Brine Dance: Brine 5

Brine Dance, a Salt Lake City collective, presented its fifth annual concert at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center as part of Repertory Dance Theatre’s Link Series. Symmer Andrews, Ashley Creek, and Sara Pickett are the creatives behind the collective, and have co-directed and -produced its five concerts thus far. This year, Brine 5 presented four dances by five choreographers, purportedly to show "longer, more in-depth works… to give the audience the opportunity to experience [a] high caliber of choreography.” This model was a major departure from last year’s structure, which featured work by 18 choreographers split between two programs. 

The choreographers included Lauren Broadbent (a junior at the University of Utah), Mar Undag (recently of SALT II) and Daniel Do (of Repertory Dance Theatre), Portland-based artist Trevor Wilde, and dancer/director Rebecca Aneloski.

There was no question that the show was well-rehearsed; all dancers performed with extreme clarity and all work was clean and contained in a way that left little room for audience interpretation or nuance. The overarching physicality of the show alternated between precise, isolated gestures and simultaneous, whole body movements. 

Do and Undag’s collaboration resulted in “Permission To Be [VDSW],” a dance for four women. The women began in front of the show curtain, working with repetitive, direct gestures to the beat of the music, then proceeded onto the stage, the music oscillating between genres and moods. Indicated by the program notes, the dance aimed to demonstrate the power of the four women. Comprised primarily of overlapping solos and duets, the piece’s many entrances and exits allowed the dancers to change their various all-white costumes. The final image had the four women with their tops off, snapping to turn off the lights. 

Trevor Wilde’s piece, “Anotherwom(e)n,” utilized a door frame and a pile of red roses. The first solo spoke of a dark memory while a contemporary ballet sequence was performed. As a counterpoint, a second soloist leapt around the stage with a bouquet of roses as if in love. In a duet, the two dancers often mirrored one another, alternating silly faces and classical lines. The simple black dresses accentuated the leggy choreography. 

“TASTE,” by Rebecca Aneloski in collaboration with her performers, had a refreshingly clear identity. Flirty, floaty, and bizarre, the choreography employed nuance and spatial logic. The physical textures allowed characters to develop complex personal identities inside a distinctive world. Suspending time, condensing time, and other surprising timing choices added to the piece’s pleasure and satisfaction. “TASTE” evoked images of family structures and personal struggle. Aneloski crafted a series of overlapping tableaus with striking moments of reflection that I continue to reflect upon. 

“8.6.45,” choreographed by Lauren Broadbent, was the final piece, and one primarily driven by its music. Strong beats drove the dancers’ sharp gestures around a table and a bench. Hands were placed over eyes, mouths, and ears. The dancers occasionally assumed a formation to face the audience, moving through punching and slashing choreography, and then finished with a large piece of white fabric. 

Even as a reviewer, I am not completely certain of my role. I do not feel I am watching to determine whether something is “good,” or not - that is far too subjective of a decision, that I think is best left to each audience member. I do, however, have some questions about the dynamics of dance-making. Some are specific to this show, some specific to Salt Lake City, and some on a larger scale.

Why do choreographers make dances seemingly based on experiences that are not their own? Why do men choreograph dances with the expressed intent of highlighting the experiences of women? Why would a young choreographer make a dance about Hiroshima, an event that predates her by half a century? 

Why do dancers use voice on stage, and how does it relate to the physicality of the body? Did the artist(s)/producers obtain the proper licenses to play the music of Kendrick Lamar? Is it appropriate for four white women to perform to Lamar’s music? 

Did the producers have conversations with choreographers about problematic gender or music content? Did they address undeveloped dances? Did choreographers have opportunities to receive feedback from the producers, their peers, or other artists? 

Can a dance find an identity succinct enough to find multiplicity inside of that clarity? Why might a dance have enough content to fill multiple distinct works?

How does a community push the boundaries of a predominant movement aesthetic? 

How does a community create space for artists to take risks while also holding the entire community to high standards of craft and quality? 

It is important for there to be more independently produced shows like Brine 5 in Salt Lake City. 

But as we create more space, we should continue to ask questions of ourselves, our peers, our mentors, our collaborators, and those with the power to create more space. We may not agree upon the answer or the methods, but in the asking, we may create the possibility to discover the unimagined ways that dance can transform, heal, and connect communities. 

Originally from the Midwest, Hannah Fischer is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Utah. She received an Individual Artist Grant through the Indiana Arts Commission in 2017 and was an Associate Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2014.

Sugar Space presents Suite: Women Defining Space

This year’s performances of Suite: Women Defining Space showcased the work of Corinne Lohner, Haley Stassia, and Halie Bahr. The Suite series is dedicated to “support[ing] the creation and presentation of new work by women choreographers,” and is produced by Sugar Space Arts Warehouse through funding from Salt Lake County’s Zoo, Arts & Parks program. 

