Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse

There are countless frames in this dance: walls that rearrange themselves, curtains and doors that close, and a hazy story about a hotel where tall tales are told. Memories of an audition. A history lesson. Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth. There’s definitely a heroine, Gertrudine, who wants – and maybe gets – to die because she’s reached the age of fifty and has lost her “sparkle.” Gertrudine is reanimated by most of the cast, one at a time, though none seem to fit her perfectly. John Allen understands age, but might not have learned any of his lines. Eliza Tappan is Gertrudine more often than anyone else, though she’s twenty-two or twenty-six, anything but fifty, a diva nonetheless. Juan Carlos Claudio is perhaps the most compelling Gertrudine, but she leaves you with the least information.

Visual pleasure and misdirection abounds, and I keep thinking, this is a story I know, isn’t it? I am reminded of the feeling years ago, when I watched Big Dance Theater’s piece about the film Cleo from 5 to 7. I knew we were somewhere in the French New Wave, but I’d yet to see any of Agnès Varda’s films.

Throughout this collaboration between Satu Hummasti and Daniel Clifton, I keep wracking my brains for the story about a fabulous dame who wants to off herself. At one point, Eliza/Gertrudine discards John Allen for Christine Hasegawa, who roller-skates impressively while sporting Lolita’s red, heart-shaped glasses. Natalie Border dons a fur vest and becomes a lithe, frightened horse. My meaning-making senses gravitate toward the gender line. The three women revel in a youthful sexuality that seems haunted by specters of age or mania. The men, who are (or appear) older, are occasionally violent but mostly just seem benignly confounded. Even when Eliza (temporarily a mother) fights with John (a father) for the affections of a sleeping (or dead?) baby Natalie, they do so in song.

Near the beginning, John beats Eliza’s head against the ground in slow motion. This seems very important. Later on, the action is replayed in a different context with roles rearranged. Another salient image: Before the funeral scene, in which Bashaun Williams enjoins the deceased to “say hello to Jesus,” a round robin of talking corpses speculate on the details of Gertrudine’s demise. Does she die in possession of herself, or is she slowly robbed of her faculties in a parade of indignities? We simply don’t have all of the information. The most pleasing image, and perhaps the most conventionally romantic, ends the action. The large square panels which comprise the set, brilliantly attuned to the costuming by designer Dan Evans, have been theatre wings, a table, an altar. Finally, Bashaun and Eliza climb into them as they form a makeshift treehouse. They close the door, and shut the light.

A tempest – sex, silliness, death, and jealousy – has concluded in unexpected coziness. The ends are not so neatly tied up, and I’m not sure this last image really fits. Why is she in there with Bashaun, who we know so little about? Is it a triumph of love over death? Or is this just another snapshot of Gertrudine’s irretrievable life and times? I feel like I’ve been on the outside of an inside joke. Maybe that’s the point.

Satu Hummasti and Daniel Clifton’s Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse continues through Saturday, May 11, at Sugar Space Arts Warehouse. Tickets are available here.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

Efren Corado Garcia: Dust. Breath. Place

Dust. Breath. Place is Efren Corado Garcia’s story. It is one of his stories, and Garcia is one person in the story, which is also made up of many stories and many people. On its most basic terms, Dust. Breath. Place is the story of Garcia’s journey as a young child from Guatemala to the United States and a reflection on that core memory as it pertains to his current self and life here in Utah.

The cast included faces mostly familiar to me, made up Garcia’s friends and collaborators from his time dancing in Repertory Dance Theatre - Natalie Border, Sarah Donohue, Austin Hardy, Tiana Lovett, and Tyler Orcutt. Technical direction was executed by RDT’s resident technical wizard Pilar Davis, and the simple, ingenious costumes were created by Carly Schaub. The production was sponsored and produced through RDT’s Link Series and Atlas Peak. An illustration by Tim Guthrie, drawn from the final image of the dancers on stage, graced the programs. Garcia called our attention to and thanked this group, and his larger community, both before and after the performance.

