RDT's Brio

I typically leave Repertory Dance Theatre performances feeling satisfied by an evening of enjoyable, well-crafted dances, and Thursday night’s Brio program was no exception. Brio featured five works by Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith. Several were creations by both members of the choreographic duo; others were created by Smith, who continues to choreograph following Shapiro’s passing in 2006.

Being shown an entire evening of Shapiro and Smith works offered up a key to unlocking their choreographic minds. Similarities cropped up from piece to piece: narrative elements, props, text, even some movement-based motifs. Proven many times over was their ability to extrapolate, both narratively and choreographically, on a theme, verse, or physical prop, and create myriad entertaining scenarios and images surrounding them. Also, while small elements potentially dated some pieces a bit, I think it still holds true that a piece’s date of origin does not determine its success or relevance in the present, if the piece is well-crafted and touches upon timeless subjects.

Clad in candy-colored jumpsuits reminiscent of the 90’s (the piece was created in 1992), the dancers in “Dance With Two Army Blankets” somersaulted over said blankets, spun into them, arrested others’ leaps with them, and caught, counterbalanced, and catapulted with them. Motion and momentum never ceased throughout the piece, as was visually manifested by the continual transfer of blankets between hands. As my performance companion Erica Womack observed, “Dance with Two Army Blankets” seemed to be on the cusp of revealing something deeper, while it maybe didn’t quite get there for her. The blanket-integrated choreography did provide endless points of interest, but I agreed with Erica when I remembered Dan Higgins getting dragged offstage at the end, holding onto a blanket for dear life. Nothing had seemed that dire up until then; but maybe that was the point? Maybe it’s all happy-go-lucky until it’s not?

“Turf” (1997) was a thorough, and at times more serious, investigation, of the territorial tendencies of humans. Different sized rugs represented personal continents that were constantly in jeopardy of other parties, who ran and soared on, off, and across the stage. Justin Bass opened “Turf” with a stand-out solo of high leaps, contractions, and small ski jumps. As the piece went on, all conceivable variations on the theme of territory, or turf, were explored, and the ending (Bass swiftly pulling a rug away just as Tyler Orcutt lunged, airborne, for it) was a final underlining of the ongoing nature of such conflicts.

“Pat-A-Cake” (2011) employed body percussion, both in its recorded track (like beat-boxing) and onstage (Ursula Perry tap-danced barefoot and clapped like a flamenco dancer, and the two even slapped each other a couple times). The women’s duet was playful yet antagonistic, as they waged nonsensical, nose-poke battles over who was “baby” and who was “me” (From: Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man/Bake me a cake, as fast as you can/Pat it, prick it, and mark it with B/Put it in the oven for baby and me!).

The biggest surprise of the evening (SPOILER ALERT) was unquestionably the ending of “Pat-A-Cake”. Suddenly, Jaclyn Brown indicated she was pregnant and the “baby”/”me” war took on a completely different meaning. Hilariously according to Perry, the baker’s man had “put it in the oven as fast as he could.”

I have no idea how a child would receive or interpret this ending. Would it just exist as part of the fabric of well-timed humor found in the rest of the duet, or would it not make sense and then not be funny anymore? While at times the show felt didactic, and thus well-suited for younger audiences, “Pat-A-Cake” was certainly one for the grown-ups. I loved that it strayed like this; it left me feeling like Bass had pulled the rug out from under me as well, and that Smith had temporarily snatched back that key to her choreographic secrets.

“Jack” (2013) similarly used nursery rhymes, this time the many with characters named Jack, in an entertaining duet danced by Bass and Orcutt (click here to read my review of this same cast from RDT’s Revel last November).

“Bolero” (2010) closed the show, but it was the one piece for which I wasn’t completely along for the ride. Maurice Ravel’s composition is iconic and a host of well-known and local choreographers spring to mind who have tried their hand at matching the score’s driving climax (with varying degrees of success). In their other pieces, Shapiro and Smith’s devices and narratives read so clearly, and here, while it appeared the music could be the prop, it was not as compelling of a pairing. If anything, I thought the movement was too simple to vie with the overpowering music, except for in a group unison section at the end where more movements were packed into less counts. I would understand if the choreography aimed to provide juxtaposition to the score, but instead it mostly seemed to fall somewhere in the middle.