Corinne Lohner is a recent transplant to Salt Lake City via New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In “The Schema of Pretense,” she had Eliza Tappan and Ali Lorenz perform games of discordant make-believe and wrestle wildly amidst a landscape of hobby horses, play telephones, and tubby plastic chairs. Conceits flashed from “here are sixty-something ways to mount a horse,” to “pretend I’m dead and you find me and we had a tenuous relationship so there are things left unsaid,” to “what if we got a divorce” and “pretend I’m lonely, and you’re lonely but not as lonely as me.” Tappan in particular is very good at theater games. Her face and voice contort elastically, with the kind of calculated improvisational ease that only comes from possession of precise comedic timing and being very well-practiced. 

These small fantasies wound down to a long moment of empty, languishing quiet before exploding. The two worked themselves into a frenzy, rolling into each other and all over the room, whispering and shrieking and laughing hysterically. They wrestled like children, like puppies, with anarchy and a caustic seamlessness between tenderness and competition. As my companion at this show put it, “hugging or fighting?” is a format/question that tends to crop up regularly to better (or worse) effect. This time, I really liked it. The window into their intense intimacy broke open towards the end with a drastic lighting change, and from then on Tappan and Lorenz’s escalating hysterics became more and more distant, and almost off-putting. A feeling settled over both myself and my companion akin to the faintly disgusted boredom of being the only sober one at the end of the night, the jokes and secret pacts of friends having become inscrutably dumb and out of reach. 

“Unmasked Vignettes” was a series of alternating solos and duets, and a final trio. It was immediately obvious that this was the piece choreographed by SALT Contemporary Dance company member Haley Stassia. The familiar and popular style of contemporary dance neatly checked all its boxes right away (trace a line to its points, push against something and then undulate away, sweep a leg, meaningfully place your hand on various body parts, etc.). I enjoyed Edromar Undag’s well-executed opening solo, but felt my attention wander as the piece progressed against a soundscape of varied solo piano waltzes, its keyed-in devotion to musicality dampened by the chaotic traces of Lohner’s piece. 

Halie Bahr is an MFA candidate at the University of Utah, and her piece began as Stassia’s ended, with a walking pattern, this time with a larger group and for a longer duration. Bahr’s five dancers transitioned from walking to an across-the-floor combination that could have come from any modern technique class. The combination was repeated many times, with slight variations in movement and facings. A few times, the lights dimmed suddenly and someone would hold up a bright cellphone-flashlight-like beam on a dancer, who would thrash their limbs with heightened intensity. The movement, effects, and intent of the piece were hard to parse and stay engaged with consistently. I’m not sure that the cumulative effect Bahr was reaching for ever coalesced for me, although the piece moved dynamically and was performed very well. 

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.

Cat + Fish: Forge

Dancing is this big ongoing thing. More than anything else, it continues – past the blackouts, wings, and curtain calls – far beyond where the bodies come in and out of view.

I think about such ongoingness when I see a show like Forge, presented at Westminster College this weekend by Cat + Fish. Artistic Director Cat Kamrath’s contributions to the evening form a suite – Strong Back, Soft Front, and Wild Heart. The mark of the university as a container for dance – a recent historical phenomenon – is strong in these works. It might be easy to criticize these pieces for the straightforwardness of how they use basic compositional tools. It might be easy to criticize the bodies getting tossed in the air based on a logic common to dances made to make better dancers. But, here indeed are strong, vivid, well-trained but still human performers. They feel their way through what they’re doing with a presence that’s more than academic. They don’t leave you feeling left out of a secret. The pleasures are infectious and intended to be available. 

The dancers even swim upstream a little. Micah Burkhardt, Madaline Maravillas, and Ursula Perry make a striking, unexpected threesome in Soft Front. Mostly, the way they touch each other is exactly what I expect, but there are junctures where the script seems to fall away. Daniel Do, Mar Undag, and Emma Sargent have solos in which I see a much freer practice that I imagine belongs to each of them privately. 

I do find myself wondering if Camrath’s use of sound as wallpaper is what’s keeping these pieces from transcending their context. She might do well to take risks with music that would make real choreographic demands, or to play with more silence. 

Daniel Do’s work Fortitude, though at times melodramatic, gestured toward such an approach. Performed by Kamrath, who’s more unorthodox as a performer, Fortitude seemed to be about a woman in search of a self-knowledge available only through sweat, trial, and error. Five lonely balloons shivered eerily in moments when Kamrath paused to reflect. 

Natalie Gotter contributed Anna, a duet for Molly Cook and Conner Erickson. Dressed in matching gray and white uniforms, the two drew pictures on butcher paper and eventually on each other. This twinning pair seemed inevitably a couple – it’s still so hard for us not to imagine a man and women partnering as such. Anna had a coldness that somehow put me in mind of science fiction. I appreciated the commentary about how we relate to each other through increasingly banal signs and symbols. By the end, they might have been tattooing each other with emojis.

Forge continues this Saturday, July 20, at 7:30 p.m. at Westminster College. Photos above by Zach Nguyen.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

Brine: Na

Now in its fourth year, Brine was created by Symmer Andrews, Ashley Creek, and Sara Pickett to highlight works by numerous local choreographers. This year, the group’s annual fall offering featured two distinct programs with sold-out performances, Na (the symbol for sodium) and Cl (chloride); this reviewer was only able to attend Na.