Segmented into nine sections, Dust. Breath. Place followed a journey, from a beginning to a middle to an end, and on to somewhere that was a bit of all three – new opportunity, process, something to stick around. Each short section received a minimally descriptive title on the program; home, first departure, migration, second departure, scorn/internal call, third departure, home revisited, dreams, and memories. These “chapters” pinned characters to distinct, if vague, points in time, and space kept them moving forward linearly as a narrative. Certain gestures and music molded the story and its characters, especially the sounds of dancers stamping the soles of their feet into the earth, of vibrant warm voices, clicking crickets, rumbling thunder, and of sweet, complicated reunion.

Kinesthetic choices, on the other hand, frequently took direction from cycling and reformulating un-pinnable elements of memory to bind the story together and give it the complex and building sense of an identity formed and remembered. The dancers walked forward through each stage, passing through movements, sounds, and emotional landscapes, gathering and trailing all behind them.

The costumes, first appearing uniformly dark and plain, were revealed to have vibrant and richly colorful patterns printed on the inside. These were made visible by each dancer, one by one over time, as they pulled up a pant leg and turned it inside out, hooking it over their shoulder to fashion a bright cross-body sash. This simple, inventive construction by Carly Schaub was delightful and highly effective in communicating various transformative states.

Garcia offered additional insights to the audience both before and after the show – earnestly and generously giving us something while firmly asking us to listen deeper. He shouted out to his community, filled in more of the details from his personal journey underlying the show, and outlined a litany of critical contextual factors regarding its creation and existence.

Garcia described the process he undertook to produce the folk dance-informed sequences that opened the show. Because he had immigrated at such a young age, before some cultural inheritances could fully and consciously land, Garcia had to perform research (in a literal, academic sense; different than the “research” that has gained popularity with dancers recently, which often describes an introspective, experimental approach) into Guatemalan folk dance traditions in order to approximate a dance that could imagine the “Efren who would have been” if he had never left the town of his birth.

When the same patterns were reprised later on, they followed one of the most emotionally dark and kinetically tense sections of the piece. Austin Hardy walked on stage in a moment of silence towards a painfully contorted and straining Tyler Orcutt, and began to stamp out the call-and-response-like pattern from the beginning, the familiar rhythm both warming and softening Orcutt mid-contraction and gently pulling the whole group back together. Garcia told us that for this reprisal he took those initial “what-if Efren” movements, and re-adapted them to reflect the real life Efren,who lives in Utah as a Guatemalan American.

Garcia also noted his thoughts on “making an ethnic dance for people who aren’t ethnic,” making the critical distinction (too often unacknowledged) that his cast of white dancers isn’t and can’t portray him or embody his experiences. What they are doing instead, he noted, is listening and thereby meeting him at a level of understanding which enabled them to understand how to transmit the work in a way that appropriately points the viewer to its referent.

Speaking later about a moment influenced by his reunion with his mother (the two were separated when he was very small because she paved the way for the rest of her family to follow by making the trip first), Garcia described it as “a simple way to make a picture of something very complicated… concurrent duets of bitterness and tenderness.” Orcutt and Hardy would grab each other’s shoulders and spin around, throwing their weight heavily and rotating faster and faster until Orcutt’s feet flew into the air while Hardy kept spinning him tenderly, his hands around Orcutt’s neck. Tiana Lovett and Sarah Donohue weaved around them, gliding and chassé-ing into floating arabesques, their bodies open, forward, and linked side by side. These sequences were repeated throughout the section.

Moments of contradiction and juxtaposition ran throughout the piece. Garcia noted that he filtered depictions of intense struggle and danger through the sense of wonder and adventure experienced by a young child, such as he was when the events actually took place. Watching it, I could glimpse that feeling, especially when the whole group raced around the stage at top speed, jockeying for places with the biggest, widest grins each of them could muster.

In the penultimate section, Tiana Lovett danced a beautifully light and sincere solo that evoked the joy of opened horizons and newly possible aspirations. The end threaded motifs together from all the previous sections, a true re-encapsulation that looked back upon the whole. Which is as memory is: everything you’ve already done will always keep washing through you as you continue on.

