Junction Dance Co: Zero Flux

Zero Flux is the first full-length performance presented by Junction Dance Co, but in many ways, this did not seem like the first show of a company that was just starting out.

The 31-dancer cast of Zero Flux includes artistic director Megan Adelsberger, nine company members, and 21 Junction II members (who pay to be involved in this training opportunity), and so much talent. Zero Flux showcased many styles of dance, such as hip-hop, contemporary, house, b-boying, jazz, and tap.

The show was clearly well-rehearsed (as I understand it, the dancers have worked for several hours a day, two days a week, since January on this project). Most of the choreography was by Adelsberger and it was cleaned to her style, which includes sharp movements, gooey moments, and expressive faces. Adelsberger’s strong vision and impressive execution are highly commendable. I appreciated the high energy of everyone on stage, how the variety of styles meshed together, and how the show flowed smoothly with quick transitions between pieces.

Some of my favorite choreographic moments were a few times when dancers were placed closely together and seamlessly transitioned from highlighting one dancer to highlighting another elsewhere in the group. I especially loved the unique lifts and other connected movements in these parts.

The theme of the first act, entitled “Zero Flux,” seemed to generally cluster around bold expressions, and a celebration of life and dance. It reminded me a lot of Underground Dance Crew (because of the large group, inclusion of various dance styles, and different costumes for each piece).

I generally enjoyed it, although I was mildly disappointed in the lack of originality in music choice for the lone Fosse-meets-contemporary-sexy piece: “Fever.” I’m glad that at least it was a less common version of the song. And maybe the dancers felt that disappointment too, because I don’t feel like they shined as brightly in that piece as in the rest.

After a 15-minute intermission, the next section, “Love Journals,” was all one piece, with extra-smoothly connected parts.

Then, following a five-minute pause, came “A.Live,” which included a variety of live audio to accompany the dancers. For me, the most memorable part of this act was a piece titled “What Do You Desire?,” which included a live actor, Isaiah Cook, delivering a speech by Alan Watts. The content of the speech included the concept that financial practicality keeps many people from doing what they truly desire to do. It was relatable to artists, wherever they are, who may exist on a spectrum from full commitment to their art to completely giving up on their art in favor of practicality. Choreographers Adelsberger and Jeffery Louizia danced along to the words in ways that highlighted the humor and irony of not doing what you love in order to fund the continuation of not doing what you love.

Another thing that stood out about this show was the strong, clean, fun tap dances featured throughout the performance, and how they seemed to be a main part of the plan, rather than an afterthought. Tap was a big part of the final piece, which included most of the cast, and was highly energetic, ending with everyone yelling something triumphantly.

The Zero Flux program states eight goals, and I think that Junction is already achieving some of them, such as, “uplift and celebrate local artists,” and “encourage artistic expression to inspire healing and instill purpose in individuals throughout the community.” There are also some bigger goals, including, “save lives through dance,” and, “create local and international opportunities, events, performances, and outreach to unite with other communities around the world.” I wish Junction the best with all of their goals, and I will be eager to see what the future holds for them.

Kendall Fischer is the artistic director of Myriad Dance Company, and has enjoyed performing opportunities with Voodoo Productions, SBDance, Municipal Ballet Co., and La Rouge Entertainment, among others. Her choreography has been performed by Myriad, Municipal Ballet, and at Creator's Grid, and her dance film project, 'Breathing Sky,' received the 2017 Alfred Lambourne Movement prize.

Justin Bass: No Bueno

When I arrived at Sugar Space Arts Warehouse in the early evening, it was sweltering. Inside, the AC was blowing to its max while a very small crowd milled about. Comprised almost entirely of other dancers from around Salt Lake, and presumably some close friends and family of the performers, the gathering was intimate and very casual. Once we were seated, Justin Bass came out to say hello. Grinning and shrugging and cracking jokes, he performed the introductions. As a preface, he let us know, “No Bueno is about everyday life, crossroads we reach, how we react… there’ll be a Q&A at the end, we can talk about why it’s not very good.”*

