Molly Heller: very vary

Molly Heller’s “very vary” was just that: a very varied patchwork. For the duration of her hour-long dance, the cast of six - both members of Ririe-Woodbury and freelancers alike - approached Heller’s performatively demanding work with integrity.

Papier-mâché animal heads by Gretchen Reynolds lined the back of the stage, glowing orbs lit from within. According to the program, each performer identified with one of these six animals: a bee, a deer, a monkey, a lion, a wolf, a seahorse. The only decoration in the Eccles Regent purple box, the animal heads added a minimal yet detailed touch, and I looked forward to how the performers might further define relationships to them.

The opening section was organized chaos, the dancers slotting into varying identities from the start. The Pixies blared; Florian Alberge yelled, Mary Lyn Graves did a mockingly good petite allegro routine, and Marissa Mooney burped (this elicited laughs, but I could have recognized Mooney’s derring do in spite of this). Melissa Younker’s innocent inquisitiveness stood out to me; her character quietly explored a landscape that the others often experienced more explosively.

Much of the physical vocabulary in “very vary” was fresh to my dance-worn eyes. The dancers’ movement came in spurts and appeared image- or emotion-driven (rather than dance for dance’s sake). The quick darts between movements and also sections managed to maintain a certain logic in their dissonance.

While there were many compelling moments by each of the six dancers, I did find that some entreated their rites and plights more truthfully, or at least less forcefully, to me than others. Some arcs of investigation I read as honest, and even vulnerable; others verged on feeling put upon, or done for the sake of performance.

Physical humor triumphed. Alberge and Nick Blaylock had a duet to Elton John’s “Rocket Man” that was a hybrid of slapstick and modern dance, timed masterfully.

"Rocket Man" duet with Florian Alberge (right) and Nick Blaylock. Photo by Tori Duhaime. 

Mooney introduced a different brand of physical humor. Telling a story about a crowded train, she noted that overhead luggage should be placed in the overhead bins - as Alberge’s dancing body was implicated as the luggage. As the group wrestled her overhead in a tangle of their arms, Mooney spoke of feeling trapped. The humor in such parallels between the spoken and the physical was successful for me.

Near the end of the dance, the opening “chaos” section was reprised, with dancers swapping roles. Graves punched through what was originally Yebel Gallegos’ serious boxing routine. Sometimes the do-er fit seamlessly into the newly assumed role; other times, the do-er appeared to have donned ill-fitting clothes. In either case, adopting others’ identities was an interesting progression after seeing each performer make their own brand of choices for most of the dance.

The dancers then helped one another tie the glowing animal visages to the tops of their heads; each seemed to have come to terms with both himself and others, and was now able to exist singularly as well as collaboratively. I wondered whether the preceding parts of the dance offered ample segue to this conclusion, and additionally wondered about the connections to the specific animals each performer supposedly had.

The dancers and their animal heads. Heads by Gretchen Reynolds, photo by Tori Duhaime.

Some of my favorite moments were when the dancers traveled around the stage en masse, like a whimsical marching band. The first time this happened, Younker conducted them as they quietly raged on their imaginary instruments; as she yelled “Louder!”, I couldn’t help but picture Spongebob Squarepants' compatriots, led by clarinet aficionado Squidward in a madcap dash around Bikini Bottom.

The second time, having donned the glowing heads, the dancers alit for a final lap. Like a mystical gaggle of Hayao Miyazaki animations, they floated, dream-like, past us before their departure. The final image presented itself to me as a reflection, in the back windows which opened mid-dance on a perfect, lilac dusk. Now, as dusk turned to night, the magical creatures began to make their way to their next engagement. I watched the reflections of their glowing heads recede as they filed, one by one, out the back.

This conclusion was lovely and evocative, but hard work for me to connect to the rest of the very varied material. Instead, I found myself waiting for the night animals to come out to play, wishing they had sooner. The ending of this iteration of “very vary” worked well as an epilogue, but might still be missing its final chapter.

Amy Falls is the development coordinator at Ballet West and loveDANCEmore’s former Mudson coordinator.

Ballet West: Works from Within at Eccles in PC

Formerly known as Innovations, Ballet West has moved the newly titled Works from Within to the Eccles Center in Park City. Works from Within shares choreography from company ranks and 2017’s presented world premieres by Oliver Oguma, Trevor Naumann, Kazlyn Nielsen, and Adrian Fry. While the Eccles Center primarily presents touring groups who may stop in Park City during larger tours of the West (think Jessica Lang), it’s this Salt Lake based company who had the best turnout of any dance that I’ve seen in the space.

One choreographer, Kazlyn Nielsen, was new to the Works from Within platform and her work, “Rendering Stillness,” was perhaps the most conventional offering of the evening. But, inarguably, Nielsen achieved her goal of offering a breath in a fast-paced world with her presentation of delicate partnering to Satie. Also traditional in concept and execution was Adrian Fry’s second work for the platform, “Kinesis.” Much like his 2015 work, “Pulse,” the work relies on the propulsion of music to move large groups through the space in a neo-classical tradition. “Kinesis,” featured more than just the company dancers in performance, as principal dancer Emily Adams costumed the work.

