OSBA presents Living Legends

Living Legends, a company that tours widely and is based out of Brigham Young University’s dance department, performed their current program, Seasons, for a one-night engagement presented by the Ogden Symphony Ballet Association. The show consisted of a series of Latin American, North American, and Polynesian ensemble song and dance pieces by performers of native descent. Per the show’s title, the pieces were grouped into seasons, each transition accompanied by narrative voiceover and projection. These were not the four solar seasons, however, but social phases which the program notes suggested to be universal to all nations: Promise, Plenty, Prosperity, War, and Rebirth. The title and structure nodded to changes that may be iterative and continuous, but also cyclical, underscoring the company’s dedication to representing tradition but also expressing vital, ongoing contemporary cultural identities.

The show began and ended with an element of theatricality. A young person shrouded in low-flow fog was beset by overbearing technologies and swelling electronic beats; they crouched before projections of familiar social media icons and drew their hoodie over their head. A dancer costumed as the eagle, of native North American origins, entered with and maintained a drifting triplet step reminiscent of flight, acting in the role of guide. Small groups in traditional costumes representing each of the three broad cultural sections filtered onstage and formed static tableaus recalling historical dioramas. They sequentially animated, guided by the narrative roles and song, and began to move, seemingly foreshadowing the series to come.

Until the final piece, there was no further pageantry external to the dances, and I did not miss it; the execution and energy was more than enough to captivate an audience. The first piece, a festive Bolivian Tinku, was among my favorites. It was danced to a musical recording of heavy drums and panpipes and featured steady marching and tight circling, the performers pitched forward in a half crouch while rhythmically throwing clenched fists, which alluded to the dance’s combat origins.

Another stand-out occurred later, in the “Season of Plenty.” This Samoan series featured live percussion, a welcome addition, and the playfully cocky interaction of a charismatic leader, or fa’aluma. After hyping up and drawing out the crowd, he was joined by other men for more sauntering and posturing, and then by a group of women, to form the large ensemble that he directed with shouted cues in performing the seated Sasa. A vernacular of iconic and everyday gestures became a unison sequence of impressive speed and infectious energy. The men resumed their satirical braggadocio to perform the Fa’ataupati, known also as the Samoan slap dance. The whole ensemble performed in startling unison, with the addition of coconut stalks in the Lapa Lapa, which were struck fast and loud against bodies and the floor to great effect.

Many of the dances similarly incorporated skilled manipulation of traditional material or costume elements with visual or musical impact, including feather and hand fans, the bells of the jingle dress, the expressively wide skirts of the Mexican folklorico dances, staves and bows in the “Season of War,” spinning poi of Maori origin, and the many hoops of the Hoop Dance.

The Hoop Dance closed the series of discrete cultural heritage dances and left a dramatic and lasting impression. Two dancers each artfully arranged twenty or more hoops on and around their bodies, both taking a unique and measured approach to achieving imagery in motion and striking static poses. The Hoop Dance was both showy and personally expressive.

A solo dance with many hoops originated in the 1930s and was performed in films and on the traveling show circuit, and was popularized by another touring show: the Lamanite Generation, formed at BYU in 1971 as a Native American performing group, and which became Living Legends. Also dating from that time was the closing song, “Go, My Son,” which espoused the values of family and education. As the closing bookend to the overwhelmed, hoodie-wearing youth’s arc, this number was a reminder that identity is always complex and never monolithic.

Faith in, as well as the institutional support of, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is an intrinsic part of Living Legends’ legacy and continuity, and although this was the least explicitly noted cultural heritage in the show, especially in terms of touring outside the cultural context of Utah, it is an inherently valid aspect of the group’s experience.

The show ended in earnest with a simple group song, bow, and ovation, following which the cast of performers headed out into the lobby alongside the audience. After giving such a committed, animated, and technical performance, the company was incredibly generous with their time and energy, engaging with patrons, especially the many kids in attendance, and offering a closer look at their incredible costumes. This level of ambassadorship from the cast in its entirety once again emphasized the company’s commitment to sharing and taking pride in tradition, and doing so as visible, present, and individual, but also interconnected, representatives of living and evolving cultural identities.