The evening was a beautiful, transformative, and emotionally affecting experience, performed in the Rose Wagner’s small, black box studio theater with simple staging and just two rows of seating. It was impeccably rehearsed and polished in its presentation, which allowed the message and experience to clearly and fully stand on their own. The themes and modes of communication felt as intimate as a confidence received from a good friend, and equally as expansive, and called out a mass of other stories, questions, suggestions, and challenges, stretching from border to arbitrary border.

A simple way to paint a complicated picture. How do you un-muddy something so complex? How do you unearth a way to reach an understanding? Ask your friends about their stories, was Garcia’s advice. And then listen.

Emily Snow is a Denver native who now calls Salt Lake City home. She has most recently been seen performing with Municipal Ballet Co. and with Durian Durian, an art band that combines electronic music and postmodern dance.

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.

Dan Higgins: In. Memory. Of.

Dan Higgins captured the human condition in its rawest form in his new evening-length work, “In. Memory. Of.” There were moments of intense vulnerability paired with stark confrontation that allowed the dancers to unveil deep human feelings often hidden from the public eye. The 70-minute work was a part of Repertory Dance Theatre’s Link Series and was followed by a panel with Drs. Shannon Simonelli, James Asbrand, and Jinna Lee that unpacked the piece’s voice on the effect of mental illness.

As the audience entered the Leona Wagner Black Box Theatre, the show had already begun. Higgins sat in a chair at a wooden table facing away from the audience. A dark green scarf that later emerged as a motif lay in front of him. The soft rattle of audience voices painted the landscape - the dance had started with simple human connection.

As the five other dancers (Natalie Border, Micah Burkhardt, Jalen Williams, Bethany Shae Claunch, and Lyndi Coles) entered the stage, their bodies created a sculptural landscape. With simple walking patterns and standing sequences, we watched them move with keen alertness. At one moment, they stood at the edge of the wings while Higgins walked past. The shadow of his hand glided gently across each of their faces. A deep humanness was unveiled in intentaional movements such as these.

The piece developed into a series of duets, a string of conversations. All the while, Higgins remained on stage, observing the connections and interactions; he was an outsider who witnessed and watched, much like the audience. Williams and Burkhardt’s duet had a virtuosic nature that alternated between playful and aggressive. The two men began by running past each other with quick changes of direction and near misses. They chased each other, launched their bodies toward one another, and supported each other in lofty, suspended lifts. Williams and Burkardt captured both the strength and gentleness of the human body, moving like young wolf pups or brothers.

“In. Memory. Of” wove together a diverse sound score that featured several layers, from a continuing drone that intensified into abrasive, pounding sounds, to moments of silence characterized by the breaths and brushing of body parts, to Higgins’ deep voice that relayed a complex and vulnerable narrative. Each of these layers was developed in small pieces, so that the narrative was presented in increments. The story created then seemed to span a very long time, an unveiling that required space and patience.

The text, written by Cooper Smith and Mary Higgins, shared a story of feeling deeply alone yet finding a sense of belonging in surprising places. It was a story of experiencing extreme awareness of and alertness to the world yet confusing the edge of reality. It was a story that carried an emotional journey and exposed memories of trauma. The narrative was shocking at times, but also allowed me to connect to the words so that my own experiences resonated alongside the narrative.

After a section of story, Higgins and Border moved through a stunning duet. Their movement held powerful parallels to the narrative. I could not help but wonder if Border was a representation of the female in the story or if, in fact, Border was a manifestation of Higgins’ inner mind, an internal conversation physicalized. Their partnering was strong and facilitated both fierce and tender moments. The amber shadows of lighting, designed by Pilar Davis, bounced the reflection of body parts off the floor’s surface. The focused brightness captured the quality of light usually found in the middle of the night when the moon hangs high in the sky.

The scarf on the table at the beginning became another moving component and motif in the dance. It emerged as a safety net, an object of comfort that crawled across dancers’ skin and seemed to offer a calming familiarity. Yet, at other moments, it was a force of tension, something that pulled, tangled, and restricted the dancers. This simple object captured, and physicalized, the complexity of mental illness.

