Salt Lake Film Society brings a new film about Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

If you’re looking for an at-home dance experience this week, the Salt Lake Film Society is screening Can You Bring It, a new film about Bill T. Jones’ 1989 dance D-Man in the Waters.

The film tells two parallel stories. The first is the tale of Jones’ early career, his romantic and artistic partnership with Arnie Zane that birthed their company, and the making of D-Man in the Waters in the wake of Zane’s death from AIDS and the illness of company member Damian Acquavella (D-man himself), who died shortly after the dance was premiered. The second is the contemporary story of a restaging of D-man at Loyola Marymount College in Los Angelos by professor and former company dancer Rosalynde LeBlanc, who is also a co-director of the film. Both are stories worth telling and their juxtaposition brings up some interesting questions about dance’s relationship to time, generational identity, cultural memory and academia.

Still of Jones winning a Bessie Award in New York, 1989.

Even though I was already familiar with the chronology of Jones’ early career, it was still quite moving to hear from dancers, family, and Jones himself. Sean Curran and Jones’ sister Johari Briggs in particular stood out, narrating in surprising, moving detail the illness and deaths of Zane and Acquavella and how the company mourned and survived.

Equally surprising are the questions that emerge from the restaging. LeBlanc and her cast wrestle with what it means for a group of college students to recreate a dance that was made by artists at the height of their powers confronting so much day-to-day mortality in nation that seemed at turns indifferent and hostile to their survival. What does it mean to pass a dance like this from one generation to the next? Can academia contain the knowledge that the original cast embodied? What’s preserved and what’s lost, and, perhaps most importantly, why?

Rosalynde LeBlanc demonstrating a moment of partnering with her students.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

A June weekend of dance in Salt Lake City

This past weekend seems to have included plenty of dance here in Salt Lake City. On Friday, June 18, I headed to the lawn outside of UMOCA to see a performance by poet-artist Alex Caldiero, who is currently being honored with a retrospective at that institution.

Traveler Dances: a transperformance might not have qualified as a “dance event” to everyone in attendance. Still, I think it’s worth discussing briefly because the musicians collaborating with Caldiero – Steve Ricks, Christian Asplund and the Utah County-based Theta Naught – are part of a music scene that has some crossover with dance in this city. Much of their work has been seen in showcases like 12 Minutes Max and honestly, I wonder why more dance artists don’t reach out and collaborate with them. They are excellent at what they do on their own, and on Friday they were excellent at listening in the moment to the improvising Sonosopher, as Caldiero sometimes calls himself. Watching this collaboration, especially as Caldiero romped around the concrete square that served as the stage in a self-styled head dress, reminded me a little of New York choreographer Jennifer Monson’s ongoing collaboration with experimental harpist Zeena Parkins.

As I alluded to above, lots seems to be happening in our community and we don’t always manage to get writers to all of the events. If you’re an independent choreographer who’s working on something, please, send a press release or a brief note to sam@lovedancemore.org and we’ll do our best to get a writer to your show. I’ve heard that there was some dance at some of the Juneteenth events this weekend as well as a backyard show produced by, among others, Hunter Rowe. If you made it to anything that we haven’t covered, get in touch. If you showed up, there’s still time and space to write about it.

Without further ado, here’s a review of another show this weekend that Max Barnewitz made it to at the Art Barn…

–SBH, editor

Tori Meyer & Arin Lynn invite audiences to experience the every-day in Finch Lane Flash Project: Quotidien/Quotidian 

This past weekend, Tori Meyer and Arin Lynn invited Salt Lake City to their “housewarming” party, an evening-length, multidisciplinary Flash Project at Finch Lane Gallery that playfully engaged audiences in disrupting the border between public and private spaces, and that explored the absurdly, sweetly repetitive nature of the everyday. 