Nora Price is a Milwaukee native living and working in Salt Lake City. She can be seen performing with Durian Durian, an art band that combines post-punk music and contemporary dance.

UtahPresents: Bollywood Boulevard

UtahPresents’ Bollywood Boulevard, a journey through Hindi cinema, was performed for a lively audience in a packed Kingsbury Hall. Brooke Horejsi, executive director of UtahPresents, introduced the show, and recalled seeing the company at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series, loving it, and wanting to bring it to Utah audiences for the purposes of both entertainment and to showcase of a different part of the world.

Bollywood Boulevard combined the talents of Heena Patel (executive producer and artistic director), Rushi Vakil (executive producer, music director, and composer), and Rohit Gijare (choreographer and dancer) to create an homage to Bollywood, chronologically taking us through Hindi cinema’s black and white era, Golden Era, and into present day. Musicians and singers flanked the stage as the combination dancers-actors performed each snippet of the featured film. It was colorful, lively, celebortary, and incredibly nostalgic (based on audience reactions) for those that are familiar with Hindi cinema.

I have limited experience with Bollywood, but my friend I attended with, Srilatha (Latha) Singh, has much more -- she was born and raised in Delhi, India. Her voice will be included throughout, as her opinions and perspective shaped my experience of the evening.

Latha explained Bollywood pulls from various cultural and religious forms (for the dancing, music, and costuming) and then makes these forms not only widely accessible but also secular. She pointed out moments during the performance that hinted toward various groups living in India: Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, and tribal groups. In this way, I could see the important role Bollywood has played in bringing diverse groups together and celebrating universal stories of love, hardship, triumph, and family.

Each scene, never lasting more than a couple of minutes, was introduced with a graphic on the cyclorama that gave information about the movie it was drawing from. The pacing was quick, and when the show landed on local guest artist Sonali Loomba performing Kathak (modern dance entry point: Akram Khan’s formative training is in Kathak), I wished that time could be suspended to dwell longer on this classical form. Kathak began in Hindu temples as a means to convey scriptures but, similar to ballet, eventually made its way to the courts and is celebrated in various ways today, one being concert dance. I felt a desire to delve into the pulsating footwork and detailed upper body of the form, but the performance’s structure did not accommodate this.

Bollywood as a movement genre is not really a concert dance form; as Latha says, “it is a participatory art form.” It is at its strongest when you are celebrating alongside the performers, as was clearly demonstrated at the end of the show. The audience was invited to get out of our seats and fill the aisles, dancing alongside the performers. It was joyous to see so many audience members enjoying movement, music, and community. It was the perfect release after spending the evening watching the performers evoke the stories of this beloved form of entertainment.      

There was a moment, about halfway through the show, when I leaned over to Latha and asked, “Do you know most of these movies?” She replied, smiling, “Every single one. They would take the most popular songs and play them on Doordarshan (the official television channel owned by the Indian government) every Wednesday night.”

In that moment, I was struck by the beauty of being able to sit with a friend who recognized and understood every cultural reference, while I recognized none. What a world! I did appreciate the bright colors, the swirling and circling, the shimmying and bouncing, the upbeat and rhythmic dancing, the soulful singing; but Latha could connect each vignette with a specific time and place in her life, or decode the theme of a dance or the words to a song. My enjoyment wasn’t based in nostalgia (though I enjoyed watching and listening as others’ was) but rather on being introduced to a fresh view of aesthetics and entertainment.  

Erica Womack is a Salt Lake City-based choreographer. She coordinates loveDANCEmore’s Mudson series and contributes regularly to the blog.

Ballet West: Swan Lake

It’s hard not to be impressed by Swan Lake. The heavy, dripping sprawl of its monumentally megalithic iconography is… eternally overwhelming. The music and choreography live outside of themselves in my brain, and maybe in yours too. Working its way from a dismally received premier through many revisions to its present form and engendering a vast cultural legacy and innumerable derivatives; Tchaikovsky’s most fêted handiwork has been performed for 142 years. I have learned it and performed it and seen it performed countless times, both live and in recordings from all over the world. And I have to say I’ve never seen one I truly enjoyed more than Ballet West’s current production.

