The Penguin Lady, joBdance & LAJAMARTIN in SPHERE: Phase One

SPHERE: Phase One brought together three distinct choreographers in a shared evening in the Leona Wagner Black Box Theatre, presented by The Penguin Lady. Unique in their voices and visions, Natosha Washington, LAJAMARTIN (Laja Field and Martin Durov), and Joseph “jo” Blake shared themes of identity, resistance, and empowerment. 

In an excerpt of “Pinot Noir,” Laja Field and Martin Durov (LAJAMARTIN) invited us into a day in their lives, in both mundane moments rooted in reality and the fantastical musings of a dream-state. Truly dance-theater in style, “Pinot Noir” transitioned between twisted floorwork and elastic partnering to grounded pedestrian action without hesitation - one moment suspended in an elegant balance, the next casually propped in an everyday stance. Both ways of being (the trained mover and the human) existed in equality, and neither had hierarchy onstage. Fleeting scenes, from lip-syncing lines of “Cat On a Hot Tin Roof,” to a hip-swaying, skirt-whipping quick step, to catching a flopping Field on a fishing pole, painted a holistic story of a couple. They were not clichéd, but relatable in their whimsy. None of us is a cohesive sentence; we are all a mess of dreams and fantasies.

The twelve dancers of Weber State University’s Moving Company paid tribute to the female voice in their excerpt of “Take Us As We Are,” a continually evolving work, much like its subject matter. Choreographer Joseph “jo” Blake reiterated in a program note that the choreography remains responsive to the discussions it catalyzes.

Clad in long, flowing fabrics in watercolor shades, the dancers surrounded a long table, fixed in shifting tableaus. Soon, they began to work together to break down the structure of the table into thirds, laying it flat, clearing the center of the stage. The work was not without tension - at times they moved in synergy, at times with resistance. Voices of iconic women echoed through the theater: Michelle Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Yursa Amjad, Emma Watson.

Soon they enveloped a single dancer with her back against a wall (in this case, one table’s top). They evoked memories, both personal and historical, of female fortitude against diversity. Solo moments, with the community never far away, each reminded us that even when an individual seems to stand alone, an army is behind them. As the table barriers cleared, they danced with exuberance and freedom. Finally, the group climbed over a last wall toward the audience, their faces open and resolute.

We had the opportunity to see Blake’s choreography course through his own body in “only he might know?” - a solo that grappled with identity expression. His back exposed to the audience, Blake rippled his shoulder blades, the beginnings of phrases percolating through his spine. As these motions sometimes stopped at his neck, sometimes escaped through his fingertips, it felt as if something was gradually working its way to surface. With staccato movement, he brought himself to his feet, then shifted back to the bench where he began. The action was both sinewy and sharp, fluid and broken.

The music stopped to reveal Blake’s breathing, another exposure. His space was one of quiet vulnerability even in its voyeurism.

In The Penguin Lady’s “Pluck,” a band of women gripped apples. Shuddering, vibrating, they seemed inseparable from the force that the object had over them. Their faces suggested something beyond fascination. Something more menacing. Corinne Penka, dressed in apple-red silk, whipped and darted in all directions, diligently following the apple in her hand.

Apples immediately connote original sin, the story of Eve tempted in the garden. There was certainly something tempting in this reference, particularly when paired with this all-female collective. But as the dancers furiously explored a changing relationship to their apples, spanning from obsession to repulsion, other associations arose. At one moment, Penka gathered armfuls of abandoned apples. Trying to protect them, the group restrained her with long red cords, her limbs stretched in opposite directions.

In both scenarios, she was controlled by an outside source. It was only when both apples and restraints were shed that the dancers gained liberty, moving in nurturing pairs. We are so often bound by our personal narratives, yet lost when we shed the things we believe encompass our identities. The dancers went back to the apples, this time with reverence. They took a bite.

The common threads running through SPHERE: Phase One are perhaps the natural workings of a viewer’s mind forging connections. But in a dance community this tight-knit, this inherently supportive, it cannot be all coincidence. As artists, our work influences, inspires, and catalyzes our circle. On to phase two. 

SPHERE: Phase One continues through tonight, Saturday, December 7, at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center.

Emeri Fetzer is a dancer and communications specialist. She works at the University of Utah and performs with Phantom Limb Company, and is looking forward to developing new choreography in the coming year.