I’m open to the suggestion that had “Bolero” not been last, I would have felt differently about it: it was more serious in tone than the other pieces, with no whimsical diversions. I did think the dancers’ moments of injury, where they would collapse down or stumble a bit, were intriguing in their subtlety and equally intriguing in their resolutions, which quickly found their way back into the abstract from these small moments of drama. And the ending of “Bolero” was exactly how I wanted it to be: an energetic group unison section ended with the music, and with flying-squirrel jumps, horizontal in mid-air, the blackout occurring in the split second before the dancers had all landed on their stomachs. It was exactly the ending I wanted to a strong program.

RDT presents Brio again Friday (tonight) and Saturday, 7:30pm at the Rose Wagner Center for the Performing Arts.

Amy Falls is loveDANCEmore’s Program Coordinator and has a BFA from the University of Utah’s Modern Dance program.

Ragamala at Kingsbury

On Saturday at Kingsbury Hall, Utah Presents hosted an evening with Ragamala Dance Company.  Directed by the mother-daughter team Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, the internationally touring company holds a venerable reputation as purveyors of the traditional Indian form, Bharatanatyam.  During a time where the world is brimming over with unrest and antipathy, the evening felt like finding the calm sacred eye of a storm.  Ragamala opened up space to share a blooming enthusiasm for life and to examine the threads that tie us together at the heart of it all.  

Performances by two local companies preceded Ragamala.  The dancers of Salt Lake City based Nitya Nritya Dance Company started the program with a traditional offering to the space known as Pushpanjali.  Although not always in total synch, the Nitya Company radiated youthful energy and charm in dances inspired our very own Utah mountains and the god Lord Shiva.  Chitrakaavya Dance performed next, another local project that aims to use the tradition alongside new collaborations to explore inter-cultural commonalities. They presented one piece fusing Bharatanatyam with the movements of modern dance, and another where Indian dance was meshed with English poetry. Chitrakaavya’s performance expressed themes related to the shared joy of moving and our connection with each other and the earth across generations.

The second half of the program was devoted to Ragamala’s Sacred Earth.  Conceptualized and choreographed by Renee and Aparna Ramaswamy, the piece mingles Bharatanatyam with two other great Indian traditions: the poetry and song of South India’s Tamil Sangam people, and paintings in the style of the Warli of West India.  Sacred Earth is designed to “explore the interconnectedness between human emotions and the environment that shapes them.”  The extensive program notes on the different cultural aspects at play were a welcome supplement, as they helped to further contextualize the musical and visual aesthetic.  The symbiosis of these elements was even clearer knowing that the Warli people painted to celebrate the spirituality they found in a balanced coexistence with nature, and that the Tamil Sangam poets created characters to explain and teach us about the human condition by linking different landscapes of the natural world to specific emotions.  

Although Sacred Earth contains eight clearly defined segments, it really draws a single golden line from the musicians’ first breath to the last dancers’ last.  Never truly pausing, variable combinations of dancers, songs, and poems shift together and apart to embody distinctive feelings and stories.  As they navigate these complex ranges of emotions, the dancers ultimately gravitate to a central tenor of harmony.  Even when the emotional tone dips towards the negative they don’t stay there for long, choosing to re-center on joy instead.  Bharatanatyam is extroverted and overtly presentational; the dancers engage in direct conversation with the audience and an emphasis on animated facial expressions is an integral part of that communication.  The dancers also rely on a highly gestural movement vocabulary and literal interpretations of lyrics to convey their stories.  Yet, it never feels pedestrian or cheap, and there are no “filler” steps.  Every flutter and twitch of muscle is precise and dense with meaning.

The five women of Ragamala showed absolute mastery of technique and control over the body. Whether imperceptibly slow or whirlwind fast, each movement was made razor sharp. Their ability to concurrently move each part of the body, at such dizzying speeds, to distinct and independent rhythms is mind-bending.  At one point Aparna Ramaswamy’s limbs were flying and contorting so quickly, I’m almost sure I caught a glimpse of her transformation into one of the many-armed Hindu deities.  

I also noticed that in Bharatanatyam the torso appears to remain largely calm and suspended upright, and everything else then unfolds and revolves around a manipulation from a midline at the heart.  This centering force present in each body provides a complement to the overall shape and directionality of movement, which is more so created by groups moving and flowing together rather than contained separately in each individual.  Bells around the ankles became another tool for interconnection as the dancers playfully added up an intricate game of sub-rhythms and accents that bounced from one body to another.

