NOW-ID: Rite of Spring

Industry, productivity, labor, ritual, depletion, exhaustion.

These are some of the themes that emerged while watching Now-ID’s Rite of Spring. Even the path to the stage, surrounded by railroad tracks, chain-link fencing, and brick and concrete block buildings, felt like part of the performance.

The raised stage underneath the 600 North on-ramp (498 West 600 North) emerged like a destination in the midst of this industrial setting, an oasis for people curious to see what unfolds when an opera singer, four phenomenal dancers, and Igor Stravinsky’s landmark score come together to create an event. The performance began at 9 p.m. and ended less than an hour later, just as the sky had darkened and night had come.

Now-ID’s Rite was a study in contrasts: between the vibrancy of the dancing and the desolation of the landscape that surrounded it, between the glimpses of mountains and the concrete that surrounded the stage, between the timelessness of the music and the ephemerality of this moment, between the perseverance of the performers, and the ultimate collapse that ended this Rite.

Avoiding an explicit narrative, Rite unfolded as a series of images: beginning with the four dancers seated on stools at the corners of the stage. Evoking boxers waiting on the edges of a ring, they seemed focused and primed. Jo Blake stood, as if to signal the beginning of a ritual, and slowly walked by the other dancers (Sydney Sorenson, Liz Ivkovich, and Tara McArthur) to greet Joshua Lindsay as he stepped onto the stage and began singing. Lindsay’s voice, sonorous and lush, heightened my attunement to sensorial engagement, of letting the sounds, sights, and actions of this event convey meaning.

When Lindsay exited, Stravinsky’s score began, and Blake’s solo presented a transformation: from human to extra-human, with arms that morphed into wings as if he were performing an invocation. He danced like he was propelled by forces, and the clarity and strength of his performance was mesmerizing to watch.

Although the performance was choreographed by Charlotte Boye-Christensen, with Nathan Webster providing the concept, the dancers made their ideas into realities with a performance that was impressive in terms of both stamina and precision. Each dancer presented distinct qualities, while also maintaining a sense of coherence. Sorenson danced with a rare combination of power and extension. Ivkovich had a compelling expansion to her movement, limbs stretching away from her center of gravity in ways that seemed to resist gravity. McArthur presented a flickering, quicksilver quality, with movement that was so fast it seemed superhuman.

In unison sections the women generated a sense of solidarity, bounding across the stage with a loping gait that seemed to gain momentum as they moved. At other times, the four performers divided into pairs that suggested rival tribes: Ivkovich and McArthur wore red-ish pants that contrasted with Blake’s and Sorenson’s attire. In partnering sections, they seemed to engage in combat, like wrestlers grappling.

Tara McArthur and Jo Blake in NOW-ID’s Rite of Spring, in costumes by Mallory Prucha. Photo by Jeffrey Juip.

The costumes, by Mallory Prucha, added to the rough and exposed environment: pants were made of heavy cotton (“monk’s cloth”) but shredded at the hems and stained with dark streaks. Make-up and hair by Stephanie Ericson, Rikki-Lee Thomas, Brittany Botarri, Kevin Truong, and Vanessa Alfaro enhanced the sense of severity with body paint and spiky hairstyles. As the performance continued, the body paint disintegrated, leaving traces of colors just as the surroundings presented traces of former industries and communities.

It’s hard to decipher the connections between this landscape and this Rite: in some ways the choreography presented a familiar tale of a woman’s sacrifice for the betterment of a community. In other ways, the dancers seemed to be exposing the exhaustion and depletion of cultures and sectors that are no longer sustainable or viable, perhaps suggesting that we become more judicious in where we invest our energies and resources. No matter the interpretation, the dancers’ commitment to the choreography was impressive, and their ability to execute the phrases while maintaining a sense of understated calm was riveting. Each one is a compelling artist, and the lighting design by Cole Adams made it appear, at times, as if their bodies were glowing. A gorgeous and appropriate effect.

NOW-ID’s Rite of Spring, with lighting by Cole Adams. Photo by David Newkirk.

Kate Mattingly is an assistant professor of dance at the University of Utah. She has a doctoral degree in performance studies from UC Berkeley, and has had writing published in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Dance Research Journal, Dance magazine, and Pointe magazine, among others.

SB Dance: Sleeping Beauty

In addition to re-imaginings of company repertoire as well as happenings and installations throughout the year, SB Dance produces an original new work each June. Their latest, a two-night run of Sleeping Beauty at the Rose Wagner, contained many of the unique hallmarks that have developed with the company over its 20-year span. These hallmarks include intricate and energetic movement that retains the vitality of just the right amount of creation and rehearsal time, consistently deft prop and set piece incorporation and manipulation, interdisciplinary collaborations, thoughtful production choices, and representations of elements of queer identity. Also included is frequent reference to S&M, bondage, and sexual power dynamics. This could easily play out as a short-cut to dynamic tension, but it instead emphasizes charged human connection in the well-practiced and integral role it plays in SB works. Themes of consent as well as physical and psychological dominance and submission are modally fitting for movement-based theater. These very themes are subtextually quite present in existing classical interpretations of The Sleeping Beauty, and explicitly take center stage in SB’s retelling.