The dancers of No Bueno were Bass, Marty Buhler, and Natalie Border. All are fantastic performers to watch, and they executed the work with richness and ease. During the short performance, each took a solo, Bass and Buhler performed a duet, and the three came together as bookends. The group began with walking patterns back and forth, contracting in and out. They shifted mostly in unison to a bouncy and driving groove, sliding into deep grand pliés in second, sometimes stopping to reach an arm out to the side, elbow cocked. When Bass and Buhler exited, Border grabbed a folding chair and slunk to it center stage. Hotly shaking off its gravity to do a jerky, windmill-armed, off-balance tip-toe before relatedly retreating back into its support, her anxious solo was the most explicitly emotive segment of the show.

When Bass and Buhler reappeared they were side by side. Here as in the group sections, they moved together without eye contact. Their far-off stares went out above our heads, while the closeness of bodies and movements in unison established connection. Simple shuffling steps combined with sudden held extensions, and with repeated gestures that were shared and passed back and forth. Buhler’s solo was next, characterized by more wide, slow grand pliés with the head rolled back and clasped hands stretch out long– matching plaintive vocals and a slower, heavier beat. Bass turned his back to the audience for much of his solo, reprising those pliés again, this time a little sharper and paired with elastic undulations of the torso and fluttering fingers.

As all three dancers reappeared, the music turned to soft piano and the choreography drew a line through everything that had come before, restating themes from each movement. A final tableau transformed the dancers into a small flock of birds - perched in deep, forward lunges, wings back, fingertips fluttering, heads swiveling, before they walked upstage away from us as the music flared again and cut to black.

Surrounding the simplicity of each dance were elements unfolding texture, depth, and tone. The music was Bass’s own composition, born of a self-proclaimed deep love for amateur tinkering in GarageBand. It was mostly in the realm of electronic dance club music, beat-heavy but also pop-y, dipping between a pulsing groove and something more moody and sweeping. The costumes were likewise home-hewn, beautifully busy fabric of jumbled blue squares turned into knee-length skirts paired with plain black tees. Bass later elaborated that there was no specific intention behind the costuming, just an easy sewing pattern and the chance to practice another favorite hobby. And then there were the vocal audio recordings woven into Bass’s solo and the final section – the first was a spoken word poem, "The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized" (a modern take on Gil Scott Heron’s iconic 1970 recording), from a YouTube video posted by poet Danny Mahes in 2011, and the other a 2015 viral video wherein high schooler Shea Glover walks around campus telling people she wants to photograph them because she is “taking pictures of things I find beautiful.” Bass re-cut and looped the latter, placing it over a tinkling piano. Afterward, in the Q&A, he expounded rhapsodically about his love of ambitious gesture, how he first found that video, and how he sort of included it on a whim just because he found it so delightfully affective and sweet.

Speaking more about the choreography, Bass touched on the specific and personal nature of his work. He explained how he created movement and method to be uncomplicated and purposely “lowbrow,” choosing to reflect the dancers, the process, and the vast minutiae of day-to-day experiences over labored sophistication and grander ideas. Referring to the process of creating No Bueno, Bass described it as a sort of experiment – if awarded an opportunity by Sugar Space to do a show, what could he come up with given the limited time and resources he had available? Might as well try it.

The assorted elements of No Bueno shared an appreciable thread of purposefully D.I.Y. and resourceful creativity similar to previous works by Bass. Discovered elements and those at hand were dissected and reassembled and inserted alongside movement phrases of irrelative origin without precise bearing in mind. The work took shape as it was created, and the different pieces ultimately came together to form a sort of tapestry, reflective of Bass himself in that moment in time and of the people he worked with - likes and dislikes, relationships, media consumed, activities enjoyed, social climate. This meandering approach through personal hobbies and cultural touchstones bestowed a nice, nuanced layering on the sensibility of the final product, which was never overly heavy on conceptual detail or framework to begin with. If No Bueno was a sort of casual and sprawling experiment, it was also passionate, crafted, and intuitively well-defined self-expression.