The opening number, “Parched,” was choreographed by Daniel Do and Edromar Undag in collaboration with their dancers. A potent piece, “Parched” created a sense of torment, yet not without end. The spoken word artist Nia Portocarrero was forceful and compelling in her tone and delivery, and even without really understanding the words that were spoken, one still absorbed the intent. The diverse bodies on stage, in turn yearning and yielding, hoping and striving, and coping with support, were decidedly interesting to watch. The lighting by William Peterson was simply brilliant, with blue and amber cross beams of light leading the gaze into a mysterious land, in which threats of darkness and glimmers of hope could coexist with equal chance.

“Guardians of the Hearth” by Emily Bokinskie was a blander number with an aesthetic dance arrangement, illustrating women as perhaps gentle yet strong keepers of warmth and tenderness. The dancers looked lovely in pinks and reds and greens, the overall palette pink as they twirled and stretched around in circles and lines. My interpretation possibly takes a cue from the title, but the intent of the choreography on its own was less clear.

The next piece, “Asylum” by Dan Higgins, was absorbing and yet difficult to watch. The dance opened and closed to a scene of five women who stood tethered to an invisible track in the ceiling, accompanied by the sound of ropes stretching as they struggled valiantly to escape, all within a diagonal track of light. (In this piece, as in “Parched,” the concept was very ably assisted by the lighting.) As they tried to break through but fell again and again, I could almost feel their bruises, both of their physical bodies and also of their spirits. Was this a prison? Was it of their own making? Were they helping each other or holding each other back? It was all a bit ambiguous. Every struggle in “Asylum” felt lonely and hopeless.

“A Walk in the Rain” by Heather Francis was an unexpectedly humorous piece, the dancers playfully exploring a pull towards conformity. Like sea lions yapping until others joined in, the dancers repeated phrases until all were engaged in the colloquy, effectively drawing the arc of an evolving indulgence from the individual to the collective, from the unique to the commonplace. It was a rare use of lighthearted wit and hilarity to entertain and stimulate. It was also interesting to see the forceful pull of one strong individual then co-opt the acquiescence of the others.

The next piece, “Saudade,” was choreographed by E’lise Marie Jumes. A Portuguese word, saudade evokes a sense of loneliness, incompleteness, or, as noted in the program: "the pleasures we suffer and ailments we enjoy; this is our longing for what is not the present, ...layers upon layers of our past experiences give life to the palimpsest of our existence." Mounds of hair surrounded the dancers, as they appeared to experience a poignant longing. The nostalgia was effectively embodied in their movements, the hair perhaps a symbol of what they had lost. And yet... it grows back, does it not? “Saudade” was an introspective piece, in which each dancer was ensconced in her own memories and a dreamy wistfulness.

“Ash/Salt,” choreographed by Corinne Lohner, opened to two women sitting in front of an elaborately arranged meal on the ground, as a third woman on the other side of the stage struggled incessantly, yet vainly, to move against an invisible barrier, locked in an eternal undesirable fate. The other two dancers seemed to eat and drink in turns, while one cut the other's hair (a wig), dyed portions of it black, and later, both proceeded to smear their mouths in the same substance. These were two separate, detached happenings, perhaps illustrating the impersonality of existence, or a lack of empathy: the two women indulging in their meal were seemingly completely oblivious to the struggle of the other woman, just across from them. The piece was jarring at times, but still kept the viewer hooked, in a strangely vicarious, voyeuristic fashion. And what did the dark smearing signify?

“Your Light Is Never Forgotten” by Alicia Trump was as compelling a number as her piece in last year’s Brine concert, “Gaslighting Blatherskites,” and was an aching reminder that grief and loss are negotiated with everyday, long past the event of loss. In myriad covert and conspicuous interactions, the absence of a loved one became evident as their essence was acutely highlighted. That graceful acknowledgment was skillfully portrayed with a spotlight under which one dancer stood. When she fell, the others continued to simulate her essence, dancing around the light that was once hers, not fully extinguished even when she no longer danced under it.  

“Good Enough” by Megan O'Brien featured a cast of four women, some dancing, some observing. They prompted several questions, among which were - What do we find surprising? What do we find acceptable? How hard is it to reveal self truths, and how do you resolve the feeling of not being good enough? The costumes, everyday clothing such as suits and the like, were aptly chosen, bringing home the situational realism in a relatable manner.

Taken in entirety, the pieces throughout Na were all thought-provoking. However, individual sections needed more finesse in their abstractions, which did not always drive home points with conviction. Last year's Brine concert, Disembodied We, was possibly more exciting and mature. As we watched this year’s, my friend and I were struck by the thought of a compulsion to find meaning through our own constructions. Did a narrative exist that was a version just for me and my constructions, or was there maybe even none at all? In stark contrast to the Indian classical arts, where there is an explicit intent to provide common meaning and contextual narrative, the aesthetic experience here was secondary to the intellectual and emotional one. Perhaps that was the intent, or perhaps it does not really matter.

Srilatha Singh is a Bharatanatyam artiste and the director of Chitrakaavya Dance. While interested in encouraging excellence in her art form, she is also keenly compelled to explore relevance and agency through the artistic medium.