Quotidien/Quotidian as Meyer explained, was meant to let audiences “get bored” and to discover what might emerge from that feeling. While the point is well taken, it was hard to feel bored in the busy environment crafted by Meyer and Lynn. The artists make good use of Finch Lane Gallery as dancers and curators of their own lives. Meyer and Lynn open the show by positioning themselves outside on the balcony – framing themselves through two large sliding glass doors, sometimes in opposition to each other, sometimes moving in sync. The gallery itself was filled with objects from Meyer and Lynn's home – objects of creative and sentimental value such as a collection of ceramic ducks, a shelf of baseball caps, a handmade "crooked house" by eighth grade Lynn, and pieces of art made by friends in the community, including a beautiful illustration by local artist Nora Lang that couldn't help but stand out even though it was hiding in a corner. These pleasant surprises are frequent throughout the piece. Colorful clutter that might fill up a house becomes somewhat dispassionate in the space of a gallery, forcing us to question the nature of performance and what our material world reflects, not on the aesthetics of the object, but rather about who we are. 

The two performers, who are partners and who have recently moved in together, wanted to share "a collage of art we made during COVID," said Lynn. This collage includes the object world, as well as recorded clips of dance made by Meyer and Lynn over the past year. Their choreography, which elegantly balances humor and technical skill, relied on subtle movements emphasizing hands and gesture. Repetition, a theme unto itself, and a sense of duality, felt especially important to the work, with Lynn and Meyer often returning to synchronous movement and symmetry. Lynn in particular emphasized a certain weightiness of (e)motion that grounded the choreography that might otherwise have floated away into the breezy use of lighthearted covers of ABBA's song "Fernando.”

What may be most striking about the work was the range of emotions explored. Quotidien/Quotidian lets audiences oscillate between the curiosity felt when you visit a friend's house for the first time, to the gratifying slap-happiness of a dance party (which was enjoyed by all in an advanced-hokey-pokey-style dance circle), to the intimate anxiety felt by partners when hosting people in your home. The piece reaches an apex when Lynn and Meyer have a mock argument about hosting friends. While the conceit of the argument was superficial, there was an edge, the edge of everyday repetition that comes from quotidien life, and pandemic life. Lynn and Meyer took this moment to create two poignant duets, not with each other, but with projections of themselves. Lynn in a rocking chair, and Meyer at a dining table, each paired with footage of the same scene filmed at home. These intimate duets, putting bodies into conversation with themselves, used repeated, contemplative gestures once again, creating a bittersweet beat.

Of course, audiences were not left to dwell in this melancholy for too long, as Meyer and Lynn joined each other for a delightful pas de deux across the gallery floor. The charismatic duo ostentatiously exaggerated their role as performers, delighting audiences with a vaudeville-esque ending. Far from the dullness that the name suggests, Quotidien/Quotidian reminds us to find pleasure in the performance of our day-to-day lives.

Max Barnewitz is a writer, comics enthusiast, and outdoor nerd based in Salt Lake City. Max holds an M.A. in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Utah and is currently pursuing and MFA in comics at the California College of Art. Max wrote the libretto for DEXO’s recent production One Hundred Years Hence. They also serve on the organizing committees for Salt Lake’s Grid Zine Fest and for Queer Spectra Arts Festival.

Ogden Contemporary Arts presents an evening of dance in close quarters

Up close and personal, the audience mingled with the members of the Ogden Movemeant Collective at the Monarch in downtown Ogden Saturday night. We were inside an experience — entitled Social Undistance — that could only be witnessed in the present moment. We were invited to realize that our breath is a manifestation of life. As if on a journey through the mind, we were guided through a structure of stopping points. Each room in which we paused was a real place to be, a real idea, a real memory, a real emotion. I believe all in attendance would agree with me — we were part of the Collective as the dancers moved, at times so close we could feel their breath on our bodies, their emotions meshing with our own.

A haunting solo, a sense of quiet, created by jo Blake, was performed in a room we could not see fully into, the distance seemingly an acknowledgment of something lost or destroyed. The dancer breathed despair, tortured by the ghost of what once was — she seemed to envision it — a part of herself long gone. The room was cold, sterile, even hostile. The dance spoke of a world ravaged by an enemy relentless in its pursuit to destroy humanity. I felt panic as the dancer found no resolution — no ability to hope or heal from the fear.

We were soon escorted into a tiny new space. It felt like a spot in the mind that held lost memory. An ingenious setting, this room, reminiscent of a comfortable living area, was totally occupied. How, I thought, were the four dancers, who were kneeling together in perfect symmetry, going to find a free space in which to move? But as the music released tension, evincing peace, serenity and wholeness of thought, the dancers replaced each other in the space, suggesting order and intelligence. Smartly executed, a time before our current chaos was reimagined in a kaleidoscope of movement. 