I found the duets where mother and daughter or the two sisters danced together powerful as well, feeling in the choreography a subtle acknowledgement of their familial ties.  Often times on stage a dancer exists as an isolate blank, their identity and relationships totally subverted.  Allowing their personal and performative identities to coexist was yet another way the Ramaswamys illustrated deep connection and a sense that all are part of a whole.

To tie the work together, the Warli paintings were projected in vivid monochrome behind the dancers.  Depicting images from differing natural settings, they shifted to match the dawn of each new segment.  As the piece drew towards its conclusion the scenes began to repeat and recombine, ultimately zooming out to reveal that all are connected as one.  

With a furiously joyful meditation on our shared place in this world, Ragamala Dance produced one of the most finely articulated performances I’ve seen in a long time.  It feels extremely rare and precious to see a work realize its intentions so absolutely and plainly in presentation.  The message of these classic traditions is ageless, and the reminder that our personal inner world is really part of something larger we must all share and protect together is more vital and compelling than ever.  

Emily Snow is a new contributor to loveDANCEmore. A graduate of University of Utah's Ballet Department, she most recently spent several seasons dancing with Central West Ballet in CA.

Photo (top) courtesy of Utah Presents

SALT at Eccles Regent

Lehi-based SALT Contemporary Dance, founded in 2013, was the first performing group to reserve space in the new Regent Street Eccles Theater this past weekend (a black box - or in the Regent’s case, a purple box). As mentioned by founding artistic director Michelle Nielsen in her pre-performance speech, SALT’s self-professed mission is to present contemporary works by local and international emergent* choreographers. While the members of SALT, and of second company SALT II, proved their technical prowess many times over throughout the evening, the programming choices themselves fell short of Nielsen’s boasts about the work the company seeks to present.

The first half of the program, three works by Ihsan Rustem, Jason Parsons, and Eric Handman, felt uncannily similar, particularly in movement vocabulary. Specifically, a leg extension in a la seconde - turned in, but with an aesthetically sickled foot at the end - made its indelible mark on each of the three. Other motifs were perhaps less memorable, but no less ubiquitous. I suspect that many of these choreographers in the program’s first half asked the dancers to input movement and that these similar choices might actually be a product of the dancers’ personal comfort zones rather than each individual choreographer’s vision.

Also in these early works, and despite the dancers’ facilities, I did not feel a kinesthetic use of weight and effort - instead, the movement seemed to stagnate at similar dynamic levels and gave the effect of many limbs gesturing with unclear intent and often at the same “volume” as each musical selection. The dancers’ internal, at times self-indulgent, foci further retracted the physical impact of the choreography from my viewpoint as an audience member.

In Rustem’s “Voice of Reason”, I enjoyed Elissa Collins’ counterpoint of stillness: seated facing the side with her legs outstretched, ankles purposefully extended like Barbie feet, she remained stalwart as duets unfolded onstage around her. However, the acoustic, singer-songwriter music that accompanied these several, all male/female duets - “But I wanna fall in love with you” - did not invite fresh perspective.

In Parsons’ “Tracing the Steps You Left Behind”, featuring SALT II, I was struck by a moment where one dancer, unveiled as the leader, controlled the all-female group to sink collectively, as if in a trance, to the floor; then upon rising, she conducted an orchestra of their seething bodies with her hands. There were several other such eerie, ritualistic moments, but their effect as a whole was diluted when the dancers walked slowly around the stage, staring warily at each other like many aimless deer in headlights.   

Handman’s “Omnivore” gave glimpses of greater dynamic variation than the two previous pieces, especially in a brief opening solo for Joni Tuttle McDonald. I am familiar with a significant body of Handman’s work, having spent semesters in class with him while at the U and having seen many of his pieces for Performing Dance Company concerts (albeit mostly work set on students). That being said, I noticed significant differences between this previous work and “Omnivore”, namely the movement vocabulary (which, of course, is subject to change throughout any choreographer's career trajectory) but also the kinesthetic effect and physical inhabitance displayed by the dancers, which has always felt singular and powerful in Handman’s work but felt less so in “Omnivore”.

