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: 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.

RDT: Emerge

Repertory Dance Theatre’s Emerge was an opportunity for each of its company members to choreograph a short piece performed by local dancers. This review reads like the show itself: eight disparate dance works, reflected upon individually. Although the choreographers might share conceptual interests and influences, having performed with each other extensively, their works were not directly in dialogue with one another.

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You Can Sit With Us, choreographed by Justin Bass:

The dancers began scattered on the floor amidst overturned metal chairs and tables. This careful dishevelment ended immediately when the dancers started moving, tidying up. They rose doing lovely tilts with their legs while beaming at the audience and putting the outdoor furniture in well-balanced arrangements. Occasionally the dancers would arrange themselves downstage and gaze at the audience invitingly. I wondered what warranted their relentless expressions of joy mixed with occasional ambivalence and why we were invited to sit with them.

One Step Forward, 500 Miles Back, choreographed and performed by Efrén Corado García:

The lights illuminated García in a striking position - his back to the audience, dark tresses shifting with his rippling arm movements. The piece was parsed into images triggered by the lights going off and then on again, similar to David Parson’s Caught. García, however, was not “caught” in midair, but grounded. He seemed to transform into a new entity for each snapshot, his still-visible silhouette  running to a new location onstage and then settling into position in quasi-darkness (due to the blaring lights from the sound booth). Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel gently pushed the dance forward; each repetition of layered melodies created a common thread between dynamically distinct movement images.

Miasma, choreographed by Jaclyn Brown:

The first third of this piece was a loose-limbed solo danced by Alicia Trump, whose hands occasionally cupped Martha Graham-style, but without the usual rigid arms and contracted torso - a compelling anachronism. This was followed by another solo danced by Marty Buhler, whose likewise loose limbs traversed the opposite diagonal. In the third section the two abruptly came into contact with familiar combative duet material. It was more interesting to witness the two when they were physically separate but moving in relation to each other, connected by common movement vocabulary and compositional elements rather than the obvious physical connection that is expected of a duet between a male and female. The piece started so strikingly with isolated solos, but deferred to duet material without precedence from within the piece to do so.

Figure it out, choreographed by Tyler Orcutt:

This piece consisted of a foundational walking pattern executed by Natalie Border, Tiana Lovett, and Gaby Zabka. Their knees were bent while walking, keeping them in a middle range between standing and fully descended, which they remained within even when they deviated from the walking pattern. Sometimes one dancer would fall in a sustained manner into the arms of the other two, or all of them would do their own phrase. But they consistently settled back into the original pattern that seemed to demand a lot of focus, both from the dancers to stay in sync and from the audience to “figure it out”.

Folie a Deux , choreographed by Nicholas Cendese:

Company members Ursula Perry and Daniel Higgins performed this duet exploring the “madness of two”. Their shared psychosis was manifested in a tense physicality and dim lights. Higgins repeatedly lifted Perry’s arm from the wrist, then tried to encircle her with both arms, only to encircle air as she ducked out of the way. Perry usually manipulated Higgins indirectly while repeating her own phrase that would happen to nudge him out of the way or allow her to slither out of his more direct grasp. Folie a Deux seemed to be an unabashed acknowledgement of the futility of repeating the same action without resolution.

Ipseity, choreographed by Daniel Higgins:

The music of Turkish composer and DJ Mercan Dede created a driving sound texture to which seven white, female dancers moved confidently while wearing identical tan, long-sleeved mini-dresses with slits on the sides. A loose narrative developed, punctuated by a scene in which all of the dancers stood around Elle Johansen who was lying supine. Natalie Border placed her hand on Johansen’s torso and then moved downstage. The two performed mirrored movement upstage and downstage while the other dancers sat in the middle creating a barrier. The piece ended with a powerfully tender solo performed by Border downstage while the rest of the dancers were shrouded in darkness upstage.

after/ever, choreographed by Lauren Curley:

For after/ever, Curley mixed and matched . Dancer Micah Burkhardt wore a skirt that matched the shirt of partner Megan O’Brien. Composer Eli Wrankle performed the violin live onstage, but was accompanied by a recording of himself that served as the rhythm to the melody that he performed. Both pairs - skirt and shirt, melody and rhythm - were separated by space and composition. The implied interdependency of these pairings was subverted by the fact that each component was operated by either another person or a rigid recording. Sometimes Burkhardt would lift O’Brien onto his shoulders or balance her in a fetal position on his reclined torso, emphasizing that the two were not actually one entity despite what their outfits might imply. after/ever brusquely revealed glitches in connectivity between autonomous beings.

Lively Sa-Sa, choreographed by Justin Bass and Ursula Perry:

This collaboration certainly was lively. The dancers had all participated in the company’s Winterdance Workshop and this piece served as a demonstration of what they had done. The movement was alternately wiggly and linear, like a graceful classic jazz dancer acting silly on the dance floor at a wedding reception. The workshop seemed like an upbeat way to stay warm in the beginning of January.

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Emerge seemed to feature mere glimpses of what RDT dancers are interested in choreographically partly because it was structured like a recital, not an interwoven concert. I am curious to see if any members continue these explorations beyond initial emergence.

Emma Wilson is a graduate of the University of Utah and regular contributor to loveDANCEmore. She frequently jams with Porridge for Goldilocks and was recently a choreographer for Red Lake at the Fringe Festival.