Higgins’ words, “The wolves always come to watch,” still resound in my mind. This phrase was followed by group movement - the first time all six dancers moved together on stage since the beginning. Were the five representative of the wolves mentioned in the story? Are we, the audience, the wolves, here so faithfully, only to watch from the outside? Or, are our minds the wolves, creating outsiders within ourselves? “In. Memory. Of.” offered few solutions to these ponderings and instead gave voice to the complexity of the human mind. The movement and narrative created a space to look at mental illness and the response of the body and mind to trauma. “In. Memory. Of.” uncovered the struggles that many may face but may keep private, laying bare painful, yet ultimately human, experiences.

Rachel Luebbert is a senior at the University of Utah, nearing completion of a double major in modern dance and Spanish. Rachel has also contributed writing to the College of Fine Arts’ blog, The Finer Points. 

Austin Hardy presents La Mela

What determines how we view identity? This question lay at the heart of La Mela, a program recently presented by Austin Hardy that featured works by local artists Rebecca Aneloski and Stephen Koester. Presented in the intimate black box in the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts & Education Complex at the University of Utah, the evening explored questions of performance, affectation and affection, memory, and interpersonal relationships. The works focused on how an individual may relate to social space both within and around themselves, and how those relationships drive who we are and who we become.

“Man Dance,” choreographed by Stephen Koester, Modern Dance Chair at the University of Utah, was a thoughtfully-crafted work that delved into what it means to be a man. Beyond just being a man, what does it mean to look, act, sound, and exist “like a man”; who successfully gets to be a man and what drives that success? With extremely physical partnering representative of Koester’s style, “Man Dance” was a duet between Micah Sir-Patrick Burkhardt and Austin Hardy, and kept me engaged throughout.

The piece opened with Burkhardt and Hardy performing a warm-up. Dressed in gray and black sweatsuits, the two seemed unaware of the audience’s presence until they were suddenly hyper-aware. While their voices dropped from their natural registers, the two continued to repeat “I’m a man!,” entertaining the audience at first, but eventually forcing a question: why did the two men feel the need to repeat this phrase? Even though Burkhardt and Hardy were performing versions of themselves, they were still characterized and performing affectations.

I appreciated Koester’s range of references in “Man Dance,” with movement motifs spanning from a Western gun battle to superheros, cavemen, a traditional Jewish wedding dance, and finally to MC Hammer. Each presented its own interpretation of what manhood means and, more importantly, each existed specifically to define masculinity. Burkhardt and Hardy, through these motifs, became the fighter, the savior, the provider, and the arbiter of “cool.” By presenting these motifs in a male duet, “Man Dance” exaggerated the men’s roles and forced the audience to view them as hyperbolic and impossible to embody.

Through Koester’s partnering, we were shown authentic weight transference between the two bodies, negating the role of the lonesome male figure. We were shown two bodies relying on each other in a way that was both intimate and clear in its connections. While some of the partnering was meant to be comedic, it maybe only seemed so because of a sense of machismo the dancers were attempting to personify.

I felt discomfort for the performers as they tried to manifest these roles with hunched backs and sharp angles, dressed in their sweat outfits, clearly uncomfortable. Towards the end of the piece, we experienced their real physical discomfort as they caught their breath, literally, in a spotlight. Their inability to completely embody the fictionalized, hyper-masculine roles was presented with nothing else to look at.

I questioned the role of mishaps in the piece, both of ones that were choreographed and others that might have been accidents. Though sometimes questioning them because of the performers’ reactions, Hardy made me feel his mistakes truly, in a way that enforced an impossible binary. At the end of the piece, both dancers embodied a groove in their pelvis, and I felt Hardy let go of all other roles he had been playing to exist in this physical element for himself. It was appropriate that this came at the end of the piece, as it was an immense relief to see the dancers stop fighting to become something and to simply be themselves.

