co.da’s Cause a Decision

The new crop of co•da dancers this season at Sugar Space are the tightest batch yet. In “Cause a Decision” they seemed determined to show off technical prowess and cohesiveness as a company. They succeed at that and took some notable risks along the way. In particular, they merit applause for making use of that tiny studio in some new ways. (The experience was only slightly marred by allowing a photographer on the frontmost of only four rows to clack away his shutter for the entirety of the show. Sure, Sugar Space needs press photos, but isn’t that what dress rehearsals are for?)

“Hips, Quakes & Stones” was the true company number. It arrives in the program notes with a quote from Courtney Love. “I’m not a woman. I’m a force of nature.” Choreographer Monica Remes should consider conducting workshops for people interested in excavating their psychologic relationship to Joan Jett, Love and Pat Benatar through strutting, air guitar, rocking out and vocalization. The action–– from a series of madcap dashes across the space to the ultimate image of the cast climbing the ballet barre stage right–– leaves the audience unsure if the dancers are crazed fans, fantasies of specific rock personae or eight bodies enthusiastically trading identities in competition for the highest quotient of glam. Remes’ was the best and most courageous use of the space. “Hips” confronted all of Sugar Space’s physical limitations while avoiding the traffic jams that plagued other works.

Fiona Nelson’s “Sum Continuum”, was set to excerpts from David Eagleman’s text “Sum”, which offers a depiction of afterlife with obvious choreographic opportunities. (The dead linger in a great waiting room till the last time they are remembered by the living, at which time they’re “called” to a more final threshold. In the meantime, they also relive their mortal experiences, but reordered so as to stack up mundane tasks into continuous years of sleeping, months of showering etc.) The problem is that the dance too tightly illustrates the text, leaving the audience with little tension, wondering why all these dead people are so young, perky and enthused about their ambiguous new existence. Still, the opening is truly striking. The choreographer sits in the dark, lit by her laptop, informing us of the three ways each of us is consigned to die. She types the list, hesitates, makes a change, and like the one of the Fates, continues.

Joshua Mora’s “Second Rate?” could easily have been the fiercest work in the show had it not been compromised by the weight of it’s score. Particularly in the context of the text heavy work that had preceded it, it suffered from the series of TED talk clichés about a living well that comprised Shane Koyczan’s lyrics. The heart of this work wasn’t to be found in these tired  platitudes, but in the very particular camaraderie of Brooklyn Draper and Monica Remes. The pair draw out of each other a sense of ecstatic play that is absent in the rest of the show (and in much of the dance field in general).

Guest choreographer Eric Handman offered the most surprises, perhaps because his work was framed with the most expectation. “Phantom Limb” bore the marks of so many of his dances. His fascination with the self-estranged human hand has calcified into a morse code of distorted wrists. Periodically, flat, pale paws cut in front of the face and eyes of another dancer, seeming to want nothing, save the clean execution of the gesture itself. Another perennial obsession is partnering. The entanglement of bodies in “Phantom Limb” is lovely, quiet and deft. They might be seven characters from a Harold Pinter play that can’t help but interrupt and offend each other, eventually destroying the coherence of the conversation, but accelerating its crooked centrifuge. Everyone ends up on the floor in an unimaginable pile. Then they get back up, dust themselves off and look around. Jane Jackson is stoic, Brooklyn Draper is almost curious. Soon its back into the fray, there’s nothing else for it. As usual, the void of the stage is metaphor for larger, darker emptinesses.

There’s nothing in terms of steps that hasn’t been glimpsed in Handman’s earlier work. What sets “Phantom Limb” apart, is restraint, in the departments of music, performance and casting. Michael Wall’s score places itself expertly in the background–– unlike many of the film scores Handman has used before–– it doesn’t tell us how to feel about the dancers-as-characters. Instead it folds and directs the experience of time. “Phantom Limb” is a lucid dream, but one spare in signs and symbols. Finally, Handman is working without any men, without any discernable bravado, machismo, balletic maleness or plausible avatar for himself. These tools have their place, but their absence here makes Handman’s detail-obsessed pure-dance voice more legible, though still mysterious, like neon in the dark.

This cold but luminous place is where Handman’s been headed for quite a while, since he started to shed his earlier voice like a snakeskin. Gone is the Eric Handman who made dances on playful, boastful improvisors akin to himself, men like Josh Anderson or women like Jess Humphrey. Five or ten years ago, he almost might have been caught in Mora’s dance, romping with Draper and Remes. One place isn’t better than the other, just different, and it’s nice to see them side by side.

Samuel Hanson contributes regularly to loveDANCEmore and SLUG magazine.