*Partial paraphrasing by the author

Emily Snow resides in Salt Lake City, where she performs regularly with Municipal Ballet Co. and with Durian Durian, an art band that combines post-punk music and contemporary dance.

Municipal Ballet Co. & Color Animal: Night

I began driving to the Commonwealth Studios upset that my tidy and prescribed theater route was disrupted on a hot night. But upon parking (finally) I discovered that the Municipal Ballet Company had found yet another magical space for something to happen.

The company’s newest concert, “Night” is, in a word, disarming.

In its sixth year of presenting concerts, this collaborative group directed by Sarah Longoria has consistently used charms to relieve the suspicion of both dance skeptics and dance critics. By carefully choosing venues off dance’s beaten path, collaborating with local bands (in this case, Color Animal) and always ensuring that beverages are provided, it’s challenging not to find something to enjoy about the experiences created by Municipal Ballet Co. whether you are a regular dance goer or, more likely, new to the field. For the former, there are new faces and places (did I mention beverages) and for the latter, there are entry points beyond movement.

Many of these entry points are stylized —  garage tracks juxtaposed with ballet steps in a commercial studio, but they are also unwitting and spatial. I am able to turn to the band on my left and notice that Felicia Baca is concentrating and therefore chewing her gum in a particular way. Or, that the audience member to my right closes his eyes at a certain cadence in Andrew Shaw’s voice. If I am choreographically disinterested, I can also see who has snuck to the bar or the black and white photographs in the back of the space. With each of these passing glances, I can just as easily return to the strips of gray marley where a handful of dancers perform the twelve works that comprise “Night.”

Theoretically these dances each represent an hour of the night, from dusk to dawn, and relate to the contemporary political moment. But in my view, that topical idea is less present than something that continually rises to the surface in Municipal Ballet Co. concerts, the complicated way in which so many individuals fill so many vibrant roles in Salt Lake’s art and social scenes.  

In this work, no choreographer, dancer, or musician holds a singular title and I am aware as I’m watching that this not just a dance concert but a dance concert which includes: radio personalities, writers, gallery directors, parents, arts administrators, neighbors, and even one of my first dance teachers. The audience reflects this multiplicity back to the stage and returns a vibrant energy of friends, family, and future collaborators eager to participate in something new.

The atmosphere of possibility has some moments of particular excitement. In “Destruction,” Mary Jessie Floor bourres while David Ayala and Tim Dwyer (literally) juggle fire around her port de bras. In “Disconnection,” Ben Estabrook’s films take the stage in new contexts, and in “Dismantle,” Nora Price impossibly cooly departs her own solo to harmonize with the band.

But that feeling of possibility is also disrupted at times: when the addition of oatmeal colored ballet skirts overwhelms the more fashionable aesthetic of clothes-we-happened-to-have, when the confines of the small space cause a choreographic glitch, or when the inevitable disparity among performing bodies is revealed -- — 

The fifth dance of the concert, “Tomb” is performed by Ursula Perry, a Repertory Dance Theater company member. Her command of the stage is tremendous and this control is derived in part from Chase Wise’s choreography but, in larger part, the amount she dances each day. It isn’t until she performs that there is a distinction between her, a dancer by trade, and the former performers who (as described) fulfill many artistic roles but simply don’t have the same degree of daily physical practice. For the casual observer, pointing this out may not appreciably change nor represent their experience, but for me, the first moment of her sharp gestures troubles the former works of the concert. Despite this sentiment, the solo is beautiful, as are many preceding and following dances -- a trio by Jo Blake that unfolds alongside the music, Joni Wilson’s crisply cupped hands and delicate movements in “Fragility,” and the unfolding choreographic pieces and earnest pairings within ensemble works.

If disarming is the first word, liminal is the final word.

Municipal Ballet Co. arrives at a boundary between showing audiences ballet steps and exploring choreographic structures; at a threshold of something commercially engaging to audiences but still artistically focused; occupying a place where I like “Night” but also (the best part is) that they don’t need me to.

Ashley Anderson directs loveDANCEmore programs as part of her 501c3, ashley anderson dances.  