In the program notes, director Stephen Brown cites two books that re-engaged his interest in the “typically misogynistic classic.” One is Robert Coover’s metanarrative novel, from which Brown borrows the multiple-perspective approach of the different fairytale archetypes to frame the show. But the show is critically divergent in this way: Where the novel is postmodern in structural form, SB’s reverts to the classic storytelling device of explicit narration. This is an apt choice for the more abstracted media of interdisciplinary live dance theater. The narration is carried out with stagey charm by vocalist/actor Ischa Bea and string accompanist Raffi Shahanian, jointly billed as MiNX. These two serenade us in song and introduce the primary characters and their conflict: Annie Kent as Aurora and Nathan Shaw as Maleficent, in a dramatic first romantic encounter.

The introduction is an intense duet. Both characters wield a carving knife in each hand. The flourishing knives never supercede their interplay; they serve as an extension of the sharp, symmetrical movement quality. Annie Kent is instantly a compelling performer in the titular role whose presence reads well in the intimate black box theater, a space with effective technical production and unobstructed sightlines from the stadium-style seating. The audience gazes down on this private moment of consensual, equal powerplay; it is the show’s last. Maleficent alludes to the classic cursing pin-prick with a knife cut along Aurora’s skin, thus felling her. Aurora is put in her figurative box as an inert object of desire - by being stuffed quite literally into a cardboard box and loaded onto a dolly, which Shaw step-ball-changes, impressively lightly yet ominously, into the wings.

The next scene features four boxes, each containing a languid, sleeping someone in navy gender-neutral jammies - Aurora and the three Beauties, performed by Christine Hasegawa, John Allen, and Ari Hassett. Arms flop and butts lift from within as harpsichord strains evoke the Baroque, to great effect. These sleeping cuties re-emerge and re-enter their packages and sprawl onto their pillows in a very realized dreamstate, and momentarily make us wonder just what they’re up to in there. They begin to interact, and execute a catching and falling sequence into the pillows. Shaw then reappears to partner the dreamers. SB newcomer Ari Hassett sought her withheld pillow by avidly scrambling up Shaw into a high-flying press lift, to general gasps. She consistently displayed the great strength and agility of someone you suspect may be more comfortable inverted than not. Shaw packs them and stacks them, continuing the deft utilization of props with a believable slapstick drop of the topmost box before exiting to leave the lone packaged princess center stage.

The narrator next introduces and campily sexualizes Prince Phillip, played with hyperbolic virility and suavity by Juan Carlos Claudio. He distributes flowers amongst the audience in the single house-lights-up nod to immersive audience interaction. Then begins the beautiful and effective and creepy duet with a half-lucid, half-conscious Kent. I have been recently discussing the classical dance trope of the partnering of an exhausted/poisoned/dying woman a la Swan Lake, La Sylphide, etc., and was gratified to see it so explicitly treated here. The narrator jumps the gun with a “happily ever after”: As Aurora awakens to the Prince’s (steamy) nonconsensual attentions, she slaps him and heads out. Here the “reworking of a classic fairytale” metanarrative becomes central. The narrator frantically rewrites the story (adorably, with a feathered quill in a very contemporary libretto binder). Her accompanist, enjoined to “play something!,” delivers a cringily deadpan rendition of Sublime’s “Date Rape.” Directed to play anything else, he moves along to Eurythmics’ hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” Tellingly, this is a shift from a direct naming of the violation of body autonomy to fantasies of dominance and submission. There is herein some precedent for the show’s glancing identification of abuse pivoting to the focal artistic treatment of desire and sexuality.

We next see Aurora striking out for L.A., a classic naive waif with tattered nighty, shawl, and old suitcase in tow. The former cohort of Beauties in forced slumber now become minions of their malevolent captor. They are intriguingly costumed in black, their bad-guy hats still sporting tags, Hassett in full mustachioed Groucho mask, all sporting bedroom slippers. This last addition made all the following choreography exceptionally interesting and beautiful - lots of fluid petite allegro and gliding undercurves. The three Beauties establish themselves as a compelling ensemble, whose different movement qualities mesh together in a cohesive whole.

