Justin Bass: No Bueno

When I arrived at Sugar Space Arts Warehouse in the early evening, it was sweltering. Inside, the AC was blowing to its max while a very small crowd milled about. Comprised almost entirely of other dancers from around Salt Lake, and presumably some close friends and family of the performers, the gathering was intimate and very casual. Once we were seated, Justin Bass came out to say hello. Grinning and shrugging and cracking jokes, he performed the introductions. As a preface, he let us know, “No Bueno is about everyday life, crossroads we reach, how we react… there’ll be a Q&A at the end, we can talk about why it’s not very good.”*

The dancers of No Bueno were Bass, Marty Buhler, and Natalie Border. All are fantastic performers to watch, and they executed the work with richness and ease. During the short performance, each took a solo, Bass and Buhler performed a duet, and the three came together as bookends. The group began with walking patterns back and forth, contracting in and out. They shifted mostly in unison to a bouncy and driving groove, sliding into deep grand pliés in second, sometimes stopping to reach an arm out to the side, elbow cocked. When Bass and Buhler exited, Border grabbed a folding chair and slunk to it center stage. Hotly shaking off its gravity to do a jerky, windmill-armed, off-balance tip-toe before relatedly retreating back into its support, her anxious solo was the most explicitly emotive segment of the show.

When Bass and Buhler reappeared they were side by side. Here as in the group sections, they moved together without eye contact. Their far-off stares went out above our heads, while the closeness of bodies and movements in unison established connection. Simple shuffling steps combined with sudden held extensions, and with repeated gestures that were shared and passed back and forth. Buhler’s solo was next, characterized by more wide, slow grand pliés with the head rolled back and clasped hands stretch out long– matching plaintive vocals and a slower, heavier beat. Bass turned his back to the audience for much of his solo, reprising those pliés again, this time a little sharper and paired with elastic undulations of the torso and fluttering fingers.

As all three dancers reappeared, the music turned to soft piano and the choreography drew a line through everything that had come before, restating themes from each movement. A final tableau transformed the dancers into a small flock of birds - perched in deep, forward lunges, wings back, fingertips fluttering, heads swiveling, before they walked upstage away from us as the music flared again and cut to black.

Surrounding the simplicity of each dance were elements unfolding texture, depth, and tone. The music was Bass’s own composition, born of a self-proclaimed deep love for amateur tinkering in GarageBand. It was mostly in the realm of electronic dance club music, beat-heavy but also pop-y, dipping between a pulsing groove and something more moody and sweeping. The costumes were likewise home-hewn, beautifully busy fabric of jumbled blue squares turned into knee-length skirts paired with plain black tees. Bass later elaborated that there was no specific intention behind the costuming, just an easy sewing pattern and the chance to practice another favorite hobby. And then there were the vocal audio recordings woven into Bass’s solo and the final section – the first was a spoken word poem, "The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized" (a modern take on Gil Scott Heron’s iconic 1970 recording), from a YouTube video posted by poet Danny Mahes in 2011, and the other a 2015 viral video wherein high schooler Shea Glover walks around campus telling people she wants to photograph them because she is “taking pictures of things I find beautiful.” Bass re-cut and looped the latter, placing it over a tinkling piano. Afterward, in the Q&A, he expounded rhapsodically about his love of ambitious gesture, how he first found that video, and how he sort of included it on a whim just because he found it so delightfully affective and sweet.

Speaking more about the choreography, Bass touched on the specific and personal nature of his work. He explained how he created movement and method to be uncomplicated and purposely “lowbrow,” choosing to reflect the dancers, the process, and the vast minutiae of day-to-day experiences over labored sophistication and grander ideas. Referring to the process of creating No Bueno, Bass described it as a sort of experiment – if awarded an opportunity by Sugar Space to do a show, what could he come up with given the limited time and resources he had available? Might as well try it.