A section of “Ominvore” did transcend the dynamic plateau of mid-level choreography done at a moderate tempo: wild electronic music invited chaos and the change in speed viscerally heightened a group section. This section was short-lived, however, and quickly found its way back to a meandering duet to equally meandering music, rife with affectations (sometimes confusingly classified as “contemporary”) such as the turned in a la seconde leg. This new choreographic chapter Handman might be exploring has lost some of the physical excitement, involvement, and even exhaustion that characterized the old.

Opening the second half of the program, “Comes the Night” by Brendan Duggan began with a single stomping dancer, slowly increasing the tempo and setting the rhythm for the phrase the group would soon break into, also incorporating stomps. Breath was audible and one could hear bodies slapping together at times, finally giving the SALT dancers weight and purpose both in space and in relation to one another.

Duggan also defined relationships between dancers in his world more clearly, aided by dancer-delivered text about a relationship intertwined with a vigorous duet. The content paired with the male/female duet did feel campy at times, but eventually morphed into a larger group alternately delivering lines about compartmentalizing the past and letting others in: a concept much more universal, and perhaps open to investigation, than a female telling her male counterpart that he is “boring!”

Ketley spent several weeks in SLC over the summer teaching classes at Salt Dance Fest, and “A Particulate History of Friendship, The Trial and Absence of Stillard Mave” was a collage of phrases that I learned in one of these classes and spent hours workshopping. Maybe it was this prior connection to the choreographic material that hindered me from seeing the piece as a singular entity: the structure felt haphazardly patchwork, with the roster of phrases merely rearranged in time and space. Group unison was executed in contrived chaos, using different timing and facings, and duets were bolstered by swapping out partners several times.

Ketley’s phrase material itself was captivating and, by far, the most inventive on the program. He choreographs movement with an attention to, and even an indulgence in, gesture while still retaining a sense of matter-of-factness. Varying degrees of attack and delicacy further colored the surprising shifts in level, from soft gestures done standing to sudden, brash poses on the floor. As in several other pieces, an intricate duet that took place on the floor was difficult to make out, as the risers in the Eccles Regent offer a very low grade of steepness with many heads partly obscuring almost half of the marley.

SALT’s success in the community it seeks to serve is evident in its outstanding attendance. As a local dancer attending a community dance performance, I relish SALT’s success, and similarly relish all the many unfamiliar faces seen at Friday night’s performance who walked away having seen more dance and of a different kind than they may have ever seen before. At the same time, again as a dancer, I’m not sure SALT’s diligent marketing of “fresh” and “innovative” correctly describes the company: much of the work I saw over the course of the evening was familiar to the point of feeling derivative, even identical, despite featuring truly stellar dancers with a variety of backgrounds and the work of choreographers from all over the world.

In the future, let’s go easy on the qualifiers, and remember that invoking “contemporary” should just refer to dance that “belongs to or occurs in the present”, rather than dance that adheres to an arbitrary set of aesthetic standards. After all, it’s really only contemporary right now.  

*I wondered what, if anything, SALT aimed to distinguish by opting for the less-used “emergent” over the common “emerging” when describing up-and-coming choreographers in a section of their program notes. I thought an exploration of the company’s semantic choice here could further shed light on their mission. A Google search I conducted for the difference between the two yielded few results, as “emergent” is not in common use. The best definitions I could find, via The Difference-Between, were “emerging”: becoming prominent, newly formed, emergent, rising; and “emergent”: arising unexpectedly, especially if also calling for immediate reaction, constituting an emergency. “Calling for immediate reaction” is probably the intended effect of invoking “emergent”, but to me “emerging” remains more relevant when describing choreographers: becoming prominent, or newly formed, but not constituting an emergency. If SALT is making a purposeful distinction between “emerging” and “emergent”, it seems a superfluous one; that is, one that does not serve to change the nature of the work presented but rather only the language that surrounds it.

Amy Falls is loveDANCEmore's Program Coordinator and regularly contributes to the blog. 

Photo (at top) by Ismael Arrieta / Artwork by Lisa Marie Crosby

Madame Butterfly

Ballet West opened its 2016-2017 season this past weekend with Stanton Welch’s Madame Butterfly.  This is the second time the company has staged the Houston Ballet Artistic Director’s ballet redux of the classic Puccini opera.  First Soloist Sayaka Ohtaki achieved the transporting sweetness of an impossible dream as the eponymous Butterfly, and the production’s glittering aesthetic stood rich and imposing against John Lanchbery’s adaptation of the iconic score.  