This cohesion holds well throughout the knife-wielding dance led by Shaw in what seems to be a warehouse of the boxed. Shaw’s Maleficent grinds on the cardboard containing the Princess, gaining pleasure from his control. The Prince obsesses over the same object from behind a stack. The two begin a voyeuristic game of withholding and expressing proprietary power over the box, deepening their characterizations and dynamic tension. The captured and bound Prince must watch the sadistic stabbing of his object of (unilateral) desire as the box is repeatedly punctured by Maleficent and company. Thus follows another hard reset of the story as the Prince charms his way into a telling of his version of the fantasy. It is narrated as “an Aurora who wants saving,” and is presented as the male fantasy contradiction of an experienced, sexually mature woman who is also lacking power (while literally bound at the wrists) and who requires childlike protection. This Aurora duets with each Beauty in turn before being carried off by the Prince. Kent’s duet with John Allen begins in struggle but features moments of lilting beauty, especially encapsulated by a swinging turn where her feet skim and glance off the ground in a dreamlike slow skip. Christine Hasegawa expertly twines with and directs Kent in a more dominant mode, and Ari Hasset brings a forceful tenderness to their duet. Aurora’s long velvety cuffs are then positioned over her eyes as a blindfold, with her elbows pointed upwards. This makes for a very interesting posture in her dancing with Nathan Shaw and Juan Carlos Claudio as well as underscoring her lack of free and informed choice.

After Princess Aurora is swept away, another abortive “happily ever after” is cut off by The Beauties, now clad in frilly frocks and silly tutus, skittering about and demanding their turn in the telling. By slumping against and running into the many cardboard boxes in a believably haphazard stupor, they in fact artfully rearrange the set pieces into a central cluster upstage. The Prince arrives to kiss them awake, with comically loud smacks, only for them to be repeatedly cursed by Maleficent, as heralded by the loud “snick” of the knife. It is a light treatment of the dark theme of the willing recidivism in The Beauties’ victim/perpetrator role. This cycle of drugging and waking escalates and intensifies until it comes to a head. The bodily manipulated John Allen and his repeated falls to the pillowed floor become untenably frantic, like something between Pina Bausch’s Café Müller and The Three Stooges. This built tension is capitalized on as the Prince and Maleficent forge a felt erotic bond in a charged look over the inert bodies they control. The two pair up and the narrator resignedly sighs something to the effect of “you two, of course, no, that makes perfect sense.” And moreso than any other moment, this one has been prefigured and developed; it perfectly does make sense.

Thereafter, as the audience can only have been eagerly anticipating throughout, Aurora takes her turn at directing the narrative centered on her experience. She voices and then enacts her own fantasy, bringing the show to its abrupt, violent conclusion.

The other book Brown cites as inspiration is Joan Gould’s Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal About the Transformations in a Woman’s Life. It is a nonfiction exploration of fairytale as allegory for the breadth of the changing, lifelong experiences of womanhood. And though SB Dance presents strong and vital personalities across the gender spectrum, the central character of Aurora was not terribly developed. Rather, the multiple-narrative perspectives sacrificed her singular ontological continuity to the presentation of an object through multiple lenses. Annie Kent embodies Aurora completely and performs the role stunningly, but the role is object and naif. When she finally wrests back her agency (through engagement with the super-structural narrator, not her abusers), she enacts a brief and frenetic revenge fantasy à la Quentin Tarantino. Revenge fantasies make us feel the reward of redressing grievance, but don’t do the rhetorical work of conclusively addressing expository complexity. Sleeping Beauty features Kent as a performer but doesn’t center Aurora’s experience as a character.

I grant that the processing of trauma, confrontation and accountability of (living) abusers, complexity of emotional attachment, and complicities would make for a very different ending - one that is less of a campy-dark combo, more truly dark. And I’m not advocating for that alternative, necessarily. However, the presentational scaffolding of program notes, press releases, and interviews invite this expectation. A City Weekly profile indicates that Aurora’s character will be especially rich, and the ticketing blurb asserts a “#MeToo warp” to the classic tale. Organizations like Whistle While You Work (@whistle_whileyouwork) facilitate a platform for whistleblowing and providing resources for the dance and performing arts community to actively benefit from engagement with the #MeToo movement. While metacommentary doesn’t easily make a work artistically stronger or more enjoyable, when artists choose to reference social and political movements there is then a greater onus to address them responsibly and more fully. Not to do so then borders on appropriative. Sleeping Beauty beautifully and inventively updates a classic fairytale and peoples it with darkly compelling archetypes. But I did wonder if it intended to address or redress the entrenched misogyny that it identifies in the original.