The assorted elements of No Bueno shared an appreciable thread of purposefully D.I.Y. and resourceful creativity similar to previous works by Bass. Discovered elements and those at hand were dissected and reassembled and inserted alongside movement phrases of irrelative origin without precise bearing in mind. The work took shape as it was created, and the different pieces ultimately came together to form a sort of tapestry, reflective of Bass himself in that moment in time and of the people he worked with - likes and dislikes, relationships, media consumed, activities enjoyed, social climate. This meandering approach through personal hobbies and cultural touchstones bestowed a nice, nuanced layering on the sensibility of the final product, which was never overly heavy on conceptual detail or framework to begin with. If No Bueno was a sort of casual and sprawling experiment, it was also passionate, crafted, and intuitively well-defined self-expression.

*Partial paraphrasing by the author

Emily Snow resides in Salt Lake City, where she performs regularly with Municipal Ballet Co. and with Durian Durian, an art band that combines post-punk music and contemporary dance.

Repertory Dance Theatre: Current

Repertory Dance Theatre’s Current included five dances presented one after the other, after the other, and yet... another, because they were all made recently; they are a reflection of “right now”; they are current.

To begin, the silhouettes of Justin Bass and Tyler Orcutt spoke their way across the stage beginning “Still Life With Flight” by former RDT member Sarah Donohue. The faces of the dancers were illuminated once they landed their popping (not locking) bodies on a bench. They shifted ever-so-slightly with harmonized pulses of their torsos that incidentally occured to execute the larger movement of wringing hands, crossing legs and shrugging, casting quick glances at one another before interlocking to perform cartwheels over the bench. Through a series of turns en dehors with their legs in arabesque (legs held behind, turning counterclockwise) the two moved around the bench, holding each other often and expertly.

Cut to Ursula Perry dancing to herself in a mirror with a scrim hanging downstage, creating a hazy, sepia effect. “Aloneness,” choreographed by Francisco Gella, contained a lot of unison phrases, all considering its subject of solitude. Or, not solitude - loneliness. The choice of being alone. I sometimes get lost on the bridge connecting etymology to physicality; are the movements representing different definitions of aloneness? Are they enacting solitude? They wore black so they must have been mourning the loss of community. Nothing was certain save for the calm and careful movement of Perry, who pierces space with her gaze. Even her fingertips and shins saw what they were moving towards.   

“Flood” began with the company in line, facing the audience, shifting together on the pads of their feet, creating a “tiny dance” of utmost specificity. (Choreographer Nichele Van Portfleet is specific.) The dancers wove in and out of this line throughout the piece, pushing and displacing each other from the line, and carefully buttoning up their shirts in a mime-like fashion ending with a gesture to form a suffocating collar made of flesh and bone (their own hand). This sequence communicated internal flooding - perhaps a flood of information, perhaps something else entirely. I was reminded of “The Green Table,” choreographed by Kurt Jooss, depicting pre-World War II “peace” negotiations and their ultimate futility. In both pieces, the dancers embody caricatures of those in power, whether world leaders or parts of themselves. The performers in “Flood” were not at peace with themselves nor with one another. They were often on the edge of physical stability, twisting themselves with movement overlapping and interweaving dynamically, likewise putting me on the edge of the seat beneath me.

Justin Bass and Jaclyn Brown in "Schubert Impromptu" by Francisco Gella. Photo courtesy of RDT.

Next on the program was a bonus duet by Gella, aptly called “Schubert Impromptu,” as if one of many Schubert compositions was picked out of a hat to entertain us after “Aloneness” and “Flood.” Justin Bass and Jaclyn Brown appeared to have been directed to move in sync with the music, and it was very satisfying, if not predictable. At one point, Brown slows down a cartwheel on her forearms over Bass, leaving me impressed with her ability to resist gravity. The two wore black, like the costumes in Gella’s previous piece. Some of the movements were similar, but, in “Schubert Impromptu,” there were no mirrors reflecting long beams of light into the audience, slicing through the space between stage and seats. “Schubert” seemed purposefully intimate - the dancers’ light did not come to us, but we could go to it for a diversion or a shelter from darker subject matter.  