The Capitol Theatre itself isn’t overly grand or spectacularly sprawling. But it’s cozy and charming (as prosceniums go), which makes it a wonderful locus for intimate, storybook detail and concentrated, emotional storytelling– a strength Ballet West has been cultivating with excellence in its story ballets of late. As in recent productions of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, they have again created a thoroughly illustrated, richly peopled world full of color and character and spirit, distilling something exquisitely different and special from a story I thought I knew very, very well.

Beyond nuanced updates to choreography, aesthetics, and staging, spectacular performances by the dancers made the ballet thrilling in a way that had me mentally calculating if I could return for a second viewing before I even vacated my seat. The company is full of skillful and smart actors; more and more, I seen in them the impulse towards a descriptive expansion of humanity and the slow razing and retrofitting of old prescriptive tropes. From the smallest page to the featured soloists, the production was awash in distinctive, fresh, and textured personality. Brought to life in vivid saturation by David Heuvel’s richly colorful costumes, they formulated a collective depth that kept the stage buzzing electrically the entire evening.

The parade of national dances in the third act, the princesses proffering themselves as candidates for Siegfried’s hand, was especially enlivening. Usually, that scene is when I find myself most empathetic toward our hapless Prince Siegfried in his exasperation with his matchmaking mother, the Queen (“Come on, another one? Really? Give it up mom.”). This time it hit me completely differently, like I was eight years old again and watching Act II of The Nutcracker for the first time, each of its series of divertissements wildly new and colorful and exciting. Here, each princess had a unique personality and all were terrifically funny in their various reactions to princely rejection. Throughout the Czardas, the repetition of grave, delicate gestures, the dance’s whirlwind finish, and the shivery intensity of Lillian Casscells, Dominic Ballard, and their ensemble had me on the edge of my seat. They smoldered and I found myself taking back every curse I’ve hurled under my breath at that particular folk dance in the past.

Even better was the Neapolitan. Jenna Rae Herrera is an incredibly warm, bright spot of sun in the company. I love watching her dance in every production, her joy always palpable and generous. It fills you and lifts you straight up. Here, both dressed in yellow and each with a tambourine in hand, she and partner Alexander McFarlan stole the show during their variation. The choreography for Ballet West’s version of the Neapolitan was fantastic and everyone around me was elated, cheering and laughing aloud as the pair’s antics took them spinning and dashing wildly around the stage.

Throughout the two acts that take place in the royal court, it was plain to see the great care taken in subtly re-imagining and reinvigorating the classic choreography to keep momentum moving, every successive dance exciting and unique. The buoyant whirl of courtiers in beautiful, airy blue costumes flooded the stage in Act I before pulling back to reveal a delicately piquant pas de trois. The wide, laughing grin on Tyler Gum’s face was a sharp point of touching sweetness as he partnered Sayaka Ohtaki and Katlyn Addison. The large, intricately pinwheeling dance of the young courtiers and Ballet West Academy students, led by Mia Tureson, was funny, cute, and marvelously well-executed. As others have noted in earlier reviews from this season, the young Academy students are impressively capable performers and always exceptionally well-rehearsed. Tureson in particular was absolutely sparkling.

And then there were, of course, the swans. Rising out of just the right amount of billowing fog, their synchronicity and intensity made hearts soar (and my eyes sting). Sharp head movements and powerful sweeping wings gave this flock a little more strength and animal quality than others I’ve seen in the past. In the dance of the Cygnets, I loved the sharp focus of heads cast to each corner of the proscenium, rather than the often-opted-for slow roll down and around.

Also exciting was seeing the degree of variation in the corps de ballet. The dancers both looked and moved differently. Each was distinct unto themselves, and the double-down on a commitment to diversity that Ballet West has begun to enact over the last few years is starting to manifest in an appreciable way on stage. They were perfectly, ferociously, and crystalline-clearly in sync, as I remembered all the times in my youth that I heard that a perfectly identical body of bodies was the only way to achieve eternal and ethereal beauty. The satisfaction and elation of seeing a corps de ballet of swans like this one was piercing. I sincerely hope Ballet West continues to push in that direction.

