Wasatch Contemporary Dance Company: Nerve and Sinew

What is contemporary dance?

As a dancer myself, I have encountered this question more times than I can count; Wasatch Contemporary Dance Company attempted to answer it with Nerve and Sinew. The performance spanned multiple techniques and featured pieces by both established professionals and emerging artists. I appreciated the performance’s variety but, at seven pieces, it felt a bit long.

When I think of contemporary dance, I tend to think more along the lines of the pop, “So You Think You Can Dance” sense of the term; a coupling of emotion, narrative, and both ballet and jazz techniques. Each of the pieces in Nerve and Sinew included elements of this to varying degrees of success. However, purely from a performance standpoint, the first act felt questionable: the dancers did not seem to be physically invested in the movement, which left the choreography feeling forced.

I am familiar with Eric Handman’s work, so his piece, “Permanent Now,” was to me the biggest victim on the program of lack of energy - it was missing the tension, vigor, and attention to detail that is most often present in his work.

On the other end of the spectrum, Lyndi Coles presented a new piece, “Spill,” that was so full of energy that there was a lack of attention to technique in moments of suspension, and instead the focus seemed to be on presenting tricks (i.e., high lifts and the dancers throwing themselves to the floor).

WCDC also presented a piece by Angela Banchero-Kelleher, which invoked emotions and sensations of Americana through its color palette and score. However, the political sentiment expressed in the program notes simply didn’t come through in the choreography. A lack of desperation and of authentic weight-sharing, as well as forced facial expressions, left the piece devoid of any real emotion. That being said, the piece’s ending trio of duets set to Johnny Cash was incredibly satisfying.

The first act concluded with a solo choreographed by Sarah Donohue, “Luz e Lorraine,” that featured Lyndi Coles. It is always a pleasure to watch Coles, and I was excited to see this piece again after first having seen it at Brine last fall. I was slightly disappointed, however, as the characterization of Coles comedically reacting to a spotlight felt completely different than that found throughout the rest of the piece. This stood out to me because Coles is such a controlled and fluid performer - but the moments of comedy looked unfamiliar to her body.

Going into the second act, I was prepared to continue to feel as ambivalent as I did in the first; instead, I felt like I was watching a completely different show, each piece more exciting than the last.

I had no idea that the Regent Street Black Box at the Eccles Theater housed floor-to-ceiling windows, but Jocelyn Smith opened the back curtain in her new piece, “Melodic Jargon,” to reveal complementary natural light. The dancers directed both the audience and themselves in rhythmic patterns that provided the score for the piece. The dancing didn’t always match the joy and energy of the rhythms, but the dancers did seem to experience joy.

WCDC also shared a work they’ve performed before by Brooklyn Draper, entitled “unaccustomed acquaintances.” Out of the whole program, I would argue that this piece was the least “contemporary,” but it was very successful. Each of the four dancers was committed to the awkward movement material and, without necessarily trying to be humorous, the piece felt unexpected in its held shapes, unheard whispers, and embodied characters.

Jake Casey’s “pop.” was the final piece on the program. The company’s performance and ongoing commitment, a strong duet by Coles and Smith, and the piece’s overall intensity made “pop.” the only piece that indicated to me that WCDC is in fact a professional company.

I went through a range of emotions during Nerve and Sinew. As a modern dancer, I often hear “contemporary” dance getting a bad rap. However, when it’s performed with commitment and gives a real experience of emotion, it too can be powerful, as demonstrated on this program.

In its 10th year, I hope that WCDC will continue to define its voice as a company and to hone in on what makes it successful. I could have watched the last two pieces of Nerve and Sinew over and over and would have continued to find exciting new details because of the dancers’ commitment and relationship to the movement. Regardless of the genre of dance in question, it’s those two things that connect performers and audience.

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.

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.

Repertory Dance Theatre: Current

Repertory Dance Theatre’s Current included five dances presented one after the other, after the other, and yet... another, because they were all made recently; they are a reflection of “right now”; they are current.