The supporting cast performed with beautiful technique to match. Jenna Rae Herrera, as Butterfly’s loyal friend, zipped with easy grace through tricky allegro sections while maintaining a convincing grasp of character.  The moments she and Ohtaki danced together at the beginning of Act II were a small but sincere delight.  Stepping softly between following and leading, the two women engaged in a conversation of tender and enduring friendship.  Oliver Oguma as Goro delivered a supremely entertaining mix of propulsive athleticism and slyly comedic trickery.

Principal Artist Chase O’Connell performed opposite Ohtaki as Pinkerton with loping elegance, floating through multiple pirouettes and moving widely with confidence.  The two leads’ pas de deux were stunning.  Employing some extremely difficult partnering, they conveyed the out of control soar of a first love.  Flying, falling lifts and dizzying turns echoed Butterfly’s romanticism, and Ohtaki was fully committed to a stirring portrayal of passionate, adoring elation.  O’Connell practiced a sweetly soothing charm that swept up the audience alongside his bride.  

And yet, for all its technical and visual splendor, I found Madame Butterfly acutely unsettling.  The opera is considered to be one of the art form’s greatest classics, and I had come to the Capitol Theatre hungry with the promise to be profoundly moved.  Instead I left feeling emptied and frustrated, with a ringing discomfort.  

The first source of this unease I can only identify as my impression that the ballet’s sumptuous production values failed to communicate an essence fundamental to these characters and their circumstances.  Madame Butterfly really isn’t a very good love story.  Stripped of its finery, it reads more as a tale of the deliberate and callous abuses endured by a young woman and her terrifying desolation.  To recap, a destitute, orphaned child (she’s 14) is forced to sell herself to a U.S. Navy officer in marriage to survive.  She is seduced and lied to and willfully betrayed by this “love interest”.  She is cast out of her own society and eventually coerced into giving up her beloved child.  She kills herself in despair and humiliation.  Her traumatized four-year-old son will presumably be carted off to a foreign country by strangers.  

The essential plot is agonizingly poignant, touching on themes that could easily find resonance in a modern audience.  But the execution felt strange and misleading, and despite a fairly direct course of action, the production was hard to follow without a close reading of the synopsis.  Transitions were disorienting and Act II in particular suffered from an overabundance of dancers entering and exiting and using different parts of the stage during critical acting scenes.  The beautiful circus of sets and costumes proved far more distracting than supportive.  In the end, the sudden conclusion was jarring in a manner more confusing than heartbreaking, saved only by Ohtaki’s emotive powers.  

Characterization was handled with a similarly flashy but clumsy approach, relying on reductive stereotypes and gimmickry.  The character of Butterfly is incredibly one-dimensional.  She is allowed two flimsy emotions, spending most of the ballet giggling coyly before slingshotting to sudden hysteric anguish at the very end.  There is no growth in her internal psychology and the dotty, Juliet-esque quality was frustrating to watch.  The seppuku (a Japanese samurai tradition of ritual suicide) Butterfly commits in the final scene is meant to be a calmly serious act in defense of her honor.  But she never takes us toward any sensation of that strength.

The way Pinkerton was rendered, in typical balletic leading-male fashion as a gallant hero, was equally disturbing.  His irresponsibly cruel behavior is the direct cause of every bit of suffering that ensues.  Yet the production placed him on a shining pedestal (quite literally at one point) and allowed the tragic course of action to rest on a sense of “well, sh— happens, I guess.”  Several tenderly playful pas de deux and an ending tableau reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet were lovely, but the relationship between Butterfly and Pinkerton isn’t the saccharine, star-crossed love those scenes suggested.  The sympathy we are designed to feel for him is so completely at odds with his abhorrent actions.  

Beyond the two leads, the supporting cast and framework did not fare much better in terms of depth.  The tired ballet trope of simple, cheerful, gossiping villagers was in full force.  Tyler Gum’s clowning as Prince Yamadori raked in the laughs (never mind why it’s considered comically disgusting that he wants to purchase Butterfly but it was perfectly okay when the handsome American did it).  There were several lazy jokes about women playing with makeup and not knowing how to read, and like Butterfly, most of the women on stage spent most of their time giggling.  One particular Act II scene for the company’s women was an aggressively unpleasant flurry of frills and grotesque facial expressions backed by what sounded like actual screeching bird calls from the orchestra pit.