In his program notes, Stephen Brown expresses gratitude to his truly fantastic group of co-creators with the witty neologism “WTF-people”, as in “WTF are you doing in Utah?”  This is an example of the counter-cultural positioning that, as a non-native, I find intriguingly endemic to Salt Lakers. It implies both separation from Utah’s political and social establishment and affiliative solidarity with the subversive underground. But actually, and hopefully not to their chagrin, SB Dance is a pillar of the local arts community. Besides being a long-running successful company with lasting internal relationships and frequent new fruitful collaborations, they are teachers and college/university faculty, alumni of other longstanding dance institutions like Repertory Dance Theatre and Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, and entrepreneurial arts therapists. Not least is artistic/executive director Stephen Brown, who creates programming connecting arts organizations, businesses, and local non-profits, such as Eat Drink SLC, and serves as president of the Performing Arts Coalition, which addresses arts and culture policy making, was instrumental in the needs assessment and creation of the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, and represents the Rose Wagner’s many performing companies in residence. In fact, less so than anarchic countercultural arts rebels (of which Salt Lake is certainly possessed of a few, like personal favorite Forbidden Fruits [@slcfruits]), SB Dance is very much a part of the fabric of the Salt Lake arts establishment. And as an innovative, sex-positive, broadly collaborative company, that is to the establishment’s benefit. Perhaps this bit of podunk posturing is an ironic understatement by an artist, producer, and organizer who in fact takes immense pride in the standing legacy and ever-growing stature of the Utah arts scene.

Photos at top: (left to right) of Nathan Shaw, Annie Kent, and Juan Carlos Claudio in SB Dance’s Sleeping Beauty, courtesy of SB Dance.

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.

Junction Dance Co: Zero Flux

The curtain opened on the first evening of Junction Dance Co’s Zero Flux to an empty, yet brightly lit, stage. The audience clapped in anticipation, their excitement palpable. I could tell right off the bat that Junction Dance Co. possesses a loyal fan base, based on the number of catcalls. The music then cut through my thoughts, pulsing. The cyclorama sparked to life, displaying a projection of outer space. Before that image had settled in my mind, the dancers streamed on stage from the wings for the first piece, “New Americana.”

I first noticed the dancers’ tennis shoes. I made a mental note that things to come would require more grip than a bare foot could offer. The music was electric, heightening the effect of the fast and precise dancing. I was impressed by the musicality of the choreography, clearly crafted in tandem with the flux of the music; no note went unaccompanied. The dancers were committed and full of energy, their smiles infectious and genuine even from eight rows back. And I was not disappointed in my assessment of their shoes: I saw lots of tumbling tricks sprinkled with b-boy steaz.

The second piece, “Freedom,” opened with fireworks, both those projected on the cyc and those coming from the five men crushing it with their footwork. I was impressed with their ability to stay in unison even at faster speeds. Women made their way on stage, joining the men in duets. Although each duet used the same phrase, I appreciated that each pair seemed to make the connections on their own.

My favorite moment happened quite drastically: The music changed simultaneously with the cyc. Everything blurred and was pushed suddenly into a new image, that of a city scene. New dancers cascaded into the group, which had now transformed into a street party. Dancers of all ages formed a half moon. Those who stepped into the middle of the semi-circle owned it, grasping their moments in the center. During this cypher session, I took a scan of the audience; I could see some heads bobbing in time to the music. I was glad to see how this piece pulled in the audience, movement now rippling throughout it. “Freedom” exuded a sense of community that truly included everyone.

“Collard Greens” brought out rows of dancers, clad in green, keeping the beat of the music in their feet on a stage also awash with green. The piece was a tap dance, and one of my favorites of the evening in terms of pure enjoyment. Schoolboy Q blared through the speakers (“Oh [oh] luxury / Chidi-ching-ching could buy anything, cop that / Oh [oh] collard greens”) as the dancers mimed money in their hands. Their feet chugged forward, the taps accentuating each beat. The audience went a little wild, whooping with appreciation. I only wished that the music was a little quieter so that I could have heard all of the taps.

In “Peggy Lee,” the dancers sported leotards, tights, and heels. I couldn’t help but think of cabaret clubs, as the movement was sexy and punchy. The playful piece, set to a fresh remix of “Fever,” offered the women a chance to showcase their technique and extensions. I especially enjoyed that the choreography was reminiscent of old jazz rather than sticking to a more contemporary style.

During “Reading Rainbow,” I was transported to a fond memory and delighted by the piece’s lightness. A vibrant rainbow was splashed on the cyc, the backdrop for a single dancer wearing what were possibly the most 80’s-print pants I’ve ever seen. The score was none other than the theme from the TV show “Reading Rainbow.” The soloist perfectly captured a balance between cheesy nostalgia and quirkiness, to a song that defined and nurtured a generation.

“Atomic Breath” felt fully developed. There was a story, guided along by a narration of movie clips; the words lent a framework that shaped the audience’s experience. Different sections that were all tied together took me on a personal journey through a story I created for myself about the birth of the universe and the dawn of time. This dance had many sections of intense movement, the all-male cast fierce in their physicality. “Atomic Breath” was one of the more temporally dynamic works on the program.

