OSBA presents Jessica Lang Dance

"Anything is possible once enough human beings realize that the whole of the human future is at stake." The words of Norman Cousins, American activist and peacemaker, echoed over and over in Jessica Lang's “us/we.” A farewell piece for her company Jessica Lang Dance (which is currently on its final tour following an eight-year run), “us/we” was the first on a diverse program presented by the Ogden Symphony Ballet Association at the Val. A Browning Center this weekend.

A delicious visual experience, “us/we” was a series of snapshots that zoomed in and out on Brooklyn, New York. The piece, created with visual artist Jose Parla, featured colorful projections that filled a screen upstage, framing the dancers and at times covering them with projected light. In a phone interview last week, Lang spoke with this writer about the "layering patchwork" of “us/we.” "It's all tied together," she said, which became clear throughout the driving work.

The set included three large pieces of fabric hanging upstage, each piece mapped for specific images. In the first section of “us/we,” the dancers wore costumes made from cloth used by Parla during his painting process, which was captured on camera and then integrated into the visual design. Still images of his completed works were also used. Costume designer Moriah Black constructed a second set of costumes by piecing together graphic-heavy items found at thrift stores from all over the world.

“us/we” spoke to a sense of unity by joining different people, places, and histories, and resonated through the dancers, who didn’t spend much time standing still as they moved between club scenes, busking scenes, and many literal tableaus, and incorporated gestural movement resembling American Sign Language. Notably, the piece coordinated large groups for impressive, multi-person partnering that had a flair for the dramatic, blending ballet and cinema.

The snapshots of “us/we” moved quickly, transitions almost nonexistent between a dance scene set to Ram Jam’s “Black Betty” and a moodier contemporary sequence. Quick changes of pace, glimpses into relationships, and hints at iconic moments recreated the feeling of riding public transportation: I remembered visiting New York for the first time, and the thrill of watching the city rush by on the subway as my face pressed against the window.

After speaking to Lang about “us/we” and then experiencing it, I see it as a love letter to the company: It is the last piece Lang will have made with the dancers, before all move on to the next stage of their respective careers. Near the end of the piece, the dancers appropriately sang “Can't Help Falling in Love.” With crescendos and brief moments of quietude, “us/we” was a lovely symphony of New York, and by extension, the world.

As a presenter, I would have opted to complete the concert with “us/we,” leaving the audience with a sense of connection and desire for more, instead of ending as the show did with “This Thing Called Love.” In contrast to the rest of the program, the fun, swingy Tony Bennett tribute paled in comparison in both content and complexity. The superimposed emotional content of “This Thing Called Love” was also amplified by its placement on the program following “Thousand Yard Stare” and “The Calling.”

Arguably Lang's most recognizable work, “The Calling” is a beautifully clear haiku of isolation and longing. Julie Fiorenza performed it with articulate grace and a length that defied that of her actual limbs.

“Thousand Yard Stare” always catches my breath. There is something about the way the dancers need each other that speaks to more than just the grit and grief of war. It also speaks to a cultural grappling with loss.

When the dancers moved through the exposed stage, the wings and scrim removed, they were in clear relationship to one another, coming in and out of unison, their contact characterized by dependence. They reached, fell, and collided, moving through space as if it was dense with fog and resistance.

Compositionally, “Thousand Yard Stare” was the most readable of Lang's work on the program. In it, she repeated and recreated scenes spatially as well as gesturally, making it easy to telecast personal or imagined relationships onto the dancers. There was a moving moment when a dancer was left out of the fold, powerful because the dancers were rarely alone throughout the piece. Their mass of overlapping bodies quickly pulled her back in, lifted her over their heads, and, surprisingly, tucked her in between them as if placing a baby bird back in its nest.

It is easy to imagine why “Thousand Yard Stare” is one of the company’s most performed pieces. Set to Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15, Op. 132, its music and movement swim together in hope despite the inevitability of death.

The dancers moved as a unit, offering the audience a sense of humanity and redemption. It would be easy to make a dance that captures the brutality of war, but for “Thousand Yard Stare,” Lang was interested in a different approach. ”We still have to carry hope," she says. She chose the music in part because Beethoven wrote the piece while he was dying, looking at the end of his life. Lang’s care and empathy are visible throughout it, and it’s a piece that does for me what I aspire to do for others through my own dance-making: It softens me, nudging me toward an understanding of the things I do not know.

I inquired about Lang’s plans for the future, now that Jessica Lang Dance is completing its final season, and why she is dissolving the company: She intends to keep creating work independently. Managing a company required her to spend less and less time working in the studio, and more time performing administrative tasks.

It’s clear that working with the same group of dancers for nine years has given Lang the freedom to push the boundaries of her aesthetic. I admire her choice to dissolve what many may think of as the pinnacle of success in order to continue pursuing the complexity of her craft. Now, she will take what she has gathered from Jessica Lang Dance and move forward, making new dances with new collaborators. “There are other things I want to try,” Lang says, and her decision reminds me that we can always change paths, make new choices, and dig deeper into that which inspires us.