Body Logic and L’anarchiste at Sugar Space

Watching Body Logic’s at Sugar Space is, for me, an experience of nostalgia.  Their evening “Convergence” reminds me of college, both my university experience, and the feeling of college as described in the movies. You’re stuck in the town where you grew up or went to school, but you’re still young and reckless enough that anything is possible. You know what I mean even if that never described your life.

It’s not that these dancers, or the band L’anarchiste, who join them onstage, are immature. There are some fierce professionals at work in this charming hodgepodge of a show. But there is also a charming willingness to try things without taking them too seriously, an agreement in the air that there’s time for everyone to get where they need to go. I didn’t realize that feeling was missing elsewhere until this show made me think about it.

I think that the models we use to present dance in Utah are changing. And that’s a good thing, too. Body Logic’s tactic–– collaborating with a popular local band–– is one I hope we see deployed more often. Not everything the company tried tonight (February 21) was wholly successful, but the small scale of each experiment–– the length of a pop song isn’t too long–– and playful tone of the show sustained interest with facility.

The opening number “Samundar” by guest choreographer Michael Garber made impressive use of the space, impinged upon as it was by the presence of the band. There’s a dual pleasure in seeing this large group of women running between each other in an indiscernible pattern–– it’s visually satisfying, but it also reminds one of the feeling of navigating such a space one’s self, and metaphor flows from the vicarious experience of navigating a crowd. I felt that I too, was leaving behind some static person or object to join a throng of public movement. (Garber will present his own collective again at Sugar Space on May 15-16.)

Guest performers from Porridge for Goldilocks (who share with Body Logic the talents of Amy Freitas) performed a simple, open ended improvisation, which was introduced as such by band leader Robert LeCheminant. Nathan Dryden, Amy Freitas, Keanu Forrest Brady and the blonde guy who was sitting next to me during much of the show are excellent and very different in extemporaneous performance. Clearly, they weren’t doing much other than sharing what must be a very regular practice of dancing together.

That Body Logic and Porridge for Goldilocks are still negotiating what they are going to be in the future is clear. But if they continue exploring with the same sense of serious play I saw tonight, their work can only improve. Maybe they’ll keep working with L’anarchiste, and develop a more profound relationship wherein the choreography informs the music as opposed to vice versa. Perhaps they will learn to use video in a context that underlies, rather than interrupts, the flow of an evening. Wherever they end up, I hope they continue to be as in love with the act of dancing as they seem to be now.

Samuel Hanson regularly contributes dance writing to loveDANCEmore as well as SLUG magazine.

SUITE at Sugar Space

Salt Lake City has enjoyed its share of successful female choreographers and company directors for quite some time. However, there is no denying that the essential role of the female choreographer in modern dance has slowly evolved and is possibly dwarfed by many well-known and successful male dance makers. Of course there are many contributing factors and the discussion about what can be done is a long and complex one.

Sugar Space is playing their part in celebrating work by local female choreographers in Suite: Women Defining Space. It is the fifth year of the series, and for me, it did not fail to inspire confidence in the participating local choreographers: Norianna Diesel a local dancer and Somatic Movement Facilitator, Srilatha Singh of Chitrakaavya Dance, Joni Tuttle McDonald from BYU, and Serena Webb of Body Logic Dance.

Upon receiving the program for the evening, we were told to read the slip of paper with instructions for viewing the first dance. My instructions were to watch the piece while sitting on someone’s lap. Having arrived alone, I was happy to raise my hand when the dancers asked for volunteers to sit on stage, as they were beginning the piece. Four of us were selected to watch from this perspective, which gave me a chance to see that at least one audience member did find a lap to sit on. The two dancers each performed solos to a recording of their voice. They spoke of different things, admittedly I could understand Diesel’s better, and got more out of it with her calm demeanor, strong voice, and luscious movement quality. Both dancers performed clear, direct movements that melted at times, before inviting those of us on stage to return to our seats. We were then given a little more insight to the piece called “Perception” as the dancers asked the audience “What was it like watching this piece while noticing your breath and heartbeat, watching through the eyes of a six-year-old, sitting on your neighbor’s lap, or with one eye closed?” This revealed what the other audience members might have experienced, and gave me the sense that there was something left to ponder about the piece and Diesel’s intentions. It was a short and sweet study into individual perspective, that could have been pushed further to truly explore this idea in depth.