Ballet West: National Choreographic Festival, Program B

The second weekend of Ballet West’s National Choreographic Festival features three pieces created by women: Jennifer Archibald’s Myoho performed by Cincinnati Ballet, Robyn Mineko Williams’s To Clear performed by Charlotte Ballet, and África Guzmán’s Sweet and Bitter performed by Ballet West. Like the first weekend of the festival, each choreographer presents a different approach to contemporary ballet, revealing a diversity of aesthetics as well as the significance of including women’s voices in ballet programming.

The director of Cincinnati Ballet, Victoria Morgan, has brought financial stability and artistic excellence to the organization during her 20-year tenure as artistic director, 8 years of which she spent in the dual role of CEO. At a panel discussion of women in leadership roles, hosted by Ballet West on May 23, Morgan said, “It’s ironic, in part, because you don’t see women in these roles, you don’t realize that you have that capability.”

Her statement speaks to the politics of representation and who has, historically, decided how women are presented and represented. Scholar and theorist bell hooks writes about how “the field of representation (how we see ourselves, how others see us) is a site of ongoing struggle.” In an essay called “In our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” hooks writes that photography was a “political instrument, a way to resist misrepresentation as well as a means by which alternative images could be produced.” In many ways the festival presented by Ballet West is another reworking of these “misrepresentations” and a place where “alternative images” of capable women are made visible and tangible.

Jennifer Archibald’s choreography exemplifies the importance of the politics of representation. Archibald was named resident choreographer of Cincinnati Ballet in 2017 and Myoho marks her fourth creation for the company (following 2014’s Sit, 2016’s Redeem, and 2017’s Never.Nest). Cincinnati’s dancers shine in her creations, which is a testament to both their talents as performers as well as Archibald’s extraordinary creativity and craft. Her choreography updates ballet’s vocabulary by intertwining elements of jazz, modern, and hip-hop with the classical vocabulary. The results are neither gimmicky nor acrobatic but rather intensely fascinating and evocative. Archibald brings ballet into the 21st century with the kind of imagination and intelligence that George Balanchine brought to ballet in the last century: sections of Myoho looked like Agon, but newly resonant. Exquisite feats of partnering and careful attention to dancers’ formations made Myoho, like Agon, a physical and emotional contest. Myoho tests the dancers’ limits and capacities, and it was incredible that, coming from Ohio the night before, they adjusted to Salt Lake City’s elevation just in time for this demanding performance.

In the panel discussion on May 23, Archibald said, “For me, when I walk into a studio I see more than dancers’ physical abilities. I am checking in with them emotionally… I look at them as humans, instead of what they execute from point A to point B. When you invest in that aspect of their humanity, I think the ensemble work is stronger and the experience is better for myself and for them.” These words sum up perfectly what happened on stage last night: the dancers combined steely strength with lightning-fast accents. Partnering sections allowed both men and women to occupy roles of resisting, relishing, and evading one another. The entire cast of ten inhabited Archibald’s movement as both a challenge and an affirmation, as if to say, “Not only can I dance this phrase, I can also add my own nuances to it.”  

Two men, Cervilio Miguel Amador and James Cunningham, were fascinating in a duet that was as much a demonstration of leaning into support and interdependencies as it was a showcase for their exceptional dancing. Again, Archibald’s vocabulary enables this kind of emotional insight: she has a keen eye for both formal elements, as when couples enter the stage in similar lifts, creating a sense of dynamism and equilibrium, and for highlighting dancers’ relationships with one another. In a brilliant touch, one of the women placed her finger on a man’s lips after a virtuosic duet, as if to say, “That’s enough for the moment.”

Indeed the title of her piece can be translated as “Myo” which means mystic or wonderful, and “ho,” which means law. According to the Soka Gakkai International website, “Myoho” is “the wonder of ordinary people, beset by delusion and suffering, awakening to the fundamental law in their own lives, bringing forth wisdom and compassion and realizing that they are inherently Buddhas able to solve their own problems and those of others. The Mystic Law transforms the life of anyone—even the unhappiest person, at any time and in any circumstances—into a life of supreme happiness.”