Repertory Dance Theatre: Sounds Familiar

Repertory Dance Theatre’s Sounds Familiar began in a manner that was also familiar, the director striding through the closed curtain to deliver pre-show remarks. Immediately, though, this familiarity was playfully subverted. Artistic and executive director Linda C. Smith executed a perfect act of vaudeville opposite an airborne pest, through attempts to shoo, entice, capture, and eventually menace it with a baseball bat, to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.” It was on the nose, tongue in cheek, surprising, and, yes, brief enough to be both compact and impactful. The program continued in this fashion. 

A diverse dozen of local artists was called upon to choreograph short works to culturally prominent pieces of classical music. This seemingly simple premise was likely tricky to produce, involving a great deal of structure to support many discrete works, a conceptual scaffolding to hold them together, and a good deal of trust and investment in many artists to pull it off - which RDT did, and beautifully so. 

Each musical selection was one deeply embedded in current culture. When called on to consider such a selection explicitly, it is often to the tune of asserting value or declaiming knowledge. Sounds Familiar is a title that perfectly encapsulates this production’s opposite approach. Video interludes presented history and context, serving as transitions while dancers and stage were reset. With the benefit of educational content, and without judgment, the audience’s tacit recognition of a classical song could become the patent processing of new, affecting interpretations. This complex pairing of familiar and unexpected must have been challenging to produce on the front end. However, it was perfectly simple and rewarding to appreciate. 

Three reprising solos by Molly Heller, duets by Nicholas Cendese, Natosha Washington, and Luc Vanier, and a solo by Sharee Lane danced by Ursula Perry were instantly memorable. 

Heller’s pieces effectively utilized repetition and escalation on many levels. The solos were interspersed throughout the program, grounding what was otherwise successive and fast-paced. Each solo was set to the same Bach prelude (from Cello Suite No. 1). Each dancer occupied the same space while moving through graspable patterns of repetition into escalations of phrasing that then moved beyond our ability to track. Dancers Trung “Daniel” Do, Jaclyn Brown, and Jonathan Kim each inhabited this echoed approach wholly differently. The reflection of the internal structure of the music with its repeated themes and variations, and the play on the very notion of a prelude, was motivated and moving. I could watch an infinite iteration of dancers traversing that diagonal, to that suite, under Heller’s direction and never, ever tire of it.

Nicholas Cendese’s piece for Do and Kim, set to Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” was spare in staging and totally full in aesthetic sensibility. The two duetted with gorgeous synchronicity, established some iconic movements, and then used them as landmarks of recognition for departure into fiercely individual contemporary movement. The integration of contemporary social dance wasn’t imitative or exploitative. It was seamless and completely culturally legible and authentic, in flawless contrast to the music’s deeply imprinted piano rondo. I hope I forever associate those arpeggiated alternating motifs in A minor with these two incredible performers. It was like viewing a film in which you let yourself sit back, suspend disbelief, and simply enjoy the craft, and then leave the theater suspecting that you might’ve just enjoyed a piece of incisive social criticism.

Duets by Natosha Washington and Luc Vanier were each richer in staging and setting. Washington’s featured a tableau of archetypes: a statuesque woman in an impossibly long gown, obscuring a pedestal, with a man below; a bouquet of flowers; a chalk circle; and the darkly shining instrument of pianist Ricklen Nobis. Vanier’s set was Washington’s dystopian mirror, or foil: dancers enrobed in hazmat ponchos, trashed couches and a glitching television on squeaky casters, cyclorama projections of desolate environments, and a faint tinny musical recording. Both pieces explicitly treated challenging topics. Washington’s duet brought immediate gravity to the inherent romance of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Dancers Ursula Perry and Tyler Orcutt exhibited a mastery of contained fluidity that established the weight of connection, and their artistic maturity allowed it to arrive safely and responsibly at a depiction of intimate partner violence. Every choice, from the initial selection of the music and its live execution, to the stage dressing and perfect casting, supported the presentation of something darkly beautiful and deeply considered. 

Vanier’s duet was equally human and thoughtful in its treatment of ecological disaster. It built slowly and never hurried, allowing for the changeable pacing of the video background. Lauren Curley and Dan Higgins have the incredible ability to project their awareness at each other with their attention drawn in opposite directions, past each other, or into the middle distance, which made every act of intricate partnering or the intimate brushing back of a plastic hood intensely chilling. The dramatic physical scale of the projection and the indistinct symphonic strains of Beethoven framed the human drama, creating with the set and costuming a built world evoking Ray Bradbury or Ursula K. LeGuin’s science and speculative fiction.