“Material Tokens of the Freedom of Thought,” choreographed by Angela Banchero-Kelleher to the music of Wojciech Kilar, ended the evening. Many of the movement phrases in the piece were punctuated by the dancers pausing at length to look out into the audience, arms placed at their sides, forming a slight oval around them. They stood this way, waiting for their turn to move again, and in these moments I saw their eyes searching, perhaps to find the meaning of “mother” in the midst of the fan-like movement surrounding them.

Current flowed - or careened - like a recital. One can only do so much to connect a playful duet with a reconciliation with one’s deceased mother to a socio-political abstraction to an exploration of being “alone together,” without any transition other than closing and opening a curtain. However, the members of RDT moved through the evening with grace and deep breaths. They exhibited a cohesion that prompted the friend accompanying me to wonder if some of the choreography throughout all five pieces was extremely similar, if not the same.  Each moment of contact carried with it a familiarity stemming from continued physical practice as a company. The dancers are fully integrated, if not the dances they are dancing.

Emma Wilson received her BFA in Modern Dance at the University of Utah and has since been making solo works, choreographing for Deseret Experimental Opera (DEXO) and working as the Salt Lake City Library’s Community Garden Coordinator.

Repertory Dance Theatre: Dabke

Repertory Dance Theatre presented the evening-length Dabke, by Zvi Gotheiner (choreographed initially on Gotheiner’s ZviDance in 2012), for the second time to Utah audiences. After performing an excerpt of the work in 2015, RDT premiered the full piece in 2017. This performance distinguished itself further in the more intimate Leona Wagner Black Box Theatre, which served the emotionally charged piece.

Much that is central to Dabke has already been written about and explored; among local writers Les Roka and loveDANCEmore’s own Liz Ivkovich, as well as New York-based writers Alastair Macaulay, Pascal Rekoert, and Brian Seibert, I will try to find my own voice within an established narrative.

Much has also been said about Dabke in terms of cultural appropriation, regarding who may lay claim on the dabke - the national dance of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine - or who (if anyone) may stake a claim on any cultural dance form. I came to the show with swirling dialogues of culture, power, and ownership, but also with a deep desire to watch and be moved by dance. Post-show, dialogues of cultural appropriation continue to swirl; notwithstanding, I was deeply taken with the power and complexity of Dabke and RDT’s embodied, virtuosic performance.

Dabke is Arabic for “stomping the ground” and this is how dancer Efren Corado begins. It is as if he is experiencing a memory, brought on by summoning a familiar beat within his body. When Lauren Curley tries to join him, he succinctly and somewhat aggressively denies her permission and continues alone. Eventually, the full company enters the space, but whether because of choreographic intent or personal performance quality (or both), Corado continues to be the central character. He is the sun and the others orbit around him, warmed by his energy.

The piece continues with entrances and exits, and with solos and duets that meld into larger group sections. A solo by Justin Bass marks the beginning of a musical score by Scott Killian, with dabke music by Ali El Deek. Bass is rounded and sensual, hips swaying and gestures soft. The solo recalls Gotheiner’s reference in “Creating Dabke” (an introductory film shown before the dance) to the quest to be “macho” in a hyper-masculine world. In one moment, Bass embodies the social construct of femininity; in the next, he is externally focused and direct, punctuating clear lines and rhythms in the space while referencing a cultural dance form that has often kept women from participating.

The struggle to preserve previous establishments is again communicated when Dan Higgins pulls at, then manically re-adjusts, his shirt. It is a gesture that hits an emotional chord and provides a pedestrian moment, a respite from the movement-driven work. Higgins plants himself downstage, his focus outward, while a group of dancers upstage, dimly lit, perform as if within his own mind. He lets the thoughts (dancers) play out, then walks off the stage without looking back.

The anchor of the evening is a solo (a duet, if you count Lacie Scott’s prone body) by Corado, in which he removes his shirt, wet with sweat, and proceeds with many actions rife with metaphor. He waves the shirt in the air, carefully arranges it on the floor in front of him while he kneels behind it, wraps it around his wrist - the shirt is both his offering and his lifeline.

