots gave way to tiny pink heels that had been hidden within all along. The big reveal was accomplished without much fanfare and Perry exited as she had entered, a fit, technical, if largely silent body in space.

The end of the show, which featured live music from Totem and Taboo, drew heavily on the gurney and other props from previous SB evenings. Once a spectre of the physical absurdity of human death, here the gurney seemed drained of all metaphoric value, as the dancers manipulated it with similar affect to that seen in the opening. These vignettes were also peppered with some of the inexplicable sexual agression of the Christina and Shaw’s duet mentioned above. Some of the show’s more interesting vocabulary  can be found here, and James Eccs dances it with a naturalist charm and understatedness very rare in Utah dance. But the collaboration is not to a point yet where it would be appropriate to try to give it real critical feedback. The band’s music is promising, but I think they need a real drummer for their encroachment into the dance space to feel real. The dance itself reads as series of unmediated choreographic ideas and dance verbiage.

In fact, I wonder if it is even appropriate to review a show like this, which is really in someways just a very formal, if somewhat scattered, high-stakes rehearsal with great lighting. That said, it’s clear that Brown wants us to take it seriously, and whatever you can say about the work, it sold out tonight and will probably sell out on Saturday. I’ll be interested to see what my peers think. I wonder how it compares to memories others might share with me of the earlier iterations of Utah’s self-proclaimed choreographer of the fringe.

Samuel Hanson is a dancer and choreographer living in Salt Lake City.

(cutie &) The Boxer

Tonight I had the great pleasure of seeing Ushio Shinohara perform at the new CUAC building near the corner of 2nd East and 2nd South. Recently re-located from Ephraim CUAC (pronounced Quack) is presenting Ushio’s work in conjunction with the screenings of Cutie and the Boxer at the Sundance Film Festival. While the exhibit of his work extends through March this was, to my knowledge, the only time he would be performing in Salt Lake City.

As the movie title suggests, Ushio boxes his paintings. Wearing gloves covered in foam pads, he dips them in paint and, always traveling from right to left, he aggressively maps out the terrain in flashes of color. While I’d seen online videos of his process, nothing could compare to the act of his live performance. Ushio, who turned 81 last week, is really boxing. He warms up, sharply shifting on his feet and forming attention at the canvas before him.  His translator tells me he is in a group of artists after WWII who each respond to their relationships with American culture. As he begins it’s like a comic book come to life. The POWs and BAMs are enacted through color and texture. I can make the connection to Jackson Pollock and also pop artists but it seems so much different because it’s designed for me to watch; it stems from (and embodies) the traditions of competition and violence inherent in boxing. I don’t only see the action taking place, I hear and feel the paint being arranged before him. Furthermore, I’m interested the whole way through.

I realize that this blog is about “dance”. But something about this performance awakened the audience. Everyone was hollering and noticeably gritting their teeth and his old hands connected with the wall. So many people were gathered in such a such space and with such energy that I was reminded of the vibrancy I so frequently lack at concert engagements. So often we, in modern dance, talk about the “visceral” relationship our work has with audiences; Ushio’s hands creating a landscape before me was the closest I’ve come to comprehending “visceral” in a long time. His performance was clear and expressive and singular in idea as well as form. It was repeated over and over without the expectation of change. It reminded me about what performance can be and how many people could be watching it, with bated breath and free expectation.