Efren Corado Garcia: Dust. Breath. Place

Dust. Breath. Place is Efren Corado Garcia’s story. It is one of his stories, and Garcia is one person in the story, which is also made up of many stories and many people. On its most basic terms, Dust. Breath. Place is the story of Garcia’s journey as a young child from Guatemala to the United States and a reflection on that core memory as it pertains to his current self and life here in Utah.

The cast included faces mostly familiar to me, made up Garcia’s friends and collaborators from his time dancing in Repertory Dance Theatre - Natalie Border, Sarah Donohue, Austin Hardy, Tiana Lovett, and Tyler Orcutt. Technical direction was executed by RDT’s resident technical wizard Pilar Davis, and the simple, ingenious costumes were created by Carly Schaub. The production was sponsored and produced through RDT’s Link Series and Atlas Peak. An illustration by Tim Guthrie, drawn from the final image of the dancers on stage, graced the programs. Garcia called our attention to and thanked this group, and his larger community, both before and after the performance.

Segmented into nine sections, Dust. Breath. Place followed a journey, from a beginning to a middle to an end, and on to somewhere that was a bit of all three – new opportunity, process, something to stick around. Each short section received a minimally descriptive title on the program; home, first departure, migration, second departure, scorn/internal call, third departure, home revisited, dreams, and memories. These “chapters” pinned characters to distinct, if vague, points in time, and space kept them moving forward linearly as a narrative. Certain gestures and music molded the story and its characters, especially the sounds of dancers stamping the soles of their feet into the earth, of vibrant warm voices, clicking crickets, rumbling thunder, and of sweet, complicated reunion.

Kinesthetic choices, on the other hand, frequently took direction from cycling and reformulating un-pinnable elements of memory to bind the story together and give it the complex and building sense of an identity formed and remembered. The dancers walked forward through each stage, passing through movements, sounds, and emotional landscapes, gathering and trailing all behind them.

The costumes, first appearing uniformly dark and plain, were revealed to have vibrant and richly colorful patterns printed on the inside. These were made visible by each dancer, one by one over time, as they pulled up a pant leg and turned it inside out, hooking it over their shoulder to fashion a bright cross-body sash. This simple, inventive construction by Carly Schaub was delightful and highly effective in communicating various transformative states.

Garcia offered additional insights to the audience both before and after the show – earnestly and generously giving us something while firmly asking us to listen deeper. He shouted out to his community, filled in more of the details from his personal journey underlying the show, and outlined a litany of critical contextual factors regarding its creation and existence.

Garcia described the process he undertook to produce the folk dance-informed sequences that opened the show. Because he had immigrated at such a young age, before some cultural inheritances could fully and consciously land, Garcia had to perform research (in a literal, academic sense; different than the “research” that has gained popularity with dancers recently, which often describes an introspective, experimental approach) into Guatemalan folk dance traditions in order to approximate a dance that could imagine the “Efren who would have been” if he had never left the town of his birth.

When the same patterns were reprised later on, they followed one of the most emotionally dark and kinetically tense sections of the piece. Austin Hardy walked on stage in a moment of silence towards a painfully contorted and straining Tyler Orcutt, and began to stamp out the call-and-response-like pattern from the beginning, the familiar rhythm both warming and softening Orcutt mid-contraction and gently pulling the whole group back together. Garcia told us that for this reprisal he took those initial “what-if Efren” movements, and re-adapted them to reflect the real life Efren,who lives in Utah as a Guatemalan American.

Garcia also noted his thoughts on “making an ethnic dance for people who aren’t ethnic,” making the critical distinction (too often unacknowledged) that his cast of white dancers isn’t and can’t portray him or embody his experiences. What they are doing instead, he noted, is listening and thereby meeting him at a level of understanding which enabled them to understand how to transmit the work in a way that appropriately points the viewer to its referent.

Speaking later about a moment influenced by his reunion with his mother (the two were separated when he was very small because she paved the way for the rest of her family to follow by making the trip first), Garcia described it as “a simple way to make a picture of something very complicated… concurrent duets of bitterness and tenderness.” Orcutt and Hardy would grab each other’s shoulders and spin around, throwing their weight heavily and rotating faster and faster until Orcutt’s feet flew into the air while Hardy kept spinning him tenderly, his hands around Orcutt’s neck. Tiana Lovett and Sarah Donohue weaved around them, gliding and chassé-ing into floating arabesques, their bodies open, forward, and linked side by side. These sequences were repeated throughout the section.

