Molly Heller & Heartland Collective: Cosmos

On December 21, the sun set in Salt Lake City at 5:03 p.m. Normally this, the shortest day of the year, reminds me of my desperate need for more sunlight (if you’re like me, you may want to check out a seasonal affective disorder light, which helps to combat the winter blues). But this year, the Heartland collective invited us to celebrate the winter solstice with them at Cosmos, a performance and dance party at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA). 

The date of the performance was no coincidence. The winter solstice holds significance in many indigenous cultures and various religions as a celebration of the longest hours of darkness. Winter is about to begin, but hours of daylight also are about to begin lengthening, and the solstice is a time to embrace reflections upon and rituals of regeneration and renewal. The evening, curated by director Molly Heller alongside her troupe of Heartlanders, was dedicated to this kind of communal reflection. 

As I entered the museum, the walls, normally illuminated to highlight galleries, were darkened. A kaleidoscope of rainbow light was strewn across the space, resembling the aurora borealis. Inside a gallery, two benches were filled with dozens of handcrafted silver boutonnieres for guests to select. I was delighted to admire each tiny piece of charming art and to select one for myself to pin onto my clothing. Cosmos also then invited me to have my face bedazzled with silver jewels. This was a theme throughout the evening: attendees were continuously invited to participate, becoming part of the art themselves.

Nick Foster and Michael Wall entered the upstairs gallery, both wearing shimmery, silver tops, and filled the space with serene sounds that carried the evening from performance to dance party and on the journey in between.

Florian Alberge, an unbilled surprise guest who recently moved back to Salt Lake City, invited the audience to write a letter, beginning “Dear Closure,” that would be burned by the Heartlanders on New Year’s Eve. This idea calls upon the tradition of a fire-releasing ceremony, often practiced on the winter solstice, where what is desired to be released is first written down and then burned as a symbol of closure. 

Heller has noted her fascination with closure: “The vulnerability within letting go and in allowing closure to be non-linear and self-actualized is what we’re exposing within Cosmos. I am discovering on a personal level that healing/release can happen with strangers and if we can’t choose our endings in life, we can practice curating beginnings.” Throughout the evening, attendees were offered many opportunities to explore such ideas of release through writing, witnessing, and dancing. 

As the performance continued, attendees outlined the long row of windows that look down upon the lower-level galleries. Heartlanders Nick Blaylock, Brian Gerke, Molly Heller, Marissa Mooney, and Melissa Younker entered and began diving in and out from the gallery walls, like atoms vibrating, darting, and pivoting. One person remarked what a magical fish bowl we were peering into, as we witnessed the Heartlanders expand and contract throughout every corner of the space.

One of the most striking moments began as Blaylock took off in a full sprint and dove to the floor, sliding nearly twelve feet across the gallery. The rest of the performers soon followed suit. There was something so whimsical and playful as they slid with such vigor in between the gallery walls that still displayed art by Cara Krebs and Stephanie Leitch, among others - all while wearing silver vintage costumes. It was a dazzling juxtaposition that brought a smile to my face.

We were soon invited down to wander the lower galleries. In a moment of delightful surprise, the side garage door (normally used to transport large works of art in and out of the gallery) opened and the Heartlanders re-entered in a series of repetitive, quirky gestures. Foster and Wall transitioned into a whimsical, carnival score. A mist of whispers filled the space: “How fun!” “How exciting!” “How wonderful this all is.”

Heller began to give verbal instructions; attendees and Heartlanders alike participated in an improvisation score that spread throughout the space, the instructions guiding everyone first to spin on an axis, then to prance through the feet. It was a carefree, unpretentious, and shared sequence. An attendee later expressed, “I felt like I was inside of this world and the characters were unraveling right in front of me. It was exciting to be in the middle of the chaos and also inside the resolution.” The model of Heartland events is unique in this way -  it interweaves performers and attendees in such a way that facilitates a shared experience. You do not simply watch a Heartland event; you become a part of it.

As performance bled into dance party, everyone began to jump, shimmy, spiral, wiggle, sing, and bop together. Heartlanders swirled throughout clusters of attendees, sharing hugs and inspiring new dance moves. One attendee remarked on the palpable shared energy. It was fun. It was tiring. It was meditative. In a darkened museum on the winter solstice, we jammed out together, sweating through our shimmering clothes. 