Cozy memories of home were displaced as the evening’s message reasserted itself; the work rejected its initially harmonious voice in favor of stark change. The dancers began to reach for each other, making contact, weight bearing, sharing burdens — but they did so with fear and distrust! Mistrust grew until all withdrew, pressed into the corners of what now seemed a stifling room. Like the rest of the evening’s events, Two Fold, choreographed by Fiona Gitlin, was well done and emotionally evocative. However, I felt saddened that this piece turned from its origin — happiness — to embrace a colder viewpoint. 

The program came full circle in the open arms of a single dancer who, in the beginning and in the end, beckoned me to open my arms. We were invited to move with singular focus into a new world grown within commiserate understanding, accumulated experiences, refined strength, and self-worth. The opening and closing works, Unheard Community (by Jessica Gabler and Conner Erickson) and Underneath the Edge (by Alicia Trump), served as narratives of the collective Covid experience. Crazed, jerking motions of hands and feet swiped at imagined barriers, the essence of life withheld and drained from tired bodies. Twisted limbs protruded with fierce angularity. A silence of lost companionship powered the performance, filling my mind with the same possession of voices that frayed the minds of the dancers.

Photo by Cam McLeod.

Beauty resides in the relentless endurance of human life. These works understood this. Frenzied movement, interrupted by supple undulations, followed a trajectory into the arms of one another. Unceasing walking and running came to mean perseverance and survival. Throughout, the works powerfully treated the struggle to maintain the self in the face of emotional and physical exhaustion. The Ogden Movemeant Collective is a much-needed addition to the Utah dance scene. I strongly hope the community will support this innovative and thought-provoking experience. 

Tara Lemons is an Ogden-based dance artist, and choreographer. She enjoyed a professional career in New York, Las Vegas, Japan, and Utah before accepting a position as Dance Director at a local arts high school. Currently, a senior at Weber State University majoring in Dance Performance and Choreography, she was recently awarded the Lindquist Endowment for Creative and Artistic Endeavors Student Fellowship grant from Weber State University. This is her first-ever loveDANCEmore review.

This performance continues Friday, June 25, and Saturday, June 26. Tickets here.

RDT closes the season with works from the fifties

After contemplating Dominica Greene’s questions in a recent loveDANCEmore podcast regarding the purpose of dance reviews in our community, I craft this review of RDT’s Homage from a perplexed place. What is the role of the loveDANCEmore reviewer, considering the intimate and delicate bonds in the Salt Lake dance community? How do reviewers encourage dialogue about a performance, not only share their opinions? Is it more important to provide an honest response to an artist’s work or to consider the artist’s feelings? Particularly for this performance, I wondered what I could say about the dancers of RDT and the works in Homage that hasn’t already been said.

The classic, historic modern dance works presented in Homage fulfill RDT’s stated mission of performing and preserving dance treasures. José Limón’s Suite from Mazurkas (1958) opened the program, and was followed by his mentor Doris Humphrey’s Invention (1949). Before Donald McKayle’s Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder (1959) appeared on the screen, we were presented with a brief excerpt from a documentary in which McKayle shared his inspiration for the piece. Elizabeth’s Waters’ Castor and Pollux (1956) included, before the dance, an introduction to the work’s musical composer, Harry Partch.

Elizabeth’s Waters’ Castor and Pollux (1956), photo by Sharon Kain.

As dance enthusiasts, you’re likely familiar with the aesthetic and movement vocabulary of these mid-twentieth century works. As supporters of Salt Lake City dance, you’re also likely familiar with RDT’s dancers and their strengths. Dance is not only a form of personal expression, an art to be critiqued, or a physical activity to participate in. It is an opportunity to examine society at large. Therefore, instead of forming and sharing an opinion of what I witnessed in Homage, I invite all of us to further research the decade during which the aforementioned works were created (1949-1959). What happened outside of the choreographers’ time in the studio and on stage? What did they encounter when they walked down the street? What content filled the conversations between their friends and families? What beliefs of this particular era in U.S. history did they portray through their choreography, and, does choreography need to do this? Who can escape “making a statement” through their art and who cannot? Even more lighthearted questions — what were people watching on TV, what novels were they reading, what was the number one hit song? — can lead to captivating discoveries and realizations.