Many story ballets construct fairy-tale settings with less than plausible characters.  What makes this case especially troubling are the cultural context and historical tensions being distorted.  These kinds of temporary “marriages” were a common practice in Japan at the turn of the 20th century, and the opera is loosely grounded in semi-autobiographical accounts.  Divesting Butterfly of a realistic internal landscape not only robs the experience of emotional depth, but also dismisses the humanity of a real group of women and proliferates stereotypes of Asian femininity as submissive, doting, self-sacrificing, and simple-minded.  Butterfly becomes a cliché and a cartoon.  

My other chief criticism relates to visual aesthetics, specifically the use of exaggerated orientalism as a racial signifier in costuming and choreography.  Seeing a majority of the cast in yellow face is a first and inescapable concern .  Obviously Butterfly employs a particular setting and characters with specific backgrounds, and that is an indispensable part of the narrative.  Pinkerton is very much the spitting image of the reckless destruction of white colonialism; a way to showcase cultural and ethnic distinctions is needed to incorporate the deeper layers of meaning at play.  However, it would be imperative to do this in a respectful way and not merely for added spectacle.  I’m not convinced Welch’s production achieves that goal.  

As an example, geisha makeup is a specific and revered tradition worn by an exclusive group.  However,  a rough approximation of the style using white paint, red lips, and heavy slanting eyebrows was used to characterize every Japanese female character on the stage.  Butterfly is meant to be a member of a geisha order, but her maids and other background characters are not.  By ignoring its specificities, that tradition is mutated, relegated to the role of ornamentation and an inappropriate racial marker.  

A second example is found in the excessive stylization of Prince Yamadori, his entourage, and Butterfly’s male relatives.  They were variously dressed in a mashup of elaborate ceremonial costumes, samurai accoutrements, and Kabuki theatre-esque makeup and masks.  I can’t speak fully to their degree of historical accuracy, but the amplified exoticism of these “bad”, “scary”, and “gross” characters was highly at odds with the Americans who were afforded a level of dress much more casual and everyday (e.g., Pinkerton and his hapless buddy Sharpless are naval officers but they never appear in any distinctive uniform, only simple light colored pants and jackets).  

The use of dubiously appropriated cultural aesthetics for embellishment moved beyond visual design and into the movement as well.  A servile, hunched-over posture, stilted parallel bourées, and a shuffling, flexed-foot heel-to-toe walk were employed to distinguish Asian characters.  Similar to the infamous “index finger pose” used in many a Nutcracker  for the Chinese divertissement, these motifs were an unnecessary way to racially shade in characters.  More intricate footwork, quick fluid allongé in port de bras, a softly bending upper body, and repeated attitude devant and derrière patterns were also used to define the vernacular of Butterfly and her friends, and were a sufficient and much better way to contrast them with the American Kate and her corps of dancers.  

I recognize many of my reservations about this production are intrinsic to its original source.  Like most art, that opera is a product of its time.  Puccini’s work reflects an era of colonial imperialism when racism, misogyny, and a distorted fascination with “exotic” cultures were prevailing forces in the zeitgeist of the western world.  When we re-stage classic works today, those shadowy undertones often come along for the ride.  So how do we deal with all these problematic tropes? Can we present a widely beloved masterpiece without perpetuating racism and dishonestly crude caricatures of human experience? What is the best approach to take?

I certainly can’t give you a satisfying answer. But I do think it’s possible, and necessary, to try for better.  With a re-adaptation (particularly one making the jump to an entirely different art form), there is always some degree of opportunity to use either more or less of the source material.  New freedom is afforded to fill in gaps, explore, and make choices with responsibility and respect.  It would have been nice to see a production that endeavored to find a little more humanity in this story, instead of relying on cheap laughs and familiar stereotypes.  There is so much emphasis in ballet on preserving tradition and creating beauty at all costs.  But our ability to produce truly resonant work becomes stunted by poor cultural sensitivity and a tendency to forgo the complexities of human existence for a circus of technique and frothy love stories.  A beautiful form does not make up for a grave mishandling of context.  

Just as filmmakers, writers, musicians, and other artists are scrutinized for questionable content choices, we as dancers  and choreographers must also reflect on our flaws and be accountable for what we put out into the world.  Continuing to uphold versions of our stories that deny their characters a justly representative and fully realized humanity only aids the reinforcement of harmful labels outside the theatre.  As artists, we give tangible shape to connection. Our imperative is to draw people together, linking one dream to another. Part of the vital responsibility of that work is to think more carefully about how we treat other people and the relationships between us.  