Two former Works from Within participants offered more specific aesthetic perspectives. Last year, Trevor Naumann premiered a dance about the philosophical views of Homer and I wrote in a review that the work was reminiscent of certain moments in Martha Clarke’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” because of styling but also its content. With another score by Boaz Roberts (deliberately driving and equally grating) the dancers in Naumann’s new work, “Grief and Integration,” explore something similar and reminiscent of different portions of the same dance by Clarke. This comparison is not just because of the return of nude unitards but because of the physical explorations of confusion and pain which are outside the norm of Ballet West’s typical fare.

Some of Naumann’s metaphors in “Grief and Integration” are clear (death comes for you in a black hood and mask) but others are less so (some dancers have human adornment like suspenders and jackets while the rest are clearly dressed for dance). In this mixed bag there is nevertheless an ongoing exploration of the way contemporary ballet might interact with the contemporary moment and its address of pain and pleasure. Further, it suggests that Naumann’s ongoing investigations may take place both in and outside of ballet’s own idioms. While this dance won’t remain my favorite piece, it will always be in the trajectory of where Naumann ultimately takes these ideas which seems to be the purpose of Works from Within.

Oliver Oguma similarly fulfills this purpose as he connects threads from last year’s “Fragments of Simplicity” to the premiere of “Tremor.” In both works, the movement for men is stunning and subtle. Also in both, it appears that women are added because that’s what usually happens in this situation. Clad in androgynous tanks and leotards, I can see the case that the dance includes traditional partnering as a way to break down the common gender stereotypes held within dancing bodies and theatrical structures. But having been at more than one modern dance rodeo I can attest that an androgynous dancing body usually ends up being a male dancing body (see: Nikolais repertory with women binding their breasts and men existing ‘androgynously’ in their same dance belts and unitards).

My desire for Oguma to explore a ballet for the male movers he is so adept at carving space for ironically competes with my ongoing desire for the inclusion of more female choreographers both in Works from Within and in the Ballet West season. Last year after consulting a professor specializing in political statistics, I came up with the figure that in a randomized selection of Ballet West company members there is less than an 8% probability that only one woman would be selected for this platform given the company makeup. That this systemic bias continues to be inadvertently reflected in the programming but corrected in the choreography is an interesting counterpart to the concert itself.

In an ongoing commitment to presenting contemporary ballets, Ballet West will soon be at another Eccles venue: Eccles Theater, in downtown Salt Lake, with the new National Choreographic Festival. Tickets and information about the program can be found here.

Ashley Anderson is the director of loveDANCEmore community events as part of her non-profit, ashley anderson dances. See more of her work on ashleyandersondances.com

SALT at Eccles Regent

Lehi-based SALT Contemporary Dance, founded in 2013, was the first performing group to reserve space in the new Regent Street Eccles Theater this past weekend (a black box - or in the Regent’s case, a purple box). As mentioned by founding artistic director Michelle Nielsen in her pre-performance speech, SALT’s self-professed mission is to present contemporary works by local and international emergent* choreographers. While the members of SALT, and of second company SALT II, proved their technical prowess many times over throughout the evening, the programming choices themselves fell short of Nielsen’s boasts about the work the company seeks to present.

The first half of the program, three works by Ihsan Rustem, Jason Parsons, and Eric Handman, felt uncannily similar, particularly in movement vocabulary. Specifically, a leg extension in a la seconde - turned in, but with an aesthetically sickled foot at the end - made its indelible mark on each of the three. Other motifs were perhaps less memorable, but no less ubiquitous. I suspect that many of these choreographers in the program’s first half asked the dancers to input movement and that these similar choices might actually be a product of the dancers’ personal comfort zones rather than each individual choreographer’s vision.

Also in these early works, and despite the dancers’ facilities, I did not feel a kinesthetic use of weight and effort - instead, the movement seemed to stagnate at similar dynamic levels and gave the effect of many limbs gesturing with unclear intent and often at the same “volume” as each musical selection. The dancers’ internal, at times self-indulgent, foci further retracted the physical impact of the choreography from my viewpoint as an audience member.

In Rustem’s “Voice of Reason”, I enjoyed Elissa Collins’ counterpoint of stillness: seated facing the side with her legs outstretched, ankles purposefully extended like Barbie feet, she remained stalwart as duets unfolded onstage around her. However, the acoustic, singer-songwriter music that accompanied these several, all male/female duets - “But I wanna fall in love with you” - did not invite fresh perspective.