Chase O’Connell portrayed Siegfried with signature elegance. Lofting about in technical excellence, his natural connection with Beckanne Sisk made for some beautiful moments in the two white swan pas de deux. I will say, though, that he appeared more at home in the moments when things were going well for his character. Harried despair didn’t hang quite as naturally on him, his moments of circling the stage in anguish maybe a little dry.

Sisk fulfilled the expectations that always precede her and then some. Fiercely technical with buckets of personality, I fully admit I expected her to hit the height of her shine as the black swan rather than the white. Both were excellent, but in fact it was almost the opposite. Forgoing some of the frailty of other swan queens, she had powerful wings like her corps, which served her better in highlighting the strength of her choice to trust the hunter and the eventual tenderness of that connection. She hit all the most iconic moments of Acts II and IV with a force that sent the room spinning, a rushing wave of divine recognition as her image lined up with the primary referent that lives at the back of my brain.

Her black swan was all sass all the time. Not even bothering to construct a facsimile of Odette and quiver her wings, she took over poor Siegfried with sheer force. I might typically expect a more paced build-up of devilishness to those fourth-wall breaks and that moment all the trickery is revealed, but honestly I’ve always found it hard to buy that the hapless prince really didn’t know the shiny new girl at his party wasn’t his true love from the forest. Whether it was a conscious artistic choice or not, I preferred interpreting that his character really does just fail miserably for a moment. It makes the betrayal even more wrenching and turns the final resolution into something much sweeter and more powerful, with layers of emotional verisimilitude that are more relatable. At any rate, Sisk’s wicked and hungry eyes are just so winning that it was incredibly fun to watch.

In the end, of course, Odette forgives her wayward lover and he continues to whirl her around tragically even as she starts to weaken and fall apart. In one especially striking moment during that final pas de deux, Sisk penché-d to the full extent of her powers towards a kneeling O’Connell before crumbling with almost ugly ferocity into a deep lunge. That simple horrifying fall into gravity carried all the weight of the couple’s despair as the evil Baron von Rothbart herded them towards death. Finally, the swan maidens returned to human form, their curse broken with the new light of day, bringing the story to a satisfying close.

Principal Artist Beckanne Sisk as Odette. Photo by Luke Isley.

Ballet West’s Swan Lake continues this weekend and next, through February 23, at the Janet Quinney Lawson Capitol Theatre.

Emily Snow is a Denver native who now calls Salt Lake City home. She has most recently been seen performing with Municipal Ballet Co. and with Durian Durian, an art band that combines electronic music and postmodern dance.

Molly Heller + Moth Closet: HEARTLAND + Dance Party

The Heart is Already Whole.

At the end of HEARTLAND, Molly Heller addressed the crowd, thanking us for exploring the many experiences of the heart together. "We entered into this time with the understanding that the heart is already whole,” she said. In this brief moment, Heller acknowledged the completeness of each person inside of our complex and, at times, confusing hearts. Her current work, HEARTLAND, does just this: It affirms and teases out the complexities of the heart, offering no definitive answers but creating space for performers and audience members to increase the dynamic range inside their hearts. The part-performance, part-pop-up-dance-party organized by Heller was just one iteration of her ongoing body of research on the idioms, sensations, and experiences of the heart.

HEARTLAND (+ Dance Party) blurred the lines of performer and audience member, inviting the audience to participate in Heller's research, HEARTLAND, through a dance party at The Beehive in downtown Salt Lake City. The venue’s dark interior was covered in at least 100 pink balloons that varied in hue and size; the overlapping forms made me wonder if we had stepped inside a heart. I showed up barely on time, covered in snow, ready to dance it out on the dance floor, and curious as to how the performance would integrate with a dance party. Heller had described the evening as a complete experiment, and a “dance within a dance.”

Before the dance party started, Heller opened with the most formal portion of the evening. Formal is not quite the right word here, though, as the whole evening defied the conventions of a formal modern dance performance. Dancers Brian Gerke and Marissa Mooney joined Heller on “stage”; the two have been working with Heller on her HEARTLAND practice since fall 2018. Composer Mike Wall accompanied throughout the evening, both making music live and acting as DJ. With the audience watching from all four sides of the room, the three dancers took their space between four pillars in the center, with minimal distinction between dancer and audience. They did, however, wear shiny red and gold clothes that stood out in the low light. The three worked through their practice, moving in and out of trios, solos, and duets. They constructed a boxing ring of sorts with party streamers, just one of many pink party favors floating around The Beehive. Think: pink construction-paper hearts, pink sunglasses, heart candies, etc.

