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.

Dan Higgins: Speak

Dan Higgins’ new work Speak, which opened yesterday at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, looks like it might have been made for his employer, Repertory Dance Theatre (it was sponsored by RDT, as part of the company’s Link Series for independent choreographers). The seventy-minute dance, in its finer moments, brought to mind teenage memories of seeing that company. There was a pleasure in watching the eight dancers — four women and four men — swim through the project of being together on stage for more than an hour. 

At the outset, we heard a disembodied Higgins reminding us to silence our phones. Then he enjoined us to look over our left shoulder, to take stock of what we smelled, to revisit a recent significant decision we’ve taken in our own lives. Soon we were watching six black benches being rearranged on white marley floor. Eight dancers folded and unfolded, glided and slowly toppled, were careful and precise in the harmonics where they faced, how they followed a looping initiation from elbow to knee to fingertips, in and out of unison.

There was a spareness and a wakefulness in this first scene that I didn’t expect. The air was cut by a leggy, bouncy solo from Emma Eileen Hansen. A frontal assault of technical prowess changed hands a few times and eventually gave way to a tactical confrontation between the men and the women — a study in changing focus and walking on the beat. The benches lined up like chess pieces.

The lithe Mar Undag and Jaclyn Brown disappeared smoothly behind these black slats of wood — moments like this returned to the spirit of the first five minutes. Higgins sometimes got lost. He sometimes relied too heavily on the kind of music that stands in the background and tells you vaguely how to feel without saying much else. But he made a believable seventy-minute dance. There were no big questions, but I respected getting to see these eight talented dancers coexisting and, at times, rising to the occasion of play. 

Speak was at its best when it didn’t know where it was going. One section comes to mind where the conceit of a common struggle gave way to chaos. A meandering trumpet (the music for the piece was by Michael Wall) whirled through the air under a series of harried runs across the stage — six-second character studies from Brendan Rupp, Micah Burkhardt, Bailey Sill, Jonathan Kim, and Morgan Phillips. 

Higgins knows how to use stillness to effect. Sometimes, I wish he would lean into that more than other implements of the scholastic modern-dance toolbox. The ending: Higgins himself came out and picked up where his opening speech left off, recounting a vague fable about a boy bravely jumping over an infinite void. This was a little much, but I can forgive him. The fleet-footed romping of his cast was enough. 

Speak by Dan Higgins. Photo by Sharon Kain.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

Cat + Fish: Forge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

Repertory Dance Theatre: Voices

Watching Repertory Dance Theatre’s Voices, a show that reiterated the company’s theme this season of “Manifest Diversity,” was a distinct pleasure. Nearly every piece was preceded by a video featuring the choreographer, or re-stager of the original choreography, providing a glimpse into their intent and process, which I found to be particularly effective and illuminating for a non-modern trained dancer such as myself. This was something I especially appreciated throughout the evening: the thoughtful, unobtrusive way in which these videos blended and drew connections through the program, which then became as much a part of the program as the dances themselves. They were like delightful appetizers followed by a sumptuous main course. The program itself was a varied menu with distinctly different flavors, some emotionally gratifying, others intellectually appealing, and all of them aesthetically pleasing.

The first piece, “Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor,” was originally choreographed by Doris Humphrey in 1938 and was “inspired by the need for love, tolerance, and nobility in a world given more and more to the denial,” according to the program notes. In the introductory video that featured Nina Watt and Jennifer Scanlon, who re-staged the piece, the audience was reminded that “Passacaglia” was originally conceived while fascism was on the rise in Europe. The significance of that historical context in today’s world was not lost.

“Passacaglia” was a lyrical piece, glorious and effulgent in the dazzling confluence of Bach’s music and Humphrey’s choreography, and transported me to a different realm. Lauren Curley and Dan Higgins led movements that found their refrain in the ensemble silhouetted in a pyramidal configuration on boxes, some seated, others standing. There was a sense of conductor and choir, song and chorus, and the struggle of dynamic leadership, as each dancer seemed to be every other dancer, an individual yet uncompromisingly part of a whole. The blue-lit background and white costumes accentuated the arabesques and turns and further underscored the uplifting nature of the piece.