Heller’s work has long been dedicated to her research of performance as a healing practice. It felt important to me that this performance-cum-party took place in such a shared setting. I found myself deep in thought about the role of community in supporting the health and wellbeing of ourselves and those around us. Heartland events have introduced a very special ritual to the community for these reasons. 

Those that stayed until the end witnessed Younker, Heller, and Mooney sing and shout a manifesto dedicated to release, healing, and closure. Attendees shouted along (even when we didn’t know the words), and I couldn’t stop myself from bouncing and clapping. The evening ended with catharsis, in the presence of friends, strangers, and glittery boutonnieres. 

Rachel Luebbert is a Utah-based dance artist. She also teaches and works in arts administration and programming, and has previously worked in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C.

Molly Heller + Moth Closet: HEARTLAND + Dance Party

The Heart is Already Whole.

At the end of HEARTLAND, Molly Heller addressed the crowd, thanking us for exploring the many experiences of the heart together. "We entered into this time with the understanding that the heart is already whole,” she said. In this brief moment, Heller acknowledged the completeness of each person inside of our complex and, at times, confusing hearts. Her current work, HEARTLAND, does just this: It affirms and teases out the complexities of the heart, offering no definitive answers but creating space for performers and audience members to increase the dynamic range inside their hearts. The part-performance, part-pop-up-dance-party organized by Heller was just one iteration of her ongoing body of research on the idioms, sensations, and experiences of the heart.

HEARTLAND (+ Dance Party) blurred the lines of performer and audience member, inviting the audience to participate in Heller's research, HEARTLAND, through a dance party at The Beehive in downtown Salt Lake City. The venue’s dark interior was covered in at least 100 pink balloons that varied in hue and size; the overlapping forms made me wonder if we had stepped inside a heart. I showed up barely on time, covered in snow, ready to dance it out on the dance floor, and curious as to how the performance would integrate with a dance party. Heller had described the evening as a complete experiment, and a “dance within a dance.”

Before the dance party started, Heller opened with the most formal portion of the evening. Formal is not quite the right word here, though, as the whole evening defied the conventions of a formal modern dance performance. Dancers Brian Gerke and Marissa Mooney joined Heller on “stage”; the two have been working with Heller on her HEARTLAND practice since fall 2018. Composer Mike Wall accompanied throughout the evening, both making music live and acting as DJ. With the audience watching from all four sides of the room, the three dancers took their space between four pillars in the center, with minimal distinction between dancer and audience. They did, however, wear shiny red and gold clothes that stood out in the low light. The three worked through their practice, moving in and out of trios, solos, and duets. They constructed a boxing ring of sorts with party streamers, just one of many pink party favors floating around The Beehive. Think: pink construction-paper hearts, pink sunglasses, heart candies, etc.

Heller has a distinct physical quality that manifests in HEARTLAND. She alternates between working with highly dense space around her, as if she's processing something unseen to the audience, and with a light, bright, carefree freedom. Gerke moved with his classic ease, but with a sense of effort and struggle inside of the articulation. It looked as if he was trying to move his shoulder blades and ribcage up around his heart. Mooney brought a bouncy, casual quality to the trio. All three moved with birdlike quirks and quick, leggy weight shifts. As they wrapped up their opening trio, Heller stood with her heart open to the sky for a long time. A low, pulsating bounce filled the room, and we all began to pulse with it. It was undeniable, the bass and tactile energy demanding that all who were present be affected by the music, by the dance. Thus began the blurring of lines and the most freeing dance party of my life.

Throughout the next hour and a half, the whole room bounced, flung, snaked, and dug deep within themselves; it was a safe space. One attendee remarked that she hadn't felt this free to dance in public in a long time. The performers danced the entire evening, mingling with all the other bodies. They occasionally danced on the benches around the room or climbed onto the stage where Wall was curating the music. Those who took dance breaks or chose not to dance bopped their heads, grooving in their own way on the sides. Almost everyone had a larger-than-life grin that only disappeared due to extreme focus on the dance.