Corado shines in roles such as these, roles in which the dancing may be important but the storytelling even more so. He has a vulnerability and a distinct self-awareness while losing himself that is piercing. Before this section ended, I found myself wishing I could restart it in an attempt to memorize every nuance. Eventually Scott joins Corado, partially undressed, in solidarity, but the moment reminds me that a woman removing her shirt carries a different weight than a man doing so.

There is violence in Dabke: aggressive partnering, convulsing bodies that won’t be quelled, imagery of slit throats, and coarse sexual gestures. While the piece is about coming together and being pulled apart, and ultimately about finding an experience in blended cultural forms, it is marketed as highlighting national and tribal identities, grappling with conflict in the Middle East, and as a hope for eventual peace.

I do not question the power of the moving body (in most respects), and certainly this work does well to explore, succinctly and powerfully, a myriad of themes central to the human experience. I do, however, question the ability of the moving body to stand in as a surrogate for a mass of countries with many distinct religions and cultures. Can we, as a community in Salt Lake City, not only appropriate a cultural dance form but also represent a complex war, with involvement by our own government to varying degrees? I do not propose to have the answers, but I do have many questions.

Ursula Perry has the last solo of the night. While the music relentlessly carries on, she struggles to find solid ground. She is beautiful and strong, then broken and weak. She clenches her fist as if she has found “it,” but then just as quickly lets “it” go. Sound escapes her mouth, jarring in its evidence that she and the others on stage for the past hour have been living, breathing people. She runs in circles, tracing the patterns that her community of dancers once traced with her. She is running, alone; she pants and gasps as the lights fade to black.

Ursula Perry in Zvi Gotheiner's Dabke. Photo by Sharon Kain.

Erica Womack is a Salt Lake City-based choreographer and an adjunct faculty member at Salt Lake Community College.  

Repertory Dance Theatre: Emerge

Repertory Dance Theatre is a collection of noticeably varied talents. Its company members possess distinctive personalities that can be glimpsed regularly in all RDT productions, no matter the program or how seamlessly they may move as a group. The second year of RDT’s Emerge, a choreography showcase for the company's dancers, gave us a chance to see those individual interests continue to develop. The program presented eight works that, while formally unconnected in content and style, all benefitted from RDT’s acutely personal approach to the work. Below is a small window into each.  

Dancers in Lauren Curley's "The Sum of None." Photo by Sharon Kain.

THE SUM OF NONE

Set to a Philip Glass score, Lauren Curley’s choreography was a complex study in pattern and numerical manipulation. Six identically-clad dancers performed sweeping athletic movements that multiplied and varied as they traveled along parallel and intersecting trajectories. The movement built up from simple walking and continued at a steady pace, adhering like clockwork to the unending and obfuscating evenness of the music’s rhythm.

Tiana Lovett in Tyler Orcutt's "Blue Sun." Photo by Sharon Kain. 

BLUE SUN

A solo for the lovely and intense Tiana Lovett, “Blue Sun” by Tyler Orcutt was well-crafted and even better performed. Lovett is a clear and technical dancer, suited to the fast and rolling fluidity of Orcutt’s style, and she sold the frenetic emotional drama of his contemporary-lyrical work perfectly. Chronicling a story of coping with an unavoidable “ending of a cycle,” Lovett shook and thrashed and fell to the floor over and over in passionate protest. The piece ended in silence and with a fade-out as she continued to jerk and twitch, suggesting any measure of peaceful acceptance might be out of reach.

Lacie Scott and daughter Shae in "Jammies" by Scott and Jaclyn Brown. Photo by Sharon Kain. 