RDT in “Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor” by Doris Humphrey. Photo by Sharon Kain.

Second on the program was the world premiere of “Event,” an incisive and interrogatory piece, with a distinctly different tone, choreographed by Bebe Miller. It was a joy to watch and a joy to listen to. Miller, in the introductory video, first told us that she is not a “storyteller” and that she began by observing who the dancers were together and allowing “the serendipity of interaction” to come to the fore. I found it intriguing to listen to her choreographic process. Her piece centered around the idea of an event occurring in a room of 6 people, which then gradually evolved/devolved from event into narrative, focusing more on each observer’s interpretation, feelings, and sentiments, the recall of it, and the correspondent emotions.

“Event” featured a brilliant score by Mike Vargas that highlighted a penetrating text by Ain Gordon, crisply delivered in this context by Miller. The movement was dynamic and accurately reflected Miller’s intent. Real drama was conveyed by the eight extremely strong dancers in the telling, retelling, and diverse experiences of the “event,” until the “event” became the remembered experience and no one really cared or could recall what the original “event” was. What I really loved about the piece was that I totally got it. I often struggle to understand the intent behind some modern pieces, but not here. The dancers were that effective in their spatial configurations, their energetic movements, and their convincing facial expressions (Abhinaya, as we call it in Bharatanatyam). I sincerely hope that RDT continues to collaborate with Miller.

RDT in “I give myself” by Bryn Cohn. Photo by Sharon Kain.

The next piece, “I give myself,” was choreographed by Bryn Cohn and was also a world premiere. As highlighted in her video, Cohn’s choreographic process starts with aesthetic empathy and articulation. She observed, and thus is able to spotlight for the audience, the energetic traits and mutual connections between the eight company dancers. The score, which felt unbroken but was actually three distinct sections, was composed by Michael Wall.

“I give myself” began with dark undertones; there was a relentless feeling of dread in the sometimes convulsive movements and the music reinforced this sentiment. It did gradually evolve to become a more optimistic endeavour, with the sense that the dancers withheld nothing and “gave themselves,” surrendering their vulnerabilities to interactive movements and embodying a confidence and mutual trust. The stark lighting, by Pilar, and dark costumes were effective as well, further emphasizing the sheer strength and technical prowess of each dancer.

The next piece, “Voices,” was a lovingly crafted tribute to Salt Lake City’s community of dancers, teachers, and mentors, choreographed by Nicholas Cendese with input from the performers, who were dance educators from across the Wasatch Front. The piece had a gentle, lilting feel to it, and the plethora of “voices” that informed it shone through without being discordant. It was moving to see and appreciate the generous contributions of local dance educators; our community, I have come to recognize, has one of the richest, most supportive dance cultures in the country.

Israeli choreographer Danielle Agami’s “Theatre” was the last piece on the program and was “dedicated to non-actors,” according to the program notes. Incredibly athletic in scope, the piece had the dancers fittingly attired in costumes with numbers on the back, as though they were members of a sports team. There were moments where the dancers would build up enormous momentum, bump into an invisible barrier, stop, and then recede with such control and finesse; at other moments, they seemed to engage in common exercises that one might see a team do before a match, except magnified and transformed with an inexplicable panache.

Tyler Orcutt in Danielle Agami’s “Theatre.” Photo by Sharon Kain.

The extremes to which Agami pushed the dancers of RDT, getting them to explore their limits or perhaps realize that they have none, was a powerful display of mutual enjoyment and a feat of singular stamina. Agami informed us in her video that she is interested in seeing how dancers convince her that they are engaged in her fantasy, and then uses that as a medium in creating her work. One could see RDT’s exceptional and diverse dancers rise to this challenge, and with support and encouragement, exult in exceeding any confines to create a fitting finale to the evening.