“Still,” a solo performed by a dancer sheathed in a powder blue costume, was set to a song conveying failure and heartbreak. The dancer did a great job of holding her own and of letting the lyrics inform her emotional performance, and the piece’s angular, staccato movement suited her. Energetically, though, the piece felt ill-placed on the program. It may have been a better fit next to “Love Journals” in the second half.

“Pursuit of Happiness,” another large group number, featured a lot of unison and relied heavily on formations to fit everyone on the stage. The choreography took on many of the same characteristics as the other dances, and only one moment really stood out to me. All the dancers were on their backs on the floor, and did a ripple in three groups in which they contracted, clawed their fingers, and splayed their legs at weird angles. The lyrics mentioned night terrors and this canon provided a vivid visual.

“Dreamers,” featuring another all-male cast, opened with an image of a hallway, maybe a school, projected on the cyc. A lone dancer in a red jumpsuit entered, sweeping. As he started dancing, other “janitors”  wearing the same jumpsuit but carrying different cleaning tools soon joined him onstage. The piece reminded me of all of the times I put on music and jam out, dancing while I’m supposed to be cleaning my house. The piece successfully kept all the dancers onstage doing different tasks while not distracting from the rotating soloists. The music, from the original “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” with Gene Wilder, created a whimsical setting. The quirkiest solo was by a dancer with a red feather boa who danced to a child’s voice talking. At the end, everyone came together to gather all the feathers that had fallen off the boa, as though they were gathering up their wishes because they now had to go back to work.

“The Quest” was funky and fast. I got lost in the movements and felt like I was at a club or a  bumping house party. The songs kept switching and building in intensity. I spotted more canon in the choreography, which was a motif throughout the show. I liked the piece’s abrupt finish, and thought it was a great way stick the ending of the first half.

The second half opened with “Love Journals.” Four women were featured in downpools, frozen as the light shone off of their rose hued, crushed velvet dresses, and moved on musical cues one by one. It was predictable, yet satisfying to watch. The dancers had a lovely sense of timing, each of them aware of the others, and I saw extensions for days that spiraled into attitude jumps. The choreographer here made different choices with timing: They didn’t jam pack movements to accompany every single beat of music. I was actually able to process the movements as the dancers lingered intentionally through their phrases. I appreciated the power of stillness and the purpose of slower movement. I also saw the first bare feet of the evening, which worked well with the concept by allowing the piece to feel more vulnerable.

After the women left the stage, a solo male dancer made his way on. I had seen him performing house tricks and fancy footwork in the other pieces on the program, but in this one he came alive through the contemporary movement, extending and leaping through the air. It was stunning. He was soon joined by another man, the two then performing the same movement but with different facings and spacing. This added a layer of depth, as most other pieces had utilized only front-facing unison. Both also emoted with their faces, making their duet more tender.

“Can you dance to my beat?” featured upbeat music, pops of color on the cyc, and constant motion for the dancers. At times, my focus was pulled to different places as I watched the dancers weave in and out. About halfway through, a drummer entered and began playing in time with the music. I wanted there to be a microphone by his drums, though, so I could hear them better over the loud music. My favorite moment came at the end when a female dancer approached the drummer and the two began creating together as the recorded track came to an end. She was saucy and playful, and he sped up his pace to match her frantic movements. They were very much in it together.

“Positive Vibrations” was performed by the junior Junction Dance Co. group. They were apt performers, showing their growing knowledge of muscular isolation and control. It was easy to see where the name of the work came from as, at different times that matched the music, the women would vibrate their whole bodies. There were also some nice breakout moments from the group, and it was fun to watch an individual dancing versus the group. I was impressed by their ability to lift and partner one another at such a young age.

The standout work was “What Do You Desire?” To begin, a man talked into a microphone, acting out his monologue for two dancers like a teacher lecturing to his students (the dancers were obviously the students as wore costumes resembling school uniforms). There was no music, making it a nice counterpoint to the other pieces. The dancers then performed a duet that visually interpreted the monologue/lecture. The monologue itself highlighted what can be a constant struggle for an artist: Do I make art, or do I eat and pay bills?  The dancers made great, and funny, choices - I laughed several times as their movements matched words perfectly. Altogether, the piece was witty and entertaining, and also made me think about what I value.

The dancers in the fun and lively “Slippy Socks” wore gray shirts and shorts with colorful socks. A live violinist provided the score. She felt included in the work as she moved about the stage, smiling and making eye contact with the dancers as she played vigorously. The piece had several duet vignettes in which each dancer matched their partner’s styles and energy well. This piece had a more “modern dance” feel to it, as the choreography blended together big, sweeping circles and dives to the floor and felt gooey rather than sharp or accented.

“How Come?” also featured live music, this time a guitarist who sang and played a sad love ballad that asked why someone wasn’t interested in him. The dancers had perfect timing throughout and looked well-rehearsed.