In many ways, Archibald’s work with Cincinnati Ballet brought me supreme happiness: I spent three days in San Francisco recently for the Unbound festival of new choreography and none of the works had the nuance and vibrancy of Archibald’s. This is also a compliment to Cincinnati’s dancers: they tap into a place where they are fearless and they excel. Their costume design, by Archibald, placed the women in yellow leotards with futuristic collars that extended over the napes of their necks, suggesting the top of a cape and heightening their sense of invincibility. The score included music by Nico Muhly, Robert Honstein, and David Lang and the intertwining of instruments and machines contributed to the idea that Archibald makes ballet relevant to our digitally-enhanced 21st century.

During the panel, Archibald also said, “I love teaching and I continue to teach high school through university students. How I attack all of my classes is to not only see the star in the room. It’s important for me to see the dancer that may not be at the forefront, but has the skill level and the talent, but not the confidence to step forward. It’s important to see everyone and motivate everyone.” Based on last night’s performance, it’s clear that her choreography motivates her audiences as much as it motivates her students, and Myoho received a standing ovation.

Charlotte Ballet is now directed by Hope Muir, who trained and performed in Great Britain before joining Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (HSDC). Muir selected a work by Robyn Mineko Williams, who danced with HSDC for 12 seasons, to bring to the National Choreographic Festival. Called To Clear, the piece was a brilliant choice for the contrast that Williams’ choreography provided. Working in a more exploratory and grounded style, Williams developed scenes that evoked poetic and enigmatic interactions: the piece began with one woman standing on a folding chair, as a man, Anson Zwingelberg, walked slowly from downstage to upstage, towards her. Two technicians, working hand-held lights in the downstage corners of the stage, created shadows that duplicated their actions on the backdrop. The imagery suggested that this relationship was similar to other human interactions, and as the piece continued the cast of seven created duets, trios, and quartets that felt poignant and dream-like: in one section each cast member slid a hand around one dancer’s waist, as if about to hug or embrace them from behind, but then abandoned the gesture.

Costumes by Aimee J. Coleman contributed to the pedestrian environment, with the men and women in socks and distinct outfits, wearing long-sleeved and sleeveless tops, with pedestrian shorts, capris, and even a pant-suit. The muted tones added to the casual environment and the commissioned score by Robert F. Haynes and Tony Lazzara enriched the atmosphere with blankets of sounds that felt like they were enveloping the scenes. Actions segued seamlessly: for example, a deep lunge morphed into a turn, and then into an arabesque, allowing the momentum of each part to determine the course of events rather than lingering in any position. Zwingelberg, who graduated from Juilliard with his BFA last year, stood out among the cast of beautiful performers.

Ballet West chose África Guzmán’s Sweet and Bitter to close the program and its merger of dramatic interactions and spectacular partnering created a powerful ending. Allison DeBona and Chase O’Connell were stellar as the lead couple, and their closing pas de deux was poignant and haunting, ending with O’Connell lifting and cradling DeBona in his arms.

Katherine Lawrence, Katlyn Addison, Chelsea Keefer, Hadriel Diniz, Alexander MacFarlan, and Jordan Veit added vibrancy and playfulness to the piece, embodying the “sweet” part of Guzman’s title. The women especially lingered in balances as if savoring the movement and this added allure to their performances. Guzmán’s choreography, a fusion of theatricality and physical feats, evokes a lineage of European ballet-makers like Nacho Duato (who Guzmán worked with for 20 years) and Jiří Kylián, and was complemented by a score by Ezio Bosso, which combined both driving and demure sections.

During the panel, Guzmán acknowledged the importance of powerful women in her career, such as Maya Plisetskaya, her first director, and Hope Muir added similar observations. Great Britain, said Muir, is “quite a small island. Ninette de Valois founded the Royal Ballet and Marie Rambert started Ballet Rambert, which is the oldest company in Britain, and one that I was fortunate to dance with... Now you’ve got National Dance Company Wales with a female director [Caroline Finn] and Scottish Dance Theatre has a female director [Fleur Darkin] and there’s Tamara Rojo at English National Ballet.” For Muir, such examples of women in leadership roles led her to believe “it was possible,” a statement that contrasts with Morgan’s observation about seeing so few female directors during her performing career.