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.

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

Jessica Lang Dance at Eccles

Jessica Lang Dance, the Long Island City-based company of choreographer Jessica Lang, performed at the Eccles Center on Friday night*. Lang founded her company in 2011; prior to this, both new commissions and re-stagings of Lang’s work have been prolific in the rep of many ballet companies internationally, from Ballet West to Richmond Ballet to Birmingham Royal Ballet. Friday’s performance featured JLD’s own nine dancers in five selected works, all created by Lang within the last ten years.

JLD dancer Jammie Walker opened the program with “Solo Bach”, a compelling and concise solo replete with nuanced musicality and exultant gestures, as well as some very impressive tricks (a back somersault into a handstand, and a moment where Walker popped up into a contraction, with only the arch of one foot holding him up in this position). The solo’s choreographic structure mimicked that of Bach’s composition in its reprises, but Walker’s delighted performance made each repetition new again. He ended with his arms opening upward and toward the audience, inviting us in until the very end.

“Sweet Silent Thought” featured a quartet of performers and recitations (trance-like, a quality enhanced by static crackling added to the recording) of Shakespearean sonnets. At first, men danced to recitations by men, and women to those by women. Eventually, that pattern was broken; two men partnered each other, and ambient music gave way to some more traditional partnering between the two couples.

While there was nothing especially memorable about “Sweet Silent Thought”, there was a moment for me that capitalized upon the company’s strength as a whole. A couple of the dancers slid into push-up positions with incredible grace and delicacy, yet exhibited a stalwart strength in doing so: a fitting analogy for the dancers’ ability to exude both an elegant, balletic sensibility as well as a contemporary sense of attack and strength (and always finding the simplest route to the next movement, for a streamlined effect).  

One of my colleagues described Lang’s dances as painterly, and I would add to her description two qualities of JLD dancers and movement that work in tandem: elongated lines and geometric shapes derived from a classical ballet vocabulary, fleshed out by curves and sweeps, derived from a classical modern vocabulary.

“Thousand Yard Stare”, the first larger work on the program, was set to the adagio movement of a Beethoven string quartet. As inferred from its title and several markers throughout, “Thousand Yard Stare” explored themes of war (the term “thousand-yard stare” has been used, probably since World World I, to describe to the vacant gaze of a battle-weary soldier).

The full company entered the stage, clad in olive-drab trousers, with a marching, weight-shifting pattern that occasionally accelerated into a layered, stomping rhythmic sequence - very effective both in its precise execution and in the silent theater. The intricate stepping patterns were danced, like other choreography throughout the evening, as though they were incredibly simple. A strong suit of the performers, and perhaps also of Lang’s choreography, is that everything appears distilled down to the most essential movements of leg and limb.

Both the formations and variations on a theme of marching took clear inspiration from military drills, and were also the more interesting and successful invocations of the war theme throughout the dance. More literal were army crawls underneath a line of dancers in downward dog and dancers slung limply across the shoulders of others, inevitably evoking the casualties of war.

The group, in formation, took turns sinking down into grand plies in parallel first position- a difficult task, and an impressive display of physical strength and strength of will (obvious parallels can be drawn to combat here). They formed one long line lying down, nestled into each others’ bodies, spooning. Dancer Kana Kimura was spun, several times, held at the waist, so that her limbs gathered centrifugal force, flying out effortlessly from her partner’s center.

“Thousand Yard Stare” contained many individual points of interest, but also contained some less interesting or obvious, and often-repeated, references to war. I enjoyed the opening marching sequences and the return to those in the end, but it was the rest for me that meandered away from a varied exploration of the dance’s subject matter.

Maybe it is even the subject matter itself that is difficult to explore through dance. Given that both battle and dance involve physical experiences, perhaps an exploration of one with the other can only offer an experience with similar physical motifs, motifs that leave less room for interpretation; I felt some similar reservations about Shapiro and Smith’s war-evoking “Bolero”, on RDT’s Brio program in 2016.

It does feel callous to dismiss work that aims to tackle difficult subject matter, and I do not wish to say that war should not be addressed in dance (from reading the Tribune’s preview of JLD’s performance, I understand that Lang worked with veterans and their stories in conjunction with making “Thousand Yard Stare” - bridging such a connection between two often disparate communities is absolutely commendable). For this reason, I should say I am excited to see Kurt Jooss’ “The Green Table” live for the first time, when Ballet West performs it in April. Though made in 1932, “The Green Table” engages with those who call us to war in the first place, exploring themes of war, and death, without scenes of literal combat on stage.

“The Calling”, an excerpt of Lang’s larger work “Splendid Isolation II”, is frequently depicted in JLD marketing so I was thrilled to finally see it performed. Though it ended before I wished it to, the dance is a lovely vignette featuring one female dancer (Kimura on Friday night) in a long white skirt, so long that a team of people accompany her onstage to set it up.