Emily Snow is a graduate of the University of Utah's Ballet Department. She most recently spent several seasons dancing with Central West Ballet in CA.

Dance Heginbotham

Last Friday, Sugar Space Arts Warehouse presented Dance Heginbotham, the company of eponymous New York-based choreographer and former Mark Morris dancer John Heginbotham. While I believe the company typically has more dancing members, Heginbotham brought just two along for the Salt Lake show: Lindsey Jones and Weaver Rhodes, both graduates from SUNY Purchase. Additionally, musician Nathan Koci traveled with the troupe, accompanying the evening alternately on the piano and the accordion. All the evening’s costumes were created by Maile Okamura (who also used to dance for Morris).

The evening included six works: five by Heginbotham, one by Okamura. While it seemed like a lot from the outset, together they rounded out a well-paced, well-varied hour-long program. The several dances that included live accompaniment by Koci often began with an overture, giving the effect of musical interludes between divertissements. Alongside Heginbotham’s quirky, humor-infused dances, the live music transported the audience to a variety show era.

As the evening progressed, Heginbotham’s choreographic knacks became clear: the crafting of technical rigor, punctuating that rigor with exploration of and indulgence in physical humor, as well as creating successful humor through facial expression. Heginbotham’s choreographic structures and movement choices are strong; so were the performative ones made by himself, Jones, and Weaver throughout the evening.

I mentioned Heginbotham’s Morris lineage previously, but want to clarify that I did so not because dancing for Mark Morris validates him as a choreographer but because Heginbotham’s dance lineage can serve as a point of reference to color the description of his work. Traces of Morris were present throughout the evening: small yet propelling footwork (prances, pony steps), homages to the classical tradition seen through a more light-hearted or contemporary lens, at times an almost academic attention to musicality, and even the cohesion of dance, music, and costume elements. While one could absolutely note these similarities in a conversation about dance lineage, the success of the evening was that the dances felt distinctly like Heginbotham’s (save, of course, for the dance by Okamura - though that too felt singular).

Throughout the evening, there were many moments that intrigued me, and many that I laughed at. Given the varied nature of the program, here is just one snapshot from each dance:

Weaver Rhodes in “throwaway”, performing quick gestures on and around his body (a la vogueing), propelled by Daft Punk’s “Buy it, use it, break it, fix it…”, clad in a white cropped jacket decorated with blue, feather-like epaulettes;

Lindsey Jones in “Lulu”, sporting a black and white op-art inspired leotard, walking back and forth across the stage while swinging her arms and tongue side to side (and her eyeballs too, I think);

John Heginbotham and Rhodes in “Old-Fashioned”, wearing colorful shorts and shirts with bric-a-brac reminiscent of lederhosen, putting their flattened palms together and drawing circles in the air (“...wax on, wax off…”);

Jones and Rhodes in “Only if You Mean It”, peppering silly, sexy hip twists with an earnest temps leve, a contraction over a battement to the front, and the windmill arms most often seen in corps de ballet stage exits;

Heginbotham in Okamura’s “Salty Dog”, pointing his finger toward Koci like a pantomime scene from a ballet (Carabosse sprang to mind), back foot extended in tendu, then grabbing the door handle attached to his pant leg in order to promenade while holding his leg up;

And Jones and Rhodes in “Rockefellers”: a postmodern, even futuristic, social dance; together doing low quick turns with their arms above their heads like the Arabian dancer from “The Nutcracker”, then Jones turning into a doll-like version of herself after being resuscitated by Rhodes’ squid-like hand.

During many of these playful moments, the performers would smile, smirk, or glance challengingly at each other. These moments did feel like inside-jokes, but of the sort that I always felt in on (and were often directed toward the audience). The humor in Heginbotham’s work is overt, in that it is grounded by both visible facial expression and physical movement, but remains original and clever as a result of Heginbotham’s sense of choreographic timing in both the pure dancing moments and in the sillier ones, as well as his ability to fold in elements of popular culture. This proved to be a delightful evening, and I would love to see Sugar Space continue to program choreographers from out of state like Heginbotham and like Rosie Trump this past summer.

Amy Falls is the loveDANCEmore Performance Coordinator, regularly contributes to the blog and also performs around town.