Ursula Perry’s solo, choreographed by Sharee Lane, was a virtuoso accomplishment. Not for a moment did the Puccini aria overshadow Perry’s movement. It done was in my favorite kind of contemporary ballet vernacular, and felt connected to the very core of its performer. It is good to be reminded that the complementary acts of reaching out and digging down haven’t been mined to nothing yet. There was an untellable richness and feeling to Perry’s performance. A marriage of the universal and the personal is itself a classical artistic aspiration, and it was wonderful to see it carried out by these experienced, capable artists.

There were some very successful ensemble pieces in the program as well. Sara Pickett and Nathan Shaw showed impressive command of formations, the former most notably in passing lines and the latter in the transmutations of unison trios. Nancy Carter’s piece was well-rehearsed and intricate, fully exploring range and levels through the modality of bungee. It was quite stylistically cohesive, such that the inclusion of different instrumentations of the same Bach fugue was a confusing choice. Elle Johansen seemed especially confident and at ease dancing tethered to an aerial rig. 

Sounds Familiar achieved a sense of history, diverse voice, and community presence, all of which I am grateful to have witnessed. In so doing, it also showcased the incredible caliber of its company, which performed 15 discrete works with tireless commitment. The show was a success belonging to many, certainly not least these eight strong dancers.

Nora Price is a Milwaukee native living and working in Salt Lake City. She can be seen performing with Durian Durian, an art band that combines post-punk music and contemporary dance.

Repertory Dance Theatre: Spirit

Repertory Dance Theatre’s season opening “Spirit,” presented a company mission of “manifest diversity,” a potential play on a problematic ideology that led white Americans westward. Manifest diversity suggests that what was perhaps more inevitable than white settlement was voices of racially diverse Americans contributing to a broad national culture, including the advent of modern dance as an American form.

To engage in these ideas, “Spirit,” presented works by two historical choreographers (Michio Ito and Donald McKayle) and two working in the contemporary moment (Natosha Washington and Tiffany Rea-Fisher). In introductory videos, each choreographer addresses their work and Rea-Fisher’s comments lend themselves to this interpretation of manifest diversity as she describes modern dance as a form created by and for people, unlike ballet and other concert forms which stem from royalty, religion, or both. This reality validates the concert’s aims but also troubles its premise. Because the works presented are made by people as varied as their ideas, their own concepts are frequently at intellectual odds.

The concert opens with an array of short dances by Michio Ito, whose work is representative of so many artists whose choreography was integral to the development of modern dance, but who were left out of a singularly Western canon of dance history. In “Time and the Dancing Image,” Deborah Jowitt links Ito to choreographers like Martha Graham and states that he was known for combining Japanese sensibilities with more “contemporary formality,” an observation that is particularly resonant while watching “En Bateau (Blue Wave).” Made a decade prior to another proverbial blue wave, “Serenade” by Balanchine, I watched the quintet of RDT’s women perform subtle and evocative gestural phrases in complex spatial patterns and wondered how many other dances of this type I haven’t had the privilege of seeing on stage.  

This feeling also has consequences.

Knowing that later, Natosha Washington’s “say their names (part i),” would address police brutality, I cringed to see Ito’s “Cake Walk” included in the program. While adeptly performed by Tyler Orcutt, “Cake Walk,” draws on minstrelsy with no sense of irony (not to mention the Debussy score’s reference to the racist caricature Golliwog). The inclusion of the dance asks questions about how dance companies can best curate racially and culturally diverse programming. I suspect it’s not about the range of the material offered to audiences but instead, the material’s sufficient historical unpacking. While “Cake Walk” did not wholly detract from the more compelling moments in “say their names” it does undercut them. “say their names” had multiple and cumulative beginnings and a strong moment of assertive partnering between Ursula Perry and Megan O’Brien. The dance ends with the full cast clad in white and surrounded by snow; they gaze over their shoulders toward the audience, demanding our complicity or our action.

This complex interaction of ideologies persists into the second half of the evening. Tiffany Rea-Fisher addresses the role of female friendships and, at first, I had the same feelings of excitement and longing as I did while viewing “En Bateau”. How many dances about women have I been denied while watching heterosexual partnering? What would it be like to watch more of this absorbing musical material in which Jaclyn Brown excels? And could Elle Johansen please collapse so readily into the arms of another friend and continue her skitter backwards to the audience’s comedic delight?