Heller has a distinct physical quality that manifests in HEARTLAND. She alternates between working with highly dense space around her, as if she's processing something unseen to the audience, and with a light, bright, carefree freedom. Gerke moved with his classic ease, but with a sense of effort and struggle inside of the articulation. It looked as if he was trying to move his shoulder blades and ribcage up around his heart. Mooney brought a bouncy, casual quality to the trio. All three moved with birdlike quirks and quick, leggy weight shifts. As they wrapped up their opening trio, Heller stood with her heart open to the sky for a long time. A low, pulsating bounce filled the room, and we all began to pulse with it. It was undeniable, the bass and tactile energy demanding that all who were present be affected by the music, by the dance. Thus began the blurring of lines and the most freeing dance party of my life.

Throughout the next hour and a half, the whole room bounced, flung, snaked, and dug deep within themselves; it was a safe space. One attendee remarked that she hadn't felt this free to dance in public in a long time. The performers danced the entire evening, mingling with all the other bodies. They occasionally danced on the benches around the room or climbed onto the stage where Wall was curating the music. Those who took dance breaks or chose not to dance bopped their heads, grooving in their own way on the sides. Almost everyone had a larger-than-life grin that only disappeared due to extreme focus on the dance.

As my quadriceps grew tired and my heart rate increased, I could not shake the sensation of unspeakable joy. There was something intoxicating about exhausting myself, moving and moving and moving and moving to the music, surrounded by other bodies. Based on my conversations with Heller, this is what she hoped HEARTLAND might offer: a way of locating oneself inside the noise. It is finding resistance and endurance, finding lightness when your chest feels heavy. It is honoring the weight of the body, the weight of the heart.

For those who stayed until the very end, Heller performed a tender yet defiant solo after the dance floor had cleared. She moved as if her arms and legs were attached to her sternum, as if they were extensions of her heart. She skipped and floated, claimed her power and fought for balance. In a final farewell, all three dancers performed a delicate score seated on the edge of the stage in front of Wall as he sang “Fade into You” by Mazzy Star.

Heller has promised more pop-up dance parties, and more iterations of HEARTLAND. She has another one coming up already at 12 Minutes Max this Sunday (February 17 at 2 p.m., in the main auditorium of the downtown Salt Lake City Library). HEARTLAND will also continue to develop beyond this: There is a film in the works, and the practice continues to reveal itself. Read more about the origins of HEARTLAND here and here, and follow its future developments here.

From left to right: Mike Wall, Molly Heller, Marissa Mooney, and Brian Gerke in HEARTLAND + Dance Party. Photo by Tori Duhaime.

Originally from the Midwest, Hannah Fischer is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Utah. She received an Individual Artist Grant through the Indiana Arts Commission in 2017 and was an Associate Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2014.

OSBA presents Jessica Lang Dance

"Anything is possible once enough human beings realize that the whole of the human future is at stake." The words of Norman Cousins, American activist and peacemaker, echoed over and over in Jessica Lang's “us/we.” A farewell piece for her company Jessica Lang Dance (which is currently on its final tour following an eight-year run), “us/we” was the first on a diverse program presented by the Ogden Symphony Ballet Association at the Val. A Browning Center this weekend.

A delicious visual experience, “us/we” was a series of snapshots that zoomed in and out on Brooklyn, New York. The piece, created with visual artist Jose Parla, featured colorful projections that filled a screen upstage, framing the dancers and at times covering them with projected light. In a phone interview last week, Lang spoke with this writer about the "layering patchwork" of “us/we.” "It's all tied together," she said, which became clear throughout the driving work.

The set included three large pieces of fabric hanging upstage, each piece mapped for specific images. In the first section of “us/we,” the dancers wore costumes made from cloth used by Parla during his painting process, which was captured on camera and then integrated into the visual design. Still images of his completed works were also used. Costume designer Moriah Black constructed a second set of costumes by piecing together graphic-heavy items found at thrift stores from all over the world.