To begin, the silhouettes of Justin Bass and Tyler Orcutt spoke their way across the stage beginning “Still Life With Flight” by former RDT member Sarah Donohue. The faces of the dancers were illuminated once they landed their popping (not locking) bodies on a bench. They shifted ever-so-slightly with harmonized pulses of their torsos that incidentally occured to execute the larger movement of wringing hands, crossing legs and shrugging, casting quick glances at one another before interlocking to perform cartwheels over the bench. Through a series of turns en dehors with their legs in arabesque (legs held behind, turning counterclockwise) the two moved around the bench, holding each other often and expertly.

Cut to Ursula Perry dancing to herself in a mirror with a scrim hanging downstage, creating a hazy, sepia effect. “Aloneness,” choreographed by Francisco Gella, contained a lot of unison phrases, all considering its subject of solitude. Or, not solitude - loneliness. The choice of being alone. I sometimes get lost on the bridge connecting etymology to physicality; are the movements representing different definitions of aloneness? Are they enacting solitude? They wore black so they must have been mourning the loss of community. Nothing was certain save for the calm and careful movement of Perry, who pierces space with her gaze. Even her fingertips and shins saw what they were moving towards.   

“Flood” began with the company in line, facing the audience, shifting together on the pads of their feet, creating a “tiny dance” of utmost specificity. (Choreographer Nichele Van Portfleet is specific.) The dancers wove in and out of this line throughout the piece, pushing and displacing each other from the line, and carefully buttoning up their shirts in a mime-like fashion ending with a gesture to form a suffocating collar made of flesh and bone (their own hand). This sequence communicated internal flooding - perhaps a flood of information, perhaps something else entirely. I was reminded of “The Green Table,” choreographed by Kurt Jooss, depicting pre-World War II “peace” negotiations and their ultimate futility. In both pieces, the dancers embody caricatures of those in power, whether world leaders or parts of themselves. The performers in “Flood” were not at peace with themselves nor with one another. They were often on the edge of physical stability, twisting themselves with movement overlapping and interweaving dynamically, likewise putting me on the edge of the seat beneath me.

Justin Bass and Jaclyn Brown in "Schubert Impromptu" by Francisco Gella. Photo courtesy of RDT.

Next on the program was a bonus duet by Gella, aptly called “Schubert Impromptu,” as if one of many Schubert compositions was picked out of a hat to entertain us after “Aloneness” and “Flood.” Justin Bass and Jaclyn Brown appeared to have been directed to move in sync with the music, and it was very satisfying, if not predictable. At one point, Brown slows down a cartwheel on her forearms over Bass, leaving me impressed with her ability to resist gravity. The two wore black, like the costumes in Gella’s previous piece. Some of the movements were similar, but, in “Schubert Impromptu,” there were no mirrors reflecting long beams of light into the audience, slicing through the space between stage and seats. “Schubert” seemed purposefully intimate - the dancers’ light did not come to us, but we could go to it for a diversion or a shelter from darker subject matter.  

“Material Tokens of the Freedom of Thought,” choreographed by Angela Banchero-Kelleher to the music of Wojciech Kilar, ended the evening. Many of the movement phrases in the piece were punctuated by the dancers pausing at length to look out into the audience, arms placed at their sides, forming a slight oval around them. They stood this way, waiting for their turn to move again, and in these moments I saw their eyes searching, perhaps to find the meaning of “mother” in the midst of the fan-like movement surrounding them.

Current flowed - or careened - like a recital. One can only do so much to connect a playful duet with a reconciliation with one’s deceased mother to a socio-political abstraction to an exploration of being “alone together,” without any transition other than closing and opening a curtain. However, the members of RDT moved through the evening with grace and deep breaths. They exhibited a cohesion that prompted the friend accompanying me to wonder if some of the choreography throughout all five pieces was extremely similar, if not the same.  Each moment of contact carried with it a familiarity stemming from continued physical practice as a company. The dancers are fully integrated, if not the dances they are dancing.

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.