At the conclusion of “her joy,” the inimitable Donald McKayle comes to the screen. While I’m (truly) delighted to hear about “Rainbow Round My Shoulder,” a seminal work about men on a chain gang, I become hung up on his verbal reminder that the woman in “Rainbow” is not really a woman at all, but instead serves as an archetype of a sweetheart, a mother and a wife. Her mythology buoys the men through their crisis without addressing her own. “Rainbow” both paves the way for Rea-Fisher’s future work and necessitates it, by framing a view that women are anchors for male experiences.

Despite this reckoning, “Rainbow,” is performed beautifully and does all of the things previous critics have lauded. As Gia Kourlas described in the New York Times during a 2016 re-staging, “The exhaustive, angular swinging movement for the men came from the idea of forced labor,” and RDT does not shirk the exhaustive portion of the responsibility. Dancing to traditional chain gang songs, the company’s men, and guest performers, are both precise and passionate. When Efren Corado Garcia carries Tyler Orcutt away at the conclusion of the dance (“another man done gone…they killed another man”) the physical line of the dancers is a spatial metaphor for the passage of time. As the chain gang exits the stage, the dance should feel dated but the concept is, regrettably, still an American present.  

See “Spirit” tonight and tomorrow at the Rose Wagner; details here.

Ashley Anderson directs loveDANCEmore programming as part of her non-profit, “ashley anderson dances.” See more on ashleyandersondances.com.

The Penguin Lady: Tarot

The Penguin Lady, a collective headed by Natosha Washington, showed their evening-length work Tarot at the beautiful Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts and Education Complex. The show runs Thursday through Saturday, and despite it being smack in the middle of the holiday bustle, most seats in the black box were filled on Thursday night. Washington has been a presence in the Salt Lake dance scene for a number of years, presenting works through various venues and formats; this is her most ambitious and strongest work to date.

The cast includes ten women, all adept performers that were able to execute what was demanded, and Washington did well to feature each dancer so that by the end of the night we felt as if each personality was revealed. The entire piece runs for about an hour, with no intermission, and features one investigated idea, a welcomed break from the multiple-works format that has become common.  

The lights brighten to reveal the cast standing on two large tables designed by board member Matt Sincell. Accompanied by ambient rain sounds and wearing stark black dresses with long slits up the sides, the dancers take turns moving atop the table, highlighting a quality and structure that is recognizable from previous choreographies by Washington. For example, gestures often ending with a punch or a beat, rolling through the spine or trailing through the head to ultimately end with an extended leg. This way of moving is lush and expressive and often carries a sense of accessible urgency.   

At one point, the dancers each pull out a tarot card that had been hiding in their costume, come off the table, and form a V with Chelsea Rowe at the downstage apex. This was the first of the several moments of striking visual power: ten severe women in formation as if they are a community of witches readying themselves for a night of ritual. Rowe does well as this central character, applying just the right amount of drama and gravitas, without ever slipping into the well of melodrama that we often see indulged by younger dancers. In this section the continued motif of raised elbows, spread hands, and simmering and shaking as if possessed or possessing is further developed and establishes that perhaps otherworldly powers are being channeled.  

New sections emerge with the dancers shifting the tables and chairs, creating architectural tension. In a spellbinding duet between Lauren Payne and Jocelyn Smith, the cast sits in various configurations on the tables and chairs, often viscerally responding to what is taking place center stage. These ripples do little to add dimension, but like the townspeople reacting and conversing in a story ballet, they acknowledge that what is occurring is a group experience.

Payne and Smith dance with an interconnectedness that isn’t the result of bodies actually touching, but rather a keen awareness of one another and their relationship in space. Once Payne and Smith separate to different tables, the spell is broken and the intensity of the moment dissipates.    

The piece continues at an engaging pace: trios and duets, solos and layered group sections with and without the props, moving the props, fully exploring the props, all serving to create a multi-layered and dynamic stage.  Most aspects work well to create this desired effect, while just a couple fell short. At one point, Danell Hathaway solos downstage while tarot cards are thrown at her feet. She continues to move among the cards, and while I can assume that they were included to layer meaning and metaphor, for me they cluttered the crisp design of what was happening under the tables (not to mention the actual choreography of the solo). In Tarot, the past, present and future are not found in the actual cards, but rather in the power of the moving body.

The final moment of the night is the group, in solidarity, receding upstage, one dancer holding a raised tarot card.  From this image it is apparent that our experience is over, but perhaps not entirely finished.  

Erica Womack is adjunct faculty at SLCC and presents her own choreography in SLC.