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière presents a theory that explains these observations: it’s called “the distribution of the sensible,” which means we can only see or “sense” those ideas that have been presented or framed for us. As a result, aesthetic approaches are deeply entwined with politics, and those works deemed “good” or “valuable” are supported by particular regimes of seeing and thinking. Another way of stating this idea is that aesthetic choices are also political choices: when we support the voices and ideas of people who are not equitably represented, we are enriching our knowledge of the world we live in.

What the National Choreographic Festival makes abundantly clear is that female choreographers are a vital part of our ballet landscapes. While the festival presents a vibrant spectrum, I believe there are still more artists to include. Salt Lake City is home to several distinguished dance-makers, including Penny Saunders, who just premiered an acclaimed full-length for Grand Rapids Ballet, and Melissa Bobick, who was selected for this summer’s prestigious Choreographic Institute at the University of North Carolina, School of the Arts, which is led by another vital female leader, Susan Jaffe.

As Morgan said during the panel discussion, “I might say confidence is important, but then I realize I didn’t feel confident when I stepped into these roles. I think it’s interesting that there’s this theme of recognizing the potential of dancers who are around you. It’s not always necessarily about confidence, but a lot about being vulnerable and creating relationships where dancers feel safe. The ability to generate that kind of atmosphere in a studio is essential.” As this festival proves, it’s also essential to generate support and opportunities for these women who are keeping ballet real.

Principal Artist Chase O'Connell and First Soloist Allison DeBona in Africa Guzmán's Sweet and Bitter. Photo by Beau Pearson.

Kate Mattingly is an assistant professor at the University of Utah’s School of Dance, and holds a PhD in performance studies from UC Berkeley.

She moderated the panel discussion at Ballet West, which featured the female choreographers and artistic directors invited to Salt Lake City for the second weekend of the National Choreographic Festival.

Read Kate's review of the first weekend of the National Choreographic Festival here.

Dr. Janaki Rangarajan in Samah: Dance of Mystic Poetry

Photos of Dr. Janaki Rangarajan in Samah: Dance of Mystic Poetry, by Srinivasan Govindarajan.

Srilatha Singh, of ChitraKaavya Dance, has a passion for presenting high quality Bharatanatyam to Salt Lake City audiences. I have had the pleasure of being an audience member for some of these performances: previously, for Renjith and Vijna performance, Samarpanam, in the fall of 2017, and, now recently, for Dr. Janaki Rangarajan performance of Samah: Dance of Mystic Poetry at the Jeanne Wagner Theatre.

I was also involved when Ragamala Dance Company performed at Kingsbury Hall in 2016; Singh, Raksha Karpoor, Liz Stich, and I performed a piece that was a collaboration of modern dance and Bharatanatyam to open the show. I preface with all of this to say that I have had exposure within this cultural art form, but am in no way well-versed in its nuance. I left Samah with a desire to understand more from the perspective of someone that was more well-versed. Thankfully, Singh and I were able to meet and the following are highlights from our conversation.

Bharatanatyam is an ancient South Indian dance form that was traditionally done as a solo by women in Hindu temples for elite, extremely select, and primarily male audiences. There was much conflict over its existence during British colonial rule; many classical Indian dance forms were ridiculed and discouraged. An “anti-dance movement” arose from this conflict, which accused dance of being a form of prostitution, and culminated in the British government banning Hindu temple dancing altogether in 1910.

When Rukmini Devi Arundale helped to revive Bharatanatyam in the 20th century, it was both taken out of the temples and relieved of any sensuality and sexuality, arguably in an attempt to gain traction and shed its former, alleged connection with prostitution. One of the many things that Singh finds so profound in Rangarajan’s dancing is that, while most contemporary Bharatanatyam dancers continue the mainstream tradition of keeping their hips and pelvis centered, Rangarajan has also been trained in the movement vocabulary called Karana, as reconstructed by her guru, Dr. Padma Subramaniam, as her life’s work. Karana allows the hip to be off-center in sculpturesque angles. With this subtle change, dancers re-integrate the sensual origins of the form, and Singh views Rangarajan’s personal interpretation as skillfully towing the line of adding sensuality without crossing over into the vulgar.