Doris Humphrey’s Invention (1949), photo by Sharon Kain.

Our ruminations on historical works can inspire questions about the present day as well. How does Utah’s current culture play into what our dance companies choose to include in their repertoire, and what they choose to define as “dance treasures?” What and whose value systems are communicated and prioritized through these choices? How does our arts funding affect what and who is remembered or forgotten, both historically and in this very moment?

I’ll say that you should watch Homage, mostly because I think we (dancers) need to support each other. We should consume each other’s work as often as we can. Whether we are freelance artists or employed by larger arts institutions, we should ask ourselves what we are “saying” by showing up or not showing up for other artists’ work, what we are “saying” by encouraging or not encouraging others to show up as well.

Alexandra Barbier is a dance artist and performance-maker. She received a modern dance MFA from the University of Utah and has taught courses on creative process, queer performance art, and dance in culture.

You can still watch Homage at RDT’s website until June 30.

Halie Bahr presents a new interactive work in Liberty Park

The muggy summer air was just beginning to cool as the colors of the sunset bathed Liberty Park in golden light. I dialed in on my cell phone to join the zoom call, ready for Halie Bahr’s voice to guide me through an innovative technological experience. After a brief explanation to the assembled attendees about the logistics of the immersive performance, we dispersed to wander the park as the piece unfolded.

During the pandemic, I became accustomed to video being the primary medium to consume dance. It was a pleasant surprise to have technology be used in a way that carved a path for new possibilities. Most dancers are familiar with the frustrations of using zoom for class: the constraints, technical difficulties, and the impersonal experience. Using only her voice and no visuals, Bahr was able to use this technology and weave it into a performance that navigated those difficulties with nuance. It was the most effective and unique use of Zoom conferencing that I have ever experienced throughout this pandemic. This was by far the most impressive use of technological dance art I have seen this year.

Two bikes left behind as the audience/performers dispersed.

It’s easy to begin zoning out during video performances, but Bahr’s work forced a pull of focus in the present moment with grounding exercises. It was an interactive performance that required shifting the roles of the audience members, who were also the performers. Listening Party pushed the margins of what dance could be. The dance, though not separated by individual pieces, had different elements that were dances in and of themselves. The pedestrians in the park, my own reflection, and the story of a woman named Claudia told by Bahr created a complex weaving of artistic throughlines over the course of the evening.

The story was of a woman coping with thoughts of death, and what I interpreted as dissociation. There came a moment, near the end of the story, that made this performance feel like it was coming full circle. The somatic practices that Bahr had incorporated into the work rooted us in the moment through practices of mindfulness and grounding. In a way, I felt like this work was an allegory not just of the woman in the story, but of my own healing from trauma.

At the end, audience/performers that had participated in-person drew maps of where they’d travelled within the park.

As a child of a deaf adult (CODA), I couldn’t help but think of how this work could become more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing. In the same vein, how does this type of work become accessible to people with movement constraints or other physical conditions that prevent them from participating? What barriers to access does needing a cell phone create in consuming this art? In interviewing Bahr after the show, I was encouraged to hear her speak of her own musings on how this work could become even more accessible to the public.

An even larger question: Is this work really a dance? I believe that it is. Furthermore, I think it paves a path toward a new way of dancing and conceptualizing dance as an art form. With movement of the body and mind, Bahr was able to inspire me as a participant to express something larger and more emotional. Ultimately, I felt more connected to the world around me hours afterward.

The sky just as the performance concluded.

Meredith Wilde (she/her/they/them) is a dance artist based in Salt Lake City, UT. They received a BFA in Modern Dance from University of Utah. In addition to ballet and contemporary, Wilde has trained in Bharatanatyam technique and performed with Chitrakaavya Dance in Salt Lake City, UT. Wilde has been a company member for the Polaris Dance Theatre, Shaun Keylock Company, and Wasatch Contemporary Dance Company. Wilde’s choreographic work has been presented at Snow College, Pacific University, The Fertile Ground Festival of New Work, MADCO2, and OuterSpace. They were also the recipient of the “Audience Choice” award at MADCO2’s “Dare to Dance” Showcase, and is a recipient of the “Barney Creative Prize,” a commissioning award to create work for White Bird in Portland, OR.