“us/we” spoke to a sense of unity by joining different people, places, and histories, and resonated through the dancers, who didn’t spend much time standing still as they moved between club scenes, busking scenes, and many literal tableaus, and incorporated gestural movement resembling American Sign Language. Notably, the piece coordinated large groups for impressive, multi-person partnering that had a flair for the dramatic, blending ballet and cinema.

The snapshots of “us/we” moved quickly, transitions almost nonexistent between a dance scene set to Ram Jam’s “Black Betty” and a moodier contemporary sequence. Quick changes of pace, glimpses into relationships, and hints at iconic moments recreated the feeling of riding public transportation: I remembered visiting New York for the first time, and the thrill of watching the city rush by on the subway as my face pressed against the window.

After speaking to Lang about “us/we” and then experiencing it, I see it as a love letter to the company: It is the last piece Lang will have made with the dancers, before all move on to the next stage of their respective careers. Near the end of the piece, the dancers appropriately sang “Can't Help Falling in Love.” With crescendos and brief moments of quietude, “us/we” was a lovely symphony of New York, and by extension, the world.

As a presenter, I would have opted to complete the concert with “us/we,” leaving the audience with a sense of connection and desire for more, instead of ending as the show did with “This Thing Called Love.” In contrast to the rest of the program, the fun, swingy Tony Bennett tribute paled in comparison in both content and complexity. The superimposed emotional content of “This Thing Called Love” was also amplified by its placement on the program following “Thousand Yard Stare” and “The Calling.”

Arguably Lang's most recognizable work, “The Calling” is a beautifully clear haiku of isolation and longing. Julie Fiorenza performed it with articulate grace and a length that defied that of her actual limbs.

“Thousand Yard Stare” always catches my breath. There is something about the way the dancers need each other that speaks to more than just the grit and grief of war. It also speaks to a cultural grappling with loss.

When the dancers moved through the exposed stage, the wings and scrim removed, they were in clear relationship to one another, coming in and out of unison, their contact characterized by dependence. They reached, fell, and collided, moving through space as if it was dense with fog and resistance.

Compositionally, “Thousand Yard Stare” was the most readable of Lang's work on the program. In it, she repeated and recreated scenes spatially as well as gesturally, making it easy to telecast personal or imagined relationships onto the dancers. There was a moving moment when a dancer was left out of the fold, powerful because the dancers were rarely alone throughout the piece. Their mass of overlapping bodies quickly pulled her back in, lifted her over their heads, and, surprisingly, tucked her in between them as if placing a baby bird back in its nest.

It is easy to imagine why “Thousand Yard Stare” is one of the company’s most performed pieces. Set to Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15, Op. 132, its music and movement swim together in hope despite the inevitability of death.

The dancers moved as a unit, offering the audience a sense of humanity and redemption. It would be easy to make a dance that captures the brutality of war, but for “Thousand Yard Stare,” Lang was interested in a different approach. ”We still have to carry hope," she says. She chose the music in part because Beethoven wrote the piece while he was dying, looking at the end of his life. Lang’s care and empathy are visible throughout it, and it’s a piece that does for me what I aspire to do for others through my own dance-making: It softens me, nudging me toward an understanding of the things I do not know.

I inquired about Lang’s plans for the future, now that Jessica Lang Dance is completing its final season, and why she is dissolving the company: She intends to keep creating work independently. Managing a company required her to spend less and less time working in the studio, and more time performing administrative tasks.

It’s clear that working with the same group of dancers for nine years has given Lang the freedom to push the boundaries of her aesthetic. I admire her choice to dissolve what many may think of as the pinnacle of success in order to continue pursuing the complexity of her craft. Now, she will take what she has gathered from Jessica Lang Dance and move forward, making new dances with new collaborators. “There are other things I want to try,” Lang says, and her decision reminds me that we can always change paths, make new choices, and dig deeper into that which inspires us.

Originally from the Midwest, Hannah Fischer is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Utah. She received an Individual Artist Grant through the Indiana Arts Commission in 2017 and was an Associate Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2014.