Srilatha Singh presented two pieces of Bharatanatyam Indian classical dance. Her first dance “Mallari” was noted in the program as being performed for temple celebrations. It was a pleasure to see four younger dancers featured, with full ceremonial costumes and makeup. They moved around the stage as a group with complex rhythmic patterns accentuated by the bells on their ankles, and complimented by the specific hand gestures and facial expressions that were easy to pick out in the intimate Sugar Space. Singh truly created something of note in her piece “Legacy,” in which she performed a solo dance to the contemporary poetry of the duo “Climbing Poetree.” Seetha Veeraghanta delivered the lines of the poem on stage in a clear and inspiring voice. It was a performance of mixing cultures and generations from the two women wearing beautiful Indian garments, while reading contemporary poetry from a smart phone, and interpreting through the movement of traditional Bharatanatyam dance movements, to the music of Ravel and Ravi Shankar. But somehow it all came together and worked, very well. The dance and spoken word shaped a piece that was beautiful, strong, delicate, and deliberate in the theme of celebrating life while overcoming challenges. The beautiful imagery from the text “Your children will sing unconquered through hurricanes” was interpreted into true storytelling through the captivating performance that Singh delivered.

“Simply Letting Be” by Joni Tuttle McDonald began with four dancers confronting the audience. The music was unsettling as an arrhythmic soundtrack, layered with the sounds of metal bowls spinning and soft piano, guided the dancers. Each dancer seemed isolated from the others until joining in partnerships dictated by manipulating each other’s body. The dancers’ beautiful lines were featured, and although the dance demonstrated the idea of finding partnership within struggle, no true relationships were formed. The piece ends sorrowfully as dancers leave the stage one by one until the final remaining dancer stops and stands with her back to the audience. I went back and forth between thinking that I wasn’t enjoying the piece to realizing that this sense of discomfort was perhaps the intent of the choreographer, succeeding in her exploration of detachment.

“Anthypophora” by Serena Webb was performed by the dancers of Body Logic. Their luscious movement was interrupted by pausing to gaze, searching into the audience or at each other. The music by local band L’Anarchiste was the impetus for the choreography. I allowed myself to just see the movement and music work together on stage, without really taking away any overall theme or story. Body Logic has an upcoming performance with the band providing live accompaniment, which will create an interesting framework to see what additional meaning comes from the dance when it is performed as part of a whole evening of work, instead of an excerpt.

In the future of modern dance, there is room for many more great choreographers, men and women. I think the most important thing for Salt Lake City is to continue supporting its vibrant community of emerging choreographers, encouraging them to continue making dance. Sugar Space offers the opportunity to see several of these dancers again during the month of February. Body Logic Dance will present “Convergence” with live music by L’Anarchiste Feb 21-22 at 7:30. Dancers Jane Jackson and Desiree Simmons from Suite also perform in co.da which is presenting “Cause a Decision” February 27-March 1st, 7:30.

Erin Romero is a choreographer and the co-director of Movement Forum in Salt Lake City. Her work was seen in the first iteration of SUITE in Spring 2010. This review is shared with 15 BYTES.

En Route Dance Festival & upcoming

Below find a review of a dance film festival brought straight to your computer by Sam Hanson. While the nature of an online festival bridges the gap between the Wasatch Front and other dance communities, it’s nice to know the festival carries a lot of connections to artists based in, or recently brought to, Salt Lake City. After checking it out consider looking at what else is up in Utah, including a casting for RDT’s LINK series presentation by Graham Brown and a Movement Forum fundraiser.

Dance’s Made to Order is an online magazine– every month it brings subscribers three new dance films. As a frequent viewer and one-time artist (March 2012 edition!), I can broadly endorse their work. Some of the films are quite good, and it’s a great way to see diverse perspectives in dance from all over the country and beyond.

Immersion in the outside world was precisely what I sought and received in watching their latest effort. Dances Made’s annual En Route Dance Festival, which ended this Sunday, is part of a growing trend in stage choreography and screen dance: temporary online exhibition (another recent example). The only piece I’d seen before was Simon Fildes and Katrina McPherson’s The Time it Takes, an homage to lush, wet Scottish landscape that screened in conjunction with the couples’s’ visit to the University of Utah earlier this year.

I found myself comparing McPherson’s work to Axolotl Collective’s Panspermia, a sci-fi work where “two aliens perpetuate a cosmic lineage”. The locations chosen for Panspermia were likely in the Mexican state of Puebla, where the Collective is based, but wherever they shot reminds me of desert lake beds of my own experience in the Western United States. It feels appropriate that aliens would do business here and that they would look at turns like orphans of the sea and animated plastic refuse. The excellent performances here remind one of the best of Alwin Nikolais’ work, though here the abstraction of the body seems less about erasure and more about the playful questions about ourselves we have always asked through imaginary animals and extraterrestrials.