A second work began after a brief intermission, this one choreographed by Rebecca Aneloski, a performer and teacher with SALT Contemporary Dance. I am unsure of the title of the work, but I assume it was “La Mela,” which translates to “the apple” in Italian. This seemed to be a deeply personal work for Aneloski and focused on memory; having worked with Aneloski in the past, I am familiar with her Italian roots. Complementary to this background knowledge, the stage was set with a table and chairs and a bookcase, all in constant shifting motion, and furthering the idea of memory through a familial context.

The piece opened with a quartet, featuring Burkhardt, Hardy, Nell Rollins, and Natalie Jones, and quickly grew to a larger cast, adding Natalie Border, Amy Fry, Allie Kamppinen, Haleigh Larmer, Chang Liu, Megan O’Brien, Laura Schmitz, Bayley Smallwood, and Sarah Stott. The large cast engulfed the stage with their presence and with Aneloski’s expansive movement vocabulary. The dancers constantly reached for and pulled each other, seemingly in slow motion even when the pace was brisk. They provided both physical and emotional support, remaining completely connected throughout the piece. Approximately an hour long, the piece as a whole presented moments for each dancer to shine.

I was struck by the thought of rediscovering the familiar, by way of memory and of caretaking throughout the entire piece. Regardless of who was being featured at the moment, the rest of the cast continuously arranged and rearranged the set: moving books to and from the bookcase; rearranging cups, plates, the tablecloth, chairs; finding new ways to see these everyday items. I often found myself entranced by what the next configuration on the table was going to be, and was surprised when my focus returned from the dancers to the set and it was completely different than I’d last seen it.

Though not explicit, specific motifs were repeated throughout the piece that lent themselves to an exploration of childhood memories. Natalie Border had one of the clearest moments of this, as she could often be seen traipsing around the stage with one arm reaching up and behind herself, her gaze towards the sky, as though flying a kite. She even brought a sense of lightness to some of the heavier moments, her white blond hair breathing fresh air into the scenes, as well as anchoring them. She gave the audience something to hold onto.

A feeling of foreboding and death surrounded Sarah Stott from the beginning of the piece through to the end. She was the only dancer to appear in color at first; from her initial entrance, she created drama, as she fell and the other dancers threw flower petals at her body. Throughout the rest of the piece, she swan-dived into the others, trusting them to catch her and seeming not to care what happened to her if they didn’t. At the end, she collapsed again, this time for good, as the titular apple appeared.

During the whole piece, we were presented with a style and vocabulary that was uniquely Aneloski’s, though with clear input from the performers. I was continually struck by moments and lines being cut off abruptly and almost awkwardly to create a sense of visual, and probably physical, discomfort. Chests were almost constantly forward, with arms reaching past shoulders, heads raised to create room for protruding appendages. The air surrounding the dancers had a tactile feel. Hands were often held at the hip, seemingly ready for action. During a duet with Burkhardt and Jones, this vocabulary was brought to a writhing climax in Jones’ body as her movement picked up pace and the discontinuous and tactile sensation continued. This hindered her ability to stay on her own two feet and led to beautiful partnering.

One moment that stood out to me was a duet between Liu and Stott. They moved with such clarity and assuredness that, even with all the shifting bodies and scenery on stage, my eye was drawn only to them. Amidst chaos, their clarity of line, precise unison, and powerful stage presence was completely engaging.

Overall, because of a large cast and constant movement, the work was chaotic. But memory is also chaotic. How we define ourselves derives from memory, both personal and external, and that perception is constantly shifting, much like the stage in “La Mela.” Without being able to pinpoint one specific element, the work felt autobiographical, like Aneloski was telling a story about her life through memory. It felt authentic to the dancers’ stories as well. I appreciated this deeply personal work and know that we can expect to see more from Aneloski in the future.

Promotional image for La Mela.

Natalie Gotter is a performer, choreographer, instructor, filmmaker, and researcher. She recently completed her MFA in Modern Dance at the University of Utah and is on faculty at Utah Valley University, Westminster College, and Salt Lake Community College.