JAMMIES

Cue audible squeals and cooing from the audience - newborn Layla Brown and small, giggling cherub Shae Scott accompanied Jaclyn Brown and Lacie Scott onstage in a testament to the life of dancing mothers, and what was very likely the cutest thing ever presented on stage. Inspiration drawn from the games, rocking, bouncing, and cradling of real life to create the choreography, the two mother-daughter pairs sweetly bobbed and capered around the stage to the tune of Bob Marley’s “Be Happy.” Their hijinks were punctuated by a section for the mothers alone who danced a weaving duet, nodding to the compound layers of identity that come with motherhood.

Dan Higgins and Natalie Border in Higgins' "Denizen." Photo by Sharon Kain.

DENIZEN

Dan Higgins’ choreography for “Denizen” depicted an intense relationship between a pair of strong and violently entwined forces. Natalie Border was tremendous and compelling in her uncompromising intensity. Brooding and moody, Higgins battled her. The exact nature of their spiraling relationship remained unclear, alternating between roaring aggression and something that was not quite tenderness, but maybe the insular comfort of familiarity. She got in his way and he attacked, neither able to extricate themselves or eliminate the other.

Dancers in "Doors" by Justin Bass. Photo by Sharon Kain.

DOORS

Justin Bass has been with RDT for four years now, and recently announced this season will be his last. “Doors,” likely one of his final pieces with the company, reflected this dawning life-shift, exploring themes of change, saying goodbye, nostalgia, and keeping faith in oneself, communicated through a spoken monologue by Bass that played over soft instrumentals. Four dancers stood apart, oriented toward each of the stage’s four corners. They performed subtle movements, sometimes in unison but holding the distance between them. While each dancer was lovely and interesting to watch on their own, the choreography of the piece as a whole underwhelmed when paired with Bass’s personal, moving, and deftly crafted poem.

Ursula Perry in "I'm OK, I Am Okay...I'm Still Here." Photo by Sharon Kain.

I’M OK, I AM OKAY…I’M STILL HERE

Ursula Perry’s work is always a personal favorite and often a revelation for me; nearly every time I see her perform I learn something that feels astounding and vital. (Perhaps a hyperbolic statement, but it feels true.) Her technical skills and power are beautiful and unforced. “I’m OK…” displayed a devotedly tended and honed strength, bowing and cracking under the weight of a pain the body can’t expel. A story of treading water, of keeping the surface intact while the inside roils, trying to glimpse the thing that used to make you feel joy when the world keeps tossing salt in your eyes. Twisting and flaking into the most beautiful and fragile shapes, Perry’s solo was devastating.

Tyler Orcutt and Tiana Lovett in Efrén Corado Garcia’s “Collateral Beauty." Photo by Sharon Kain.

COLLATERAL BEAUTY

Efrén Corado Garcia’s “Collateral Beauty” was a light-hearted duet, simple and sweet, danced by Orcutt and Lovett and accompanied by Michele Medina on violin. The piece gave me the sensation of watching a ballet - something neoclassical, attuned only to music, lightness, appealing lines and a shimmering feeling. A little goes a long way with that kind of ebullient frivolity; the willful obliviousness and over-saturation of it in my own balletic background can feel exasperating, but it’s very refreshing in smaller doses. I particularly enjoyed the moment in which Orcutt won over Lovett with some jellyfish-esque grand pliés. The two flirted, they dipped, swooped, darted, and brushed softly into each other without allusion to any world beyond.

Winterdance Workshop participants in "The Color of Sand." Photo by Sharon Kain.

THE COLOR OF SAND

Following last year’s model, Emerge came at the end of RDT’s Winterdance Workshop and utilized the final piece as a showcase for the workshop’s participating dancers. This year’s workshop, unlike last year, was also an audition for the company. This seems to have drawn a larger group than previously: a good thing, but one that made for a somewhat uncomfortably tense viewing experience. The dancers did an admirable job with the crowded space and choreography that appeared overly tricky for a large group of newly-acquainted people to pull together in several days, but the “they’re-looking-at-me” tension was viscerally palpable. A more informal, workshop-dedicated showing might have been more appropriate, and still could have offered dancers a chance to both prove their abilities and partake in a rewarding performance experience.