“Etude No. 2,” a duet between a male dancer and a female pianist, was my favorite of the pieces to live music. The pianist began playing as the dancer held his position on the floor in a meditative position, his eyes closed. The anticipation built until he suddenly began dancing. Each phrase was convoluted and twisting. He tied himself in knots and untangled them, and was up and down, giving a visually dynamic performance. The pianist had her back to the audience, so I could see her fingers flying across the keys (she didn’t look at his dancing). Throughout the piece, he moved closer and closer to the pianist, as if he was being pulled to her inevitably by an unseen force. He ended the same way he began, on the ground with a straight back, knees folded, and eyes closed. As the pianist finished, both turned to look at each other. The lights stayed up to emphasize this powerful moment, and I was struck by the simplicity of their final acknowledgement of the other.

The closing piece, “Earthquake,” was fast and furious like I would expect an earthquake to be. Set to a driving beat that continually sped up, the dance featured the show’s entire cast of performers and packed a punch to conclude the program on a high note.

Overall, I was highly entertained by the evening. Each piece had me tapping my feet because I couldn't help being swayed by the music and movement. The first half felt more planned, with transitions accounted for and dances moving from one piece to the next with no pauses. It also felt more cohesive in content - I could see and make connections between most of the works.

The second half was more random. None of the pieces connected energetically or conceptually. This didn’t necessarily detract, but the sheer number of pieces in the show (nineteen in total) was overwhelming. I found myself wishing that Junction Dance Co. had spent more time developing some pieces, maybe exploring their depth versus just their short aesthetic value. I was, however, impressed with each performer in the show. They were all stunning in their authenticity and performance quality. Not only were they expert performers, but they were (dance) multilingual, performing a variety of styles.

I was reminded that the dance world is constantly evolving. Dancers who can tumble and do tricks are in high demand; they must have the technique, but then also be able to throw it all away. More and more, I see a fusion of styles, with this show being a prime example - a crockpot filled with many ingredients. To extrapolate, I find this evolution within dance to be an apt representation of the fusing of cultures happening all around us.

Ashley Creek is co-director of Brine and can be seen performing with Myriad Dance Company and The Penguin Lady. She also works for Ballet West, teaching Academy students, schoolchildren, and female inmates at the Utah State Prison.

Chitrakaavya Dance: Manubhuti - Being Human

On Sunday afternoon, ChitraKaavya Dance presented Manubhuti – Being Human at the Jeanne Wagner Theater. The program’s five offerings brought together a multigenerational cast of performers steeped in classical Indian dance forms. It struck me how elucidating it can be to see young dancers and older dancers together on stage. Even if you’re not deeply familiar with the traditions being presented - I know next to nothing about the history of Indian classical dance - you begin to see how dance traditions exist across the span of many interrelated, individual lives. The evening also featured contributions by modern dance artists Erica Womack and Katie Davis.

Womack’s “Ages” and ChitraKaavya director Srilatha Singh’s “Hyphen-ated” exist as a part of a longer conversation between these two artists about how to collaborate across their distinct choreographic heritages. I spoke a little bit with Womack after the show and she shared stories about moments when Singh and her company members challenged her instincts, ultimately leading her to make a riskier choice. The highlight of “Ages” was Srilatha Singh dancing in silks to Cesaria Evoria’s famed rendition of “Besame Mucho,” as Womack held a large fan, dead-pan. I was reminded of Kazuo Ohno’s Admiring La Argentina, except it was a little more lighthearted and a little less self-serious.

One of the most exciting elements of Sunday’s performance was an excellent live band: Suchinth Murty singing, Tarun Gudipati on the tablas, Abhishek Mukherjee on sitar, Sriram Krishnamoorthy on violin, and Shreyas Hoskere on keyboards and flute. Their presence raised the bar, particularly in “Hyphen-ated,” which began with an intense exercise in mirroring between Srilatha Singh and Malavika Singh, whose opening number at the top of the show was the evening’s namesake. (I don’t know if the two are related.) As they peered at each other through the empty wooden frame, I was drawn to their different strengths as performers. In Srilatha’s dancing, I watch her hands, and how quickly she can shift my focus without my expecting it - in short, the mastery of someone who’s been at it a while. In Malavika’s dancing, it’s her expansiveness, the ability to fill the empty stage, and her proclivity for off-balance rests and unexpected pauses - a hip tucked at an obscure angle, a lunge that seems too deep to sustain and then crumbles silently. I’m eager to see more of these conversations in the future.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

Queer Spectra Arts Festival

Pictured in photo carousel above: Performers in the Queer Spectra Arts Festival, photos by MotionVivid.

“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” - José Muñoz

How might writing about a queer (an adjective) festival queer (a verb) ideas and expectations surrounding arts criticism?