RDT is currently comprised of Jaclyn Brown, Lauren Curley, Daniel Do, Efren Corado Garcia, Dan Higgins, Elle Johansen, Tyler Orcutt, and Ursula Perry, an excellent ensemble who had us at the edge of our seats. I learned, speaking to a friend, that this was Efren Corado Garcia’s final season with the company. His note in the program thanking local employers for their flexibility in accommodating dancers’ schedules caught my eye and brought a lump to my throat: "All of you dealt with my tired body, long working days… your patience, commitment to me… helped me live a dream."

“Voices” was a banquet to be relished, and I left the theater satiated and eager for another program by Repertory Dance Theatre.

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

EyeKnee Coordination: DRYPP

As I was en route to DRYPP, I passed people taking photos of the sun diffused by haze caused by smoke blown into the Salt Lake Valley from fires as far away as Los Angeles and the Pacific Northwest. I thought about my family and friends who are recovering from Hurricane Harvey and also inhaling toxic air caused by leaking petrochemical plants, hastily shut down before the storm. I thought about Bangladesh, India and Nepal where monsoons have caused the deaths of 1,200 people. We are in the midst of many natural disasters occurring much faster than the shift of tectonic plates. In DRYPP, Einy Åm Sparks investigates “geological time” in relation to “human time” through movement and media with her company, EyeKnee Coordination. I arrived at the show with a sore, smoke-filled throat as well as a heightened sense of “geological time” moving at a rapid pace, at the rate of “human time”.

I peered into the Leona Wagner Black Box Theater to see crinkled white paper that, as I ventured further into the space, quickly became a rock formation when I rounded the corner to see more floor-to-ceiling paper-rocks looming around every wing of the stage-scape. I felt like I was going into Timpanogos Cave. Stephanie Sleeper and Kevin Ho were planted onstage already, wearing loose red outfits designed by Sleeper. They were lying down with their legs up, the tops of their heads facing the audience, at rest as if they had been there for eternity.

A drop of water fell in our ears and the dancers began. They moved upstage with a series of intertwining leg and arm movements executed on their backs until they rolled away from each other, while still gesturing towards one another and then reconnecting. Einy Åm Sparks entered, her black oxford pumps click-clacking over the sound of rain falling. She had a cameo scene protecting herself from the rain with a red coat that served as a potent symbol throughout the piece. It protected, it was coveted, then it was a shroud trapping its wearer. The red coat could be seen as another dancer in the piece as it was animated by the way the human dancers moved with and around it.

Photo of DRYPP, courtesy of EyeKnee Coordination.

Scenes of the Arctic Circle were projected and woven into the performance of DRYPP. Both Sparks and Sleeper dance in the films, and their live movement was frequently in dialogue with that of the film. The film spilled onto the stage. This expert integration of film and live dramaturgy created a sense that even though the footage was shot primarily in the Arctic Circle, the landscape of DRYPP was universal and transplantable.

The same can be said of the efficient, released, and persistent choreography. All three dancers moved fluidly alone, together, or with the filmed version of themselves. There were a few moments when one dancer crawled through a space created by a dynamic, geological-looking position of their partner. They played with the weight of their limbs, lifting their legs as if they were very heavy and then flipping onto one another as if they were weightless. DRYPP is a mesmerizing interplay of weight-play, film and live-performance play, and sonic provocation. The sound designed by Eddie Segi, Mike Wall, Yngve Åm, and Kristy Dodson was vital in driving DRYPP forward, with piercing violin concertos, silence, and distorted drips.

DRYPP reminded me that disparate communities of people on earth are ecologically connected despite socio-political initiatives towards separatism. Watching this work was a meditative experience amidst a hectic and somewhat ominous time of natural disaster throughout the world. I left the theater feeling like I had taken a breath of fresh air.

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.