As my quadriceps grew tired and my heart rate increased, I could not shake the sensation of unspeakable joy. There was something intoxicating about exhausting myself, moving and moving and moving and moving to the music, surrounded by other bodies. Based on my conversations with Heller, this is what she hoped HEARTLAND might offer: a way of locating oneself inside the noise. It is finding resistance and endurance, finding lightness when your chest feels heavy. It is honoring the weight of the body, the weight of the heart.

For those who stayed until the very end, Heller performed a tender yet defiant solo after the dance floor had cleared. She moved as if her arms and legs were attached to her sternum, as if they were extensions of her heart. She skipped and floated, claimed her power and fought for balance. In a final farewell, all three dancers performed a delicate score seated on the edge of the stage in front of Wall as he sang “Fade into You” by Mazzy Star.

Heller has promised more pop-up dance parties, and more iterations of HEARTLAND. She has another one coming up already at 12 Minutes Max this Sunday (February 17 at 2 p.m., in the main auditorium of the downtown Salt Lake City Library). HEARTLAND will also continue to develop beyond this: There is a film in the works, and the practice continues to reveal itself. Read more about the origins of HEARTLAND here and here, and follow its future developments here.

From left to right: Mike Wall, Molly Heller, Marissa Mooney, and Brian Gerke in HEARTLAND + Dance Party. Photo by Tori Duhaime.

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.

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.

Dollhouse

Gretchen Huff and Marissa Mooney both hold dual degrees in modern dance and gender studies from the University of Utah. Together they produced Dollhouse this past weekend, exploring themes of womanhood and femininity in and amongst the rooms of a historic home in the Avenues. Huff and Mooney, also the show’s main performers, led audiences on a planned, and eventually repeating, circuit through all levels of the house and four sections: “Maiden,” “Mother,” “Wild Woman,” and “Crone.”

Many of the rooms featured striking installations created by Kate Gourley-Thomas: a closet full of shelves lined with paper-dolls depicting many-bodied women and flora; a heap of aromatic potting soil in the living room over which hung a nest of branches encasing a chandelier; and a mass of gauzy webs crisscrossing a cellar room. Mooney co-created the cellar installation, in addition to creating one for the kitchen: spoons taped to every surface - cupboards, walls, drawers - each one cupping a fried egg.

In the opening “Maiden,” Huff and Mooney were clad in white bras and briefs, sitting at the foot of a bed. With strategically placed slices of frosted cake, they explicitly used their fingers to deliver icing from cake/nether region to mouth, staring the audience down sullenly. It was confrontational and occasionally uncomfortable, though maybe no more so than in another intimate setting where performers stare unrelentingly back at audience members.

They moved into an adjacent bathroom, where they did a duet in an enclosed shower that I saw flashes of through reflection in a mirror, beside a tub filled with lollipops and other candy and detritus. Sounds of their bodies knocking together and a building film of steam on the shower door indicated a strong physicality, as the two continued their exploration of the corporeal discovery of maidenhood.

Downstairs for “Mother,” Huff and Mooney donned aprons with Jessica Pace, who had been frantically frying eggs, and the three cheerily, but sarcastically, danced to Sam Cooke’s “Sugar Dumpling.” The dance commented upon outward appearances, specifically those of suburban housewives, belying troubled inner landscapes (reinforced by a conspicuous pile of prescription pill bottles on the counter). The pill-popping housewife may be a real, and worrisome, affliction, but I felt the depiction here oversimplified the invariably nuanced roles that a contemporary woman might actually find herself taking on throughout motherhood.

In the adjacent dining room, three women passed around a casserole dish of anecdotes on mother- , wife-, and daughterhood, from which they took turns reading selections aloud. These potentially autobiographical snippets offered compelling challenges found within these relationships. I wanted to linger more here (and did return after completing the full cycle), but we were ushered onward into the peat-scented, dirt-laden living room for “Wild Woman,” where Natalie Border and Meagan Bertelsen, in Pina Bausch-like white slips, awaited.