What if the writing resisted any imposed order or conventional sequencing?

What if instead of prose it became a collage of impressions and concepts?

Commonwealth Studios was home to the Queer Spectra Arts Festival on Saturday, May 25, but in many ways the festival began weeks prior, with daily postings on social media about the festival’s artists (including photographers, a ceramicist, dancers, painters, video-makers, poets, and musicians). Every aspect of the multi-modal festival, founded by Dat Nguyen, Emma Sargent, Aileen Norris, and Molly Barnewitz, deepened awareness and opportunities to reflect on art-making and our identities.

Queer Spectra Arts Festival co-founders (from left to right) Aileen Norris, Dat Nguyen, Emma Sargent, and Molly Barnewitz, pictured at Commonwealth Studios. Photo by Nora Lang.

Bookended by a keynote that began at 1:30 p.m. and a post-show discussion that ended at 9:30 p.m., the festival was a mosaic of propositions, images, and questions. Alexandra Barbier’s opening lecture beautifully traced the contours of queer theory, and began by asking us to move the rows of chairs we occupied into a big oval, so she could occupy its center. She spoke about how the word “queer” signals “a state of being and a way of living” that challenges “compulsory thoughts.” Barbier used Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line regarding obscenity and pornography - “I know it when I see it” - as a way of pointing to the contingency of “queer.” As she explained, the word exists as “an active verb, an insult, a reclaimed slur…” This porosity makes “queer” a great partner to “performance,” a word that similarly points to a way of being that can challenge or subvert dominant points of view.

Barbier suggested that queerness engages whiteness by challenging its dominant identity markers: “white,” “hetero-,” “cis-,” and “middle class.” Towards the end of her talk, Barbier theatrically unscrolled a list of 10 questions that the festival’s founders had posed to artists submitting work to be considered. It began with “What does it mean to belong?” and included “What does it mean to be you in the context of larger communities that you may or may not belong to?” and ended with “What do you long for?”

What if queerness is a challenge to any system of oppression, not only regarding gender and sexuality, but also race, class, ethnicity, and ability? As Clare Croft writes, “queer dance, at its best, is in conversation with and often in productive overlap with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial artmaking, activism, and scholarship.”[1] Moments of disciplinary overlap made the strongest impression on me during the nine hours I spent at the festival. They opened up the possibilities of different attunements.

In his video “Them and Me,” Nate Francis presents himself, at first alone onscreen, wearing white shorts and wrapping red string around the skin of his torso, arms, and legs. Two more people wearing white outfits, like attendants or orderlies, join the wrapping ritual, each with a spool of white string. Over the course of the 45-minute performance, Francis is immobilized by the wrapping, the string functioning like accumulating binds that bend his body into a crouched position. When I asked him about the video, Francis shared that it was an assignment developed in a course by Kelsey Harrison at the University of Utah, where he studies sculpture and photography. Aligned with durational performances by Stelarc and by Marina Abramovic, Francis’s video uses his body to comment on societal oppressions and strictures. Although not created for the festival per se, “Them and Me” spoke to the power of art, and the importance of university courses like Harrison’s, to probe questions of identity and perceptions of our bodies.

During the post-show discussion at the festival’s end, Francis wondered about “queer” art that not only “resists” but also “celebrates” possibilities and potentialities. His words reminded me of a quote from Munoz, who defines potentiality not through a binary of actuality and potentiality, but instead: “Unlike a possibility, a thing that simply might happen, a potentiality is a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense.” Performance is a generative place for opening such futurities.

In contrast to the sense of restriction generated by Francis’s video, a duet choreographed by Alexandra Barbier, for Barbier and Colleen Barnes, approached the question of queerness through potentiality: can a duet between two women who appear platonic, not romantic, be “queer”? Aptly titled “Well, is it?,” this duet featured the women in floral dresses with tulle that suggested outfits worn to a 1950s cocktail party. Barnes wore pearls. The costumes themselves were not unfamiliar for a dance performance, but coupled with the music by Arvo Pärt, there was a compelling strangeness. J. Jack Halberstam writes about “queer” as referring to “non-normative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time.”[2] Juxtaposition of the vintage costumes and contemporary movement made me curious about the precision in the dancers’ focus and gaze. Unlike much concert dance that veers towards excess and oversaturation, there was a coolly understated quality in their performance.

Barbier’s choreography is subversively subtle and resistant. Shifting from more Apollonian qualities at the beginning, to swirling falls to the floor that suggested Dionysian rituals, the pair ended by calmly lighting their cigarettes and asking, “Well, is it?” Leaving the question unanswered let us, as their audience, fill the empty space. Was the cigarette at the end of the duet a kind of synecdoche for post-coital bliss? Is dancing ever divorced from some kind of pleasure for its artists and audiences? Refreshing in its refusal to subscribe to familiar movement vocabularies, the duet was a captivating blurring of full-bodied expression with quotidian gestures.