In Parsons’ “Tracing the Steps You Left Behind”, featuring SALT II, I was struck by a moment where one dancer, unveiled as the leader, controlled the all-female group to sink collectively, as if in a trance, to the floor; then upon rising, she conducted an orchestra of their seething bodies with her hands. There were several other such eerie, ritualistic moments, but their effect as a whole was diluted when the dancers walked slowly around the stage, staring warily at each other like many aimless deer in headlights.   

Handman’s “Omnivore” gave glimpses of greater dynamic variation than the two previous pieces, especially in a brief opening solo for Joni Tuttle McDonald. I am familiar with a significant body of Handman’s work, having spent semesters in class with him while at the U and having seen many of his pieces for Performing Dance Company concerts (albeit mostly work set on students). That being said, I noticed significant differences between this previous work and “Omnivore”, namely the movement vocabulary (which, of course, is subject to change throughout any choreographer's career trajectory) but also the kinesthetic effect and physical inhabitance displayed by the dancers, which has always felt singular and powerful in Handman’s work but felt less so in “Omnivore”.

A section of “Ominvore” did transcend the dynamic plateau of mid-level choreography done at a moderate tempo: wild electronic music invited chaos and the change in speed viscerally heightened a group section. This section was short-lived, however, and quickly found its way back to a meandering duet to equally meandering music, rife with affectations (sometimes confusingly classified as “contemporary”) such as the turned in a la seconde leg. This new choreographic chapter Handman might be exploring has lost some of the physical excitement, involvement, and even exhaustion that characterized the old.

Opening the second half of the program, “Comes the Night” by Brendan Duggan began with a single stomping dancer, slowly increasing the tempo and setting the rhythm for the phrase the group would soon break into, also incorporating stomps. Breath was audible and one could hear bodies slapping together at times, finally giving the SALT dancers weight and purpose both in space and in relation to one another.

Duggan also defined relationships between dancers in his world more clearly, aided by dancer-delivered text about a relationship intertwined with a vigorous duet. The content paired with the male/female duet did feel campy at times, but eventually morphed into a larger group alternately delivering lines about compartmentalizing the past and letting others in: a concept much more universal, and perhaps open to investigation, than a female telling her male counterpart that he is “boring!”

Ketley spent several weeks in SLC over the summer teaching classes at Salt Dance Fest, and “A Particulate History of Friendship, The Trial and Absence of Stillard Mave” was a collage of phrases that I learned in one of these classes and spent hours workshopping. Maybe it was this prior connection to the choreographic material that hindered me from seeing the piece as a singular entity: the structure felt haphazardly patchwork, with the roster of phrases merely rearranged in time and space. Group unison was executed in contrived chaos, using different timing and facings, and duets were bolstered by swapping out partners several times.

Ketley’s phrase material itself was captivating and, by far, the most inventive on the program. He choreographs movement with an attention to, and even an indulgence in, gesture while still retaining a sense of matter-of-factness. Varying degrees of attack and delicacy further colored the surprising shifts in level, from soft gestures done standing to sudden, brash poses on the floor. As in several other pieces, an intricate duet that took place on the floor was difficult to make out, as the risers in the Eccles Regent offer a very low grade of steepness with many heads partly obscuring almost half of the marley.

SALT’s success in the community it seeks to serve is evident in its outstanding attendance. As a local dancer attending a community dance performance, I relish SALT’s success, and similarly relish all the many unfamiliar faces seen at Friday night’s performance who walked away having seen more dance and of a different kind than they may have ever seen before. At the same time, again as a dancer, I’m not sure SALT’s diligent marketing of “fresh” and “innovative” correctly describes the company: much of the work I saw over the course of the evening was familiar to the point of feeling derivative, even identical, despite featuring truly stellar dancers with a variety of backgrounds and the work of choreographers from all over the world.

In the future, let’s go easy on the qualifiers, and remember that invoking “contemporary” should just refer to dance that “belongs to or occurs in the present”, rather than dance that adheres to an arbitrary set of aesthetic standards. After all, it’s really only contemporary right now.  

*I wondered what, if anything, SALT aimed to distinguish by opting for the less-used “emergent” over the common “emerging” when describing up-and-coming choreographers in a section of their program notes. I thought an exploration of the company’s semantic choice here could further shed light on their mission. A Google search I conducted for the difference between the two yielded few results, as “emergent” is not in common use. The best definitions I could find, via The Difference-Between, were “emerging”: becoming prominent, newly formed, emergent, rising; and “emergent”: arising unexpectedly, especially if also calling for immediate reaction, constituting an emergency. “Calling for immediate reaction” is probably the intended effect of invoking “emergent”, but to me “emerging” remains more relevant when describing choreographers: becoming prominent, or newly formed, but not constituting an emergency. If SALT is making a purposeful distinction between “emerging” and “emergent”, it seems a superfluous one; that is, one that does not serve to change the nature of the work presented but rather only the language that surrounds it.

Amy Falls is loveDANCEmore's Program Coordinator and regularly contributes to the blog. 

Photo (at top) by Ismael Arrieta / Artwork by Lisa Marie Crosby