I was not fully aware of this history, or of this deliberate attempt by Rangarajan, but I did gather the effects just by watching her perform. I interpreted her moving body as a full-bodied and multi-dimensional woman, aware of her sensuality and sexual power, but also interested the portrayal of other aspects of the human (or divine) experience. One portrayal did not take precedence over the other. She was simultaneously euphoric, devoted, devastated, sublime, and ordinary. These states of being were housed and manifested in her flesh-and-bone body - a body that she was able to transcend while fiercely staking claim to it.

Singh and I also discussed Bharatanatyam moving forward, and how Singh thinks the form could possibly evolve to gain wider audiences (and also, what will remain constant in the form without compromise). As I watched Rangarajan’s performance, I was surprised at the sheer length of it. As a solo performer, she was onstage for just under two hours, interpreted five different poems, and spoke in between each one, with minimal rest backstage throughout. I can’t imagine the stamina, both physical and mental, that was necessary.

Consequently, the viewing experience also asks a certain stamina of the audience. I found beauty in settling into a lengthy solo performance, a respite from the often scattered and short attention spans littered with sound bytes and social media quips. But, I wondered how this functioned with mass audiences, especially those that are predominantly non-Indian.

While I gleaned much from Rangarajan’s storytelling, Bharatanatyam is essentially a form of sign language, the dancers telling plot-based stories familiar to those raised in the tradition. Immediately accessible to me were her virtuosic dancing, the rhythms, the specificity of her arms moving with her legs, and the layer of choreography that was her face and eyes, but I did not know the literal meanings of many gestures, nor did I have access to the music (sung or spoken in a variety of languages, including Tamil, Kannada, Persian, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Hindi, Maithili, and Sanskrit) in the way that Singh does.

Will this art form experience a "Balanchine moment," in which the plot is forsaken for a non-literal musical interpretation? Could it even go a step forward, à la Merce Cunningham, and divorce itself from the music to see what remains of an abstracted body moving through space? Singh cannot imagine this happening, as emotion and storytelling are at the core of why the dancers move to begin with. This idea was highlighted in our collaboration in 2017: Stich and I would explain our movement choices in terms of spatial arrangement and internal impulse motivation (i.e., doing what “feels” right), while Karpoor and Singh would respond with what the music was saying and how their movements directly corresponded.   

Should somethings remain unchallenged? Should we always be jabbing at tradition with innovation? Would anything worthwhile be left if we pushed and pulled at the rich tradition of Bharatanatyam? These were my own questions, though I’m not sure Singh felt my angst within my probes - which makes sense. I am looking through the lens of modern dance, a movement tradition that was born in the 1900s through the rejection of traditions that came before it, and then continued, and still continues, to turn itself inside and out each decade. We dance to the music, then alongside it, then against it, and sometimes without it… and while I find this interesting, I cannot say modern dance’s exploratory nature has gained it mass appeal as a form.

Instead of these questions, Singh wonders if it would be advantageous to educate audience members more about Bharatanatyam prior to a performance. Each show she has presented has maintained a nice balance of speaking before the performance to welcome but also to enlighten the audience about what they will see. Does there need to be more explanation in order for wider audiences to walk away feeling fulfilled? In the case of Rangarajan’s performance, my response was, “No.” Though I could not historically or academically detail all that occurred, I was transported nonetheless. Rangarajan wove the history of her own body with questions and affirmations of love, despair, and joy with a commitment that I have hardly experienced before. I was left wanting to engage more with what I experienced at Samah: Dance of Mystic Poetry- an indication that art did what it should.

Erica Womack is a Salt Lake based choreographer. She teaches at SLCC and regularly contributes to loveDANCEmore.