If “belonging” was a theme of the festival, “Well, is it?” signaled the importance of artists belonging-in-difference, of carving out their own definitions of “queer” rather than assimilating. The festival’s discussions were as thought-provoking as the artists’ work and one question in particular, from Samuel Hanson during a Q & A with the artists, still percolates as I write this review (this is a paraphrase): “As someone who is interested in Salt Lake City communities, I wonder what lineages, queer or otherwise, you situate yourself in and how they may be different from lineages of San Francisco or New York?"

A couple days prior to the festival, its founders appeared on KRCL’s RadioActive. Dat Nguyen spoke about obstacles he faced in his university courses: “In my dance education, identity was separate from the work, but for me identity is never removed from performance.” His words made me think of how entrenched whiteness has become in dance settings, to the point where identities, and their disproportionate access to representation, are seemingly ignored.

All movement and all performances emanate from people, contexts, and communities. Gerald Casel, in “Activating Whiteness” by Rebecca Chaleff, explains, “there is no such thing as pure movement for dancers of color… One of the assumptions that postmodern formalism arouses is that any body has the potential to be read as neutral - that there is such a thing as a universally unmarked body. As a dancer and choreographer of color, my body cannot be perceived as pure. My brown body cannot be read the same way as a white body, particularly in a white cube.”[3]

During the festival, Dat Nguyen presented a workshop called “Looking at Queer Experience Through Performative Collage.” He prefaced the lecture-demonstration with a little of his own biography (he grew up in Vietnam and moved to the States at age 19) and danced throughout his lecture, a kinetic background of fluid sequencing and refined stillnesses for his statements and insights. What if queering is resisting dominant modes of discourse or delivery?

This would explain why I was drawn to Dillbilly’s “Winged Refugee” set, with its arrangement by Dillbilly and Rhonda Kinard. They are queering a conventional concert format wherein musicians tour and sing for isolated communities, and instead are collecting stories from working class people at each place they visit, then sharing them with audiences at their next locations. In this way they are creating “a map of oral histories” that focuses on experiences of people who identify as queer, POC, non-binary, and trans. Two of the stories shared during the festival came from the Bay Area (Dillbilly is based in Oakland) and featured photos by Kinard. Their multi-sensory evocation was straightforward, compelling, and lush, with Dillbilly’s crystalline voice and Kinard’s bass guitar reverberating long after the songs ended.

In “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” Jasbir K. Puar addresses questions of identity and corporeality in terms of “assemblages” that “allow us to attune to intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities. Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information.”[4]

The festival’s closing conversation grappled with complexities of a “queer” festival that offers a designated space for work that wants to be seen through this lens. If there are multiple ways to define “queer,” does such a festival limit its aesthetics or representations? Artists responded by speaking of the gratitude they felt for the festival and its curation. Rhonda Kinard added, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Others spoke to the power of creative expression that comes from a place of discomfort or dissensus.

Singer/actor/poet Alborz Ghandehari, who delivered a phenomenal poem called “A Politics of Desire,” spoke about his own performance that night which traversed scenes of the 1979 Revolution in Iran, sexual longing, living as an immigrant, and the horrors of war. Such multiplicity - or “assemblage” in Puar’s theories - resonates with a queerness that both challenges and accepts. Queer as potentiality, as the “if only” that Ghandehari translated from Persian: “I long for this, but now it cannot be.”

“If only” speaks to an idea of “queer,” as feeling or seeing “beyond the quagmire of the present,” in the words of Munoz. In Cruising Utopia, Munoz writes about the role of the arts as “identifying certain properties that can be detected in representational practices helping us to see the not-yet-conscious.”[5]

If I personally associate queerness with undermining oppressive structures, redistributing access and resources, and building power from the ground up, then I think it’s important to remember, in the words of thomas f. defrantz, “we don’t all get to be, do, or make queer. if anything, the unmet challenge for queer theory and queer dance might be an opening of access for anyone who wants to think-move queer; an allowance for more people to understand strategies of queer [black/asian/trans/aboriginal] performance on our bodies, in our imaginations, and among our friends.”[6]

[1] Queer Dance, page 3.

[2] In a Queer Time and Place, page 6.

[3] “Activating Whiteness,” page 79.

[4] “Queer Times,” page 128.

[5] Cruising Utopia, page 3.

[6] Queer Dance, page 179. 

Performers in the Queer Spectra Arts Festival during a Q & A. Photo by Nora Lang.

Kate Mattingly is an assistant professor of dance at the University of Utah. She has a doctoral degree in performance studies from UC Berkeley, and has had writing published in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Dance Research Journal, Dance magazine, and Pointe magazine, among others.