Moments of contradiction and juxtaposition ran throughout the piece. Garcia noted that he filtered depictions of intense struggle and danger through the sense of wonder and adventure experienced by a young child, such as he was when the events actually took place. Watching it, I could glimpse that feeling, especially when the whole group raced around the stage at top speed, jockeying for places with the biggest, widest grins each of them could muster.

In the penultimate section, Tiana Lovett danced a beautifully light and sincere solo that evoked the joy of opened horizons and newly possible aspirations. The end threaded motifs together from all the previous sections, a true re-encapsulation that looked back upon the whole. Which is as memory is: everything you’ve already done will always keep washing through you as you continue on.

The evening was a beautiful, transformative, and emotionally affecting experience, performed in the Rose Wagner’s small, black box studio theater with simple staging and just two rows of seating. It was impeccably rehearsed and polished in its presentation, which allowed the message and experience to clearly and fully stand on their own. The themes and modes of communication felt as intimate as a confidence received from a good friend, and equally as expansive, and called out a mass of other stories, questions, suggestions, and challenges, stretching from border to arbitrary border.

A simple way to paint a complicated picture. How do you un-muddy something so complex? How do you unearth a way to reach an understanding? Ask your friends about their stories, was Garcia’s advice. And then listen.

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.

Austin Hardy presents La Mela

What determines how we view identity? This question lay at the heart of La Mela, a program recently presented by Austin Hardy that featured works by local artists Rebecca Aneloski and Stephen Koester. Presented in the intimate black box in the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts & Education Complex at the University of Utah, the evening explored questions of performance, affectation and affection, memory, and interpersonal relationships. The works focused on how an individual may relate to social space both within and around themselves, and how those relationships drive who we are and who we become.

“Man Dance,” choreographed by Stephen Koester, Modern Dance Chair at the University of Utah, was a thoughtfully-crafted work that delved into what it means to be a man. Beyond just being a man, what does it mean to look, act, sound, and exist “like a man”; who successfully gets to be a man and what drives that success? With extremely physical partnering representative of Koester’s style, “Man Dance” was a duet between Micah Sir-Patrick Burkhardt and Austin Hardy, and kept me engaged throughout.

The piece opened with Burkhardt and Hardy performing a warm-up. Dressed in gray and black sweatsuits, the two seemed unaware of the audience’s presence until they were suddenly hyper-aware. While their voices dropped from their natural registers, the two continued to repeat “I’m a man!,” entertaining the audience at first, but eventually forcing a question: why did the two men feel the need to repeat this phrase? Even though Burkhardt and Hardy were performing versions of themselves, they were still characterized and performing affectations.

I appreciated Koester’s range of references in “Man Dance,” with movement motifs spanning from a Western gun battle to superheros, cavemen, a traditional Jewish wedding dance, and finally to MC Hammer. Each presented its own interpretation of what manhood means and, more importantly, each existed specifically to define masculinity. Burkhardt and Hardy, through these motifs, became the fighter, the savior, the provider, and the arbiter of “cool.” By presenting these motifs in a male duet, “Man Dance” exaggerated the men’s roles and forced the audience to view them as hyperbolic and impossible to embody.

Through Koester’s partnering, we were shown authentic weight transference between the two bodies, negating the role of the lonesome male figure. We were shown two bodies relying on each other in a way that was both intimate and clear in its connections. While some of the partnering was meant to be comedic, it maybe only seemed so because of a sense of machismo the dancers were attempting to personify.

I felt discomfort for the performers as they tried to manifest these roles with hunched backs and sharp angles, dressed in their sweat outfits, clearly uncomfortable. Towards the end of the piece, we experienced their real physical discomfort as they caught their breath, literally, in a spotlight. Their inability to completely embody the fictionalized, hyper-masculine roles was presented with nothing else to look at.

I questioned the role of mishaps in the piece, both of ones that were choreographed and others that might have been accidents. Though sometimes questioning them because of the performers’ reactions, Hardy made me feel his mistakes truly, in a way that enforced an impossible binary. At the end of the piece, both dancers embodied a groove in their pelvis, and I felt Hardy let go of all other roles he had been playing to exist in this physical element for himself. It was appropriate that this came at the end of the piece, as it was an immense relief to see the dancers stop fighting to become something and to simply be themselves.

