A couple of weekends ago I took in two very different shows, which together illustrate the variety of what Salt Lake City dance has on offer these days. Versa Styles, a hip hop dance company from Los Angeles, has visited the University of Utah a couple of times now through UtahPresents. The company’s exuberant dancers more than filled the giant stage at Kingsbury Hall — I only wish they’d had a bigger audience. In a much smaller space the next night, I watched a collaboration between Heartland Collective and local painter Andrew Alba. Heartland Collective is made up of Molly Heller, Melissa Younker, Brian Gerke, Florian Alberge, and Nick Foster. Both evenings were memorable and brought up questions in my mind about how dance can fill different spaces and enrich audiences’ lives.
Versa Styles’ performance reminded me of the many lecture demonstrations I witnessed and participated in as a young dancer, and I mean this in a positive sense. It’s rare to get to see each dancer in a professional company moving on their own and getting a few minutes of solo time to present their unique strengths. All of the dancers had incredible presence and most were from California, so meeting them one after another was also an opportunity to learn more about the embodied histories of popping, waacking and other related forms from a West-coast perspective. The autobiographical moments in which the dancers, many of whom had worked with artistic director Jackie Lopez since junior high school, belied the formality of the setting, which at times seemed at odds with the values of the dance forms at play.
Heller’s work, ∆IAMON∆IAMON∆, which took place in the tiny optician’s shop at the corner of 800 East and 800 South, was in some sense more formal in tone, despite the intimate setting. It began with a piercing, spaced-out cover of Cindy Lauper’s “Time after time,” which followed a beguiling, intricate trio danced by Heller, Melissa Younker and Brian Gerke. Despite the lack of physical space available, there was an uncharacteristic sense of depth to the way Heller’s lines of phrase work unfolded, fugue-like, quiet and serene. Where Heller has in the past seemed preoccupied with the frantic, here she seemed to be exploring a group of characters with such a long shared memory that they didn’t need to be in constant contact in order to develop their moody, glacial, underwater relations. As all of this unfolded, the dancers (and later the artist himself) manipulated the set — a melancholy grid of square paintings by Alba, which formed and unformed glyph-like, haunting faces — crossing, forming and unforming, and eventually ending up beached in a tidy pile on the floor.
Samuel Hanson is the executive director of loveDANCEmore.