Emily Snow lives in Salt Lake and can be seen performing with Municipal Ballet Co.  She is also a member of Durian Durian, an art band that combines indie electronica and modern dance.

Repertory Dance Theatre: Sanctuary

“When you have fire, that’s where you are,” she said as she rubbed ash across dancer Efren Corado Garcia’s face. The other dancers followed suit, rubbing the ashes from campfires grown cold across their faces and hands.

Poignant words from Ida Yellowman, one of the three Navajo guides who led the artists of Repertory Dance Theatre, guest choreographer Zvi Gotheiner, and ZviDance on a pilgrimage to Bears Ears National Monument in San Juan County, Utah. Marty Buhler’s documentary of their five-day journey began Repertory Dance Theatre’s Sanctuary program, contextualizing the 30+ minute work, “Dancing the Bears Ears," the group built from this experience.

“Dancing the Bears Ears” opened with eight RDT dancers slapping knees and head, two lines of four, weaving in between each other in unison, turning in one breath, energizing the Rose Wagner stage. The collected energy of their stomps highlighted the projections of small spaces from the Bears Ears -- a purple flower here, a range of colorful dirt there.

The ensemble dissembled into a series of duets, where small moments of tender intimacy echoed the small spaces projected. Ursula Perry and Corado Garcia arching underneath each other’s circled arms, she lifts and turns him around. Justin Bass and Lauren Curley lying legs tangled on the ground, she gently rubs the back of his neck, a touch as intimate as the rubbing of ashes onto a dancer’s face.

Returning anew to the rhythmic opening, the dance seems to begin again. This recurring beginning marks this as a dance of hope, the kind of hope that (to quote environmental educator David Orr) “is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.” By that I mean not a naive optimism that all will be well with the land, or a desperate cynicism about the wilderness that is slipping away in front of our eyes, but rather an engaged and recurring plea for the protection of this place for all who consider it sacred, and returning to the daily act of advocating for the land.

As the dancers took their bow, they gathered together in the center of the stage, arms around each other. There was a finality to the bow, a sense of complete giving and abandon to the energy of sharing their transformative experiences at Bears Ears with us.

Efren Corado Garcia in Eric Handman's "Ghost Ship." Photo by Sharon Kain.

After intermission, Eric Handman’s “Ghost Ship” led the second half of the evening. This 2007 work was re-staged on six of the eight RDT dancers, who huddled on stage right, moving across to stage left in syncopated build -- climax -- dissolve duets. Less stylized than more recent works of Handman’s that I have seen, the recurring arabesque lines and tight duet unison created a sense of remembering without nostalgia, and history without pain. The piece concludes with a shower of 250 pounds of rice on stage right, the patter of it on the stage satisfyingly never-ending.

RDT and Utah Valley University students in "Tower" by Andy Noble. Photo by Sharon Kain.

Andy Noble’s “Tower” (2015), featuring 27 guest performers from Utah Valley University, concluded the evening. Evoking military images, the ensemble goose-stepped and chassé-ed on, across, and off the stage. The UVU artists’ command of ballet and jazz techniques supported Noble’s competition dance aesthetic. Also notable: their commitment to the stage presence required for the work, such as when the house lights went up and a group of dancers slid towards the front of the stage, aggressively waving their arms in the faces of the first row of the audience. I struggled to connect the army-inspired images and content of the work to the evening’s theme, begging the question of what makes an ‘environmental piece’.

While leaving the concert with a heart full of beautiful and engaging dancing, I stumbled into one of my students, who had, for the first time, paid for a ticket to a dance concert specifically to see "Dancing the Bears Ears." Confused, she and her brother had left the show at intermission, certain that the evening was over. I must admit that I shared that sense of finality at intermission. While the later works of the evening were also interesting and important, I felt satiated after seeing "Dancing the Bears Ears," and would have preferred to have gone on with my evening with its hopeful dancing strongly in my mind’s eye.

Liz Ivkovich is in a relationship with the loveDANCEmore performance journal (it’s complicated), works in sustainability communication and development for the U of U, and adjuncts at SLCC.