A second work began after a brief intermission, this one choreographed by Rebecca Aneloski, a performer and teacher with SALT Contemporary Dance. I am unsure of the title of the work, but I assume it was “La Mela,” which translates to “the apple” in Italian. This seemed to be a deeply personal work for Aneloski and focused on memory; having worked with Aneloski in the past, I am familiar with her Italian roots. Complementary to this background knowledge, the stage was set with a table and chairs and a bookcase, all in constant shifting motion, and furthering the idea of memory through a familial context.

The piece opened with a quartet, featuring Burkhardt, Hardy, Nell Rollins, and Natalie Jones, and quickly grew to a larger cast, adding Natalie Border, Amy Fry, Allie Kamppinen, Haleigh Larmer, Chang Liu, Megan O’Brien, Laura Schmitz, Bayley Smallwood, and Sarah Stott. The large cast engulfed the stage with their presence and with Aneloski’s expansive movement vocabulary. The dancers constantly reached for and pulled each other, seemingly in slow motion even when the pace was brisk. They provided both physical and emotional support, remaining completely connected throughout the piece. Approximately an hour long, the piece as a whole presented moments for each dancer to shine.

I was struck by the thought of rediscovering the familiar, by way of memory and of caretaking throughout the entire piece. Regardless of who was being featured at the moment, the rest of the cast continuously arranged and rearranged the set: moving books to and from the bookcase; rearranging cups, plates, the tablecloth, chairs; finding new ways to see these everyday items. I often found myself entranced by what the next configuration on the table was going to be, and was surprised when my focus returned from the dancers to the set and it was completely different than I’d last seen it.

Though not explicit, specific motifs were repeated throughout the piece that lent themselves to an exploration of childhood memories. Natalie Border had one of the clearest moments of this, as she could often be seen traipsing around the stage with one arm reaching up and behind herself, her gaze towards the sky, as though flying a kite. She even brought a sense of lightness to some of the heavier moments, her white blond hair breathing fresh air into the scenes, as well as anchoring them. She gave the audience something to hold onto.

A feeling of foreboding and death surrounded Sarah Stott from the beginning of the piece through to the end. She was the only dancer to appear in color at first; from her initial entrance, she created drama, as she fell and the other dancers threw flower petals at her body. Throughout the rest of the piece, she swan-dived into the others, trusting them to catch her and seeming not to care what happened to her if they didn’t. At the end, she collapsed again, this time for good, as the titular apple appeared.

During the whole piece, we were presented with a style and vocabulary that was uniquely Aneloski’s, though with clear input from the performers. I was continually struck by moments and lines being cut off abruptly and almost awkwardly to create a sense of visual, and probably physical, discomfort. Chests were almost constantly forward, with arms reaching past shoulders, heads raised to create room for protruding appendages. The air surrounding the dancers had a tactile feel. Hands were often held at the hip, seemingly ready for action. During a duet with Burkhardt and Jones, this vocabulary was brought to a writhing climax in Jones’ body as her movement picked up pace and the discontinuous and tactile sensation continued. This hindered her ability to stay on her own two feet and led to beautiful partnering.

One moment that stood out to me was a duet between Liu and Stott. They moved with such clarity and assuredness that, even with all the shifting bodies and scenery on stage, my eye was drawn only to them. Amidst chaos, their clarity of line, precise unison, and powerful stage presence was completely engaging.

Overall, because of a large cast and constant movement, the work was chaotic. But memory is also chaotic. How we define ourselves derives from memory, both personal and external, and that perception is constantly shifting, much like the stage in “La Mela.” Without being able to pinpoint one specific element, the work felt autobiographical, like Aneloski was telling a story about her life through memory. It felt authentic to the dancers’ stories as well. I appreciated this deeply personal work and know that we can expect to see more from Aneloski in the future.

Promotional image for La Mela.

Natalie Gotter is a performer, choreographer, instructor, filmmaker, and researcher. She recently completed her MFA in Modern Dance at the University of Utah and is on faculty at Utah Valley University, Westminster College, and Salt Lake Community College.