Kimura contracted, touched her abdomen, extended an arm out with a Martha Graham-like hand, firm but charged, at its end. Lush reaches outward and simple, elegant turns of her head were abruptly punctuated.

When Kimura kneeled, the skirt folded inward, giving the illusion she was shrinking as her legs disappeared beneath it. As she pivoted, the skirt twisted and wrapped around her, gaining pleats as she turned.

Only once did Kimura diverge from her stationary stance. Lifting her skirt with one hand and her leg into a low arabesque, she defied what we had come to know as her world in the short time we experienced it. By the end of the dance, she had returned to her stationary pivot point, both feet firmly planted, but I was left wondering if there were more to this within the context of the larger work, or if Lang was purposely tantalizing us with just this small taste of freedom.

The closing work, “Tesseracts of Time”, was an epic journey through a series of realms, again employing the entire company. The metallic hammering of David Lang’s “Anvil Chorus” ushered in the first universe, the dancers clad in various black unitards buzzing frenetically below a projection of a yet-unidentified metal object.

Lang’s dances tend to appear propelled by their musical scores (most often in a good way), and this first section, “Under”, definitely did. Informed by minimalism and modernism, (David) Lang’s abstract, percussive score seemed to strip (Jessica) Lang’s choreography of its balletic sensibility altogether, the dancers moving fluidly through identities of several modern dance pioneers.

The projection screen then came all the way down, ushering in the next section, “In”, and revealing the results of an intriguing collaboration with architect Steven Holl. Surprising and mesmerizing, what looked at first like a live dancer lying atop a large sculpture was actually a to-scale video projection of that same scene. Appearing on, in, and between the sculpture’s many complicated facets, the dancers in the video defied gravity and reality.

At times a live dancer framed the projection, standing off to the side. It was unclear the relationship we were supposed to mine between the video and the stage, however, as the live dancers were always in shadow, lit only faintly by the blue light of the projection.

A striking moment in the video was dancer Eve Jacobs (a former high school classmate of mine from North Carolina School of the Arts) atop a whorl of the sculpture, promenading regally in attitude - a music box ballerina trapped in an Escher-esque universe.

Moving forward to “On”, the video screen flew up and away, revealing several white sculptures resembling origami across the upstage area. At first, the dancers seemed to fit less naturally into these real-life sculptures than their video counterparts into the virtual ones; moments such as when all the dancers peered out of one hollowed-out sculpture like prairie dogs solidified a connection to their real-life surroundings.

Color began to be introduced to a formerly black-and-white world: the cyc changed to orange, and then to blue; the dancers added orange swaths to their once-black, now-white unitards; pink light was cast upon the now-suspended white sculptures. The larger color changes evoked a journey from midnight to dawn, but the dancers quickly shed their orange swaths. 

Jacobs remained solely in white throughout, and seemed to serve as an anchor, a stalwart central presence, foreshadowed, perhaps, by her video-counterpart’s promenade. Once all other dancers had returned to white, they surrounded Jacobs as she balanced first in an angular penchee, then in a la seconde (she had also shown her balancing chops in an attitude en releve shortly before).

Yet another return had the cyc change back to black, losing the vibrant colors of dawn. The white-clad cast ended the dance in a rather Apollonian tableau (the Balanchine ballet, not the philosophical concept), Jacobs at its center.

While the four individual sections of “Tesseracts of Time” were complex and visually stimulating, I struggled to find a compelling thread that ran through all four, aside from the most basic - architectural elements and the dancers’ relationship to such. Though, with Lang’s adept vocabulary and her dancers’ technical grasp, I enjoyed “Tesseracts” for the ever-changing epic that it was (“Tesseracts” brought to mind Schlemmer’s “Triadic Ballet”, due in part to the score and also to the central and ever-shifting use of costumes and props, not always employed as heavily in contemporary ballet which is often primarily about the body).

Like the rest of the evening’s program, “Tesseracts” was danced incredibly well. While ballet companies always look fabulous in Lang’s choreography, seeing her own dancers perform her work was a different experience entirely. Her dancers’ often-dual sensibilities, many having spent significant time in the worlds of both ballet and modern dance, further illuminate the dynamic range and clarity of her movement.

I hope JLD comes through Utah again. Downtown Eccles Theater, I’m looking at you…

*I want to note, for anyone reading this who may have been in attendance on Friday night, that Jessica Lang is, in fact, one of many female choreographers in this country, rather than one of only a few, as indicated in a pre-curtain speech. Perhaps it was intended to say that she is one of a few successful female choreographers. In which case: while female choreographers may be underrepresented in the programming of larger companies/theaters/organizations, there are myriad female choreographers working in many cities, receiving vary degrees of recognition or success. It is commendable that Lang has had such success, and it is well-deserved, but her successes do not reflect a dearth of female choreographers in dance. For a more comprehensive list of current American female choreographers, check back on the blog in the near future.

Amy Falls is loveDANCEmore’s program coordinator. She also works for the University of Utah's School of Dance, her alma mater.