After circling around and rolling in the dirt with these two wild women, no longer constrained by kitchen appliances and the compulsion to clean, Huff and Mooney made the journey with the audience down to the cellar for “Crone.” Here, Samantha Matsukawa passed the time knitting in her rocking chair amongst the gauzy web installation. She joined in with Huff and Mooney for some gentle postures and gestures. “Crone” was quiet and contemplative, and in this way opened itself up more for introspection and interpretation than some of the previous and more visually graphic or overt sections.

“Crone” ended outside in the backyard, the performers watering handmade, silvery flowers that poked up out of the yard and out of the deck, before returning quickly into the house to begin “Maiden” again in the upstairs bedroom. I thought this last image of flower-watering, outside in the dark and cold, was lovely and wished the performers had explored this section for longer.

Upon re-entering the house through the “Mother” scene in the kitchen, I was reminded of Dollhouse’s focus on some feminine roles through an antiquated lens. Maybe it’s my own bias, due in part to the potentially privileged lack of constraint I feel regarding my own role in society, but the “woman in the kitchen” trope feels less to me like a concern of 2017 and more one of, for example, 1972 - the year Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, with other feminist artists from Cal Arts, opened Womanhouse in Los Angeles.  

Upon a post-Dollhouse refresher, I realized the performance I had just seen drew heavily, and even directly, from Womanhouse in several instances. Presumably, this was an intentional effort by Huff and Mooney to position their work within the feminist art historical tradition, but it was not attributed as such.

"How would you like your eggs done / this morning?," Robin Weltsch wrote, about The Kitchen for the catalog that accompanied Womanhouse. The Kitchen walls were covered in circular nodes that were at once eggs and nipples.

Faith Wilding created a pronouncedly non-functional shelter with her Crocheted Environment for Womanhouse, which featured web-like strands knit together to form a spidery cave, dimly lit by a single bulb.

Wilding performed “Waiting,” a contemplation on passivity in which she rocked back and forth in a chair reviewing her life from beginning to end.

The observation of such close similarities led me to believe Dollhouse wasn’t exploring its creators’ ideas and concerns, but rather recapitulating those voiced by women and artists decades earlier. Problematically, it was unclear to me both the extent to which this was intentional and, therefore, the desired effect. 

Regardless of clear context or positioning of intent, a viable takeaway from Dollhouse is that gender roles may be more complicated now than in the 1970s. Struggles voiced by mid-twentieth century feminists may remain struggles for contemporary feminists, though might crop up in new ways. Yet, strangely, more subversive elements from Womanhouse were absent from Huff and Mooney’s performance.

Judy Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom demonstrated "an image of women’s hidden secret, covered over with a veil of gauze...and deodorized...except for the blood." Chicago observed, "However we feel about our own menstruation is how we feel about seeing its image in front of us."

Written by Chicago and Wilding, the performance of Cock and Cunt Play featured "two women, each wearing a plastic “part” designating their respective sex. The women “play” man and woman, engaged in the age-old battle about domestic and sexual duties and demands.  “She wants ”him” to help her with the dishes and provide her with sexual gratification. “he” is outraged by these demands and takes his rage out on her by killing her with his plastic phallus."

Even the eponymous dollhouse in the entryway lacked the subversion of Schapiro’s 1972 counterpart. Here, it could have been any girl’s plaything. Schapiro’s featured a rattlesnake, grizzly bear, peering men, and other threats and reversals lurking within its diminutive rooms.

Dollhouse’s self-awareness remains untenable based on provided information, and even assuming Womanhouse as the springboard, so do Huff and Mooney’s decisions to incorporate some themes while excluding others.

True to Womanhouse, though, Dollhouse “echoes the feelings of a Woman’s place”, as Schapiro first described in 1972. Perhaps those same feelings are just as resonant today, but the ways in which we voice them have shifted, as seen by Huff and Mooney's inclusion, exclusion, and divergence from Womanhouse ideas. After all, how we grapple with the present is unavoidably shaped by our acknowledgement of and engagement with the past.

Source: The Womanhouse Online Archive (http://www.womanhouse.net/)

Amy Falls is loveDANCEmore’s program coordinator and a regular contributor to the blog. She works for the University of Utah's School of Dance, her alma mater.