A much more approachable effort, Turn Around Tango comes from Canada. There’s not much to say save that a tango performed back to back is much more fascinating than it sounds. This filmmaker has all the stylish dance-in-a-void bravado of Edouard Lock, without being so heavy handed. It’s left to Pas, a brief farce on the use of French nomenclature in ballet to further critique the supercilious. Courtney Harris and Charli Brissey make fun of classical dance in a way that only those versed in it could.

The festival also featured some work where the connection to dance was a little more obtuse. British choreographer Siobhan Davies and David Hinton brought All This Can Happen, a structuralist feature which juxtaposed creatively reframed found footage with excerpts from “The Walk”. The text, a novella by Swiss writer Robert Walser, deals with the raptures and horrors of every day life as an artist. It’s great that work like this is being reframed in a dance context, and I hope lots of people see it in this way, which beautifully demonstrates the simple choreography of the cut– the beginning and ending of a movement taken out of context becoming the way we construct the unitary power of “a singular move(ment)”.

Also very strong was Melting Justice, which was described in the program notes as “a film from the Democratic Republic of Congo…a mediation on agency vs. voyeurism that simultaneously captures instances of embodied critique while confronting the viewer with challenging questions about the passive consumption…” Petna Ndaliko Katondolo’s work was nothing like it’s art-speak byline, but his work is worth researching––  here is an artist who uses the conventions of documentary film in the age of the video to make an audience feel physically implicated as we watch (among other things) a man literally dance through oblivious traffic.

Samuel Hanson contributes regularly to loveDANCEmore and SLUG mag

En Route Dance Festival

Below find a review of a dance film festival brought straight to computer by Samuel Bennett Hanson. While the nature of an online festival bridges the gap between the Wasatch Front and other dance communities, it’s nice to know the festival carries a lot of connections to artists based in, or recently brought to, Salt Lake City. After checking it out consider looking at what else is up in Utah, including a casting for RDT’s LINK series presentation by Graham Brown and aMovement Forum fundraiser.

Dance’s Made to Order is an online magazine– every month it brings subscribers three new dance films. As a frequent viewer and one-time artist (March 2012 edition!), I can broadly endorse their work. Some of the films are quite good, and it’s a great way to see diverse perspectives in dance from all over the country and beyond.

Immersion in the outside world was precisely what I sought and received in watching their latest effort. Dances Made’s annual En Route Dance Festival, which ended this Sunday, is part of a growing trend in stage choreography and screen dance: temporary online exhibition (another recent example). The only piece I’d seen before was Simon Fildes and Katrina McPherson’s The Time it Takes, an homage to lush, wet Scottish landscape that screened in conjunction with the couples’s’ visit to the University of Utah earlier this year.

I found myself comparing McPherson’s work to Axolotl Collective’s Panspermia, a sci-fi work where “two aliens perpetuate a cosmic lineage”. The locations chosen for Panspermia were likely in the Mexican state of Puebla, where the Collective is based, but wherever they shot reminds me of desert lake beds of my own experience in the Western United States. It feels appropriate that aliens would do business here and that they would look at turns like orphans of the sea and animated plastic refuse. The excellent performances here remind one of the best of Alwin Nikolais’ work, though here the abstraction of the body seems less about erasure and more about the playful questions about ourselves we have always asked through imaginary animals and extraterrestrials.

A much more approachable effort, Turn Around Tango comes from Canada. There’s not much to say save that a tango performed back to back is much more fascinating than it sounds. This filmmaker has all the stylish dance-in-a-void bravado of Edouard Lock, without being so heavy handed. It’s left to Pas, a brief farce on the use of French nomenclature in ballet to further critique the supercilious. Courtney Harris and Charli Brissey make fun of classical dance in a way that only those versed in it could.

The festival also featured some work where the connection to dance was a little more obtuse. British choreographer Siobhan Davies and David Hinton brought All This Can Happen, a structuralist feature which juxtaposed creatively reframed found footage with excerpts from “The Walk”. The text, a novella by Swiss writer Robert Walser, deals with the raptures and horrors of every day life as an artist. It’s great that work like this is being reframed in a dance context, and I hope lots of people see it in this way, which beautifully demonstrates the simple choreography of the cut– the beginning and ending of a movement taken out of context becoming the way we construct the unitary power of “a singular move(ment)”.

Also very strong was Melting Justice, which was described in the program notes as “a film from the Democratic Republic of Congo…a mediation on agency vs. voyeurism that simultaneously captures instances of embodied critique while confronting the viewer with challenging questions about the passive consumption…” Petna Ndaliko Katondolo’s work was nothing like it’s art-speak byline, but his work is worth researching––  here is an artist who uses the conventions of documentary film in the age of the video to make an audience feel physically implicated as we watch (among other things) a man literally dance through oblivious traffic.

Samuel Hanson contributes regularly to loveDANCEmore and SLUG mag