Repertory Dance Theatre: Emerge

This past weekend, Repertory Dance Theatre presented its fourth annual Emerge program, a collection of works choreographed by company dancers and staff. I appreciated that no unifying theme was forced on the show, so that each piece was free to be what it was.

The evening opened with “Indebted,” choreographed by RDT member Jaclyn Brown in collaboration with the performer, Angela Banchero-Kelleher. This understated piece featured gorgeous lighting and a regal yet simple feel.

“This Is What It Feels Like,” choreographed by company member Daniel Do and Mar Undag in collaboration with dancers Morgan Phillips and Nicole Smith, featured alternating solos and duets. The dancers moved with matching stylization, which was especially enjoyable to watch during a brief section of unison choreography. 

Choreographed by company member Lauren Curley in collaboration with performer Mikaela Papasodero, “Soliloquy” demonstrated impressive navigation of floorwork with a full long skirt, and lovely moments of uplifted posture and gaze.

I loved the flow of overlapping parts and the contrast of fast and slow movement in the group piece “Proto,” choreographed by RDT artistic associate Nicholas Cendese and dancers. Within the group, partnering between company members Megan O’Brien and Jonathan Kim stood out to me as feeling both natural and interesting, and I appreciated that one of their sequences together was performed twice within the work with different directional orientations each time.

“I… Me… We” was a delightful piece choreographed by company member Dan Higgins, who also performed spoken word live alongside the solo danced by Morgan Phillips. The vibe was generally silly, and the movement was floppy and weird in the best way – I imagine it would be fun to perform. Through eye contact and action-reaction pairs, there was a nice connection between dancer and speaker/choreographer, as if they were trying to figure something out together but not taking it too seriously and finding amusement in the idea that they weren’t really sure of whatever it was they were exploring.

“femme.” featured beautiful and well-rehearsed partnering between dancer/choreographers Ursula Perry (of RDT) and Laja Field. I interpreted the piece to be about female friendships until a friend pointed out that the title is a word that refers to an aesthetic presentation by a lesbian that fits into society’s typical conception of a feminine look.

After a brief intermission, we saw “Trick Mirror,” choreographed by RDT dancer and education associate Megan O’Brien in collaboration with the four dancers. The part of this work that I enjoyed most was the end, the dancers lip-syncing exaggeratedly to The Bee Gees while facing the audience at the front of the stage – I’m not sure what it had to do with the rest of the piece, but it made me smile.

“Trapped” (1974) by former RDT member Lynne Wimmer was well-performed by Tiana Lovett. I loved the small, sharp movements at the beginning, Lovett’s amazing leg extensions, the grand use of space, and how Lovett seemed to break out of her trap by the end of the piece.

Comparatively, “until you are no more,” by company dancer Jonathan Kim, was much less clear in its theme. For me, the most distinct and memorable part of this piece was a simple yet effective silhouette of purposeful walking, from the downstage to upstage at the beginning of the piece, and from upstage to downstage at the end.

The program ended with “The Hours,” directed and structured by Cendese with choreography and performance by twelve dance educators. This piece got exciting during a transition where three benches, which had been stationary for the first part, were creatively moved and interacted with – I would have loved to see this section extended with more choreographic exploration of this concept. Then the benches were placed in three rows and the dancers sat facing the audience like a congregation in church pews, and from there performed a very satisfying series of movement in canon.

Within the otherwise very professional presentation, I was distracted by the amount of backstage noise throughout, including multiple instances of doors closing, cast conversations, and, once, what sounded like keys being dropped. 

Overall, Emerge presented beautiful dancing alongside choreographic talent, coming together in a likeable show. I think it’s wonderful that RDT offers this opportunity for their dancers and staff to both create and share their creations. 

Kendall Fischer is the artistic director of Myriad Dance Company, and has enjoyed performing opportunities with Voodoo Productions, SBDance, Municipal Ballet Co., and La Rouge Entertainment, among others. Her choreography has been performed by Myriad, Municipal Ballet, and at Creator's Grid, and her dance film project “Breathing Sky” received the 2017 Alfred Lambourne Movement prize.

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: Emerge

Repertory Dance Theatre is a collection of noticeably varied talents. Its company members possess distinctive personalities that can be glimpsed regularly in all RDT productions, no matter the program or how seamlessly they may move as a group. The second year of RDT’s Emerge, a choreography showcase for the company's dancers, gave us a chance to see those individual interests continue to develop. The program presented eight works that, while formally unconnected in content and style, all benefitted from RDT’s acutely personal approach to the work. Below is a small window into each.  

Dancers in Lauren Curley's "The Sum of None." Photo by Sharon Kain.

THE SUM OF NONE

Set to a Philip Glass score, Lauren Curley’s choreography was a complex study in pattern and numerical manipulation. Six identically-clad dancers performed sweeping athletic movements that multiplied and varied as they traveled along parallel and intersecting trajectories. The movement built up from simple walking and continued at a steady pace, adhering like clockwork to the unending and obfuscating evenness of the music’s rhythm.

Tiana Lovett in Tyler Orcutt's "Blue Sun." Photo by Sharon Kain. 

BLUE SUN

A solo for the lovely and intense Tiana Lovett, “Blue Sun” by Tyler Orcutt was well-crafted and even better performed. Lovett is a clear and technical dancer, suited to the fast and rolling fluidity of Orcutt’s style, and she sold the frenetic emotional drama of his contemporary-lyrical work perfectly. Chronicling a story of coping with an unavoidable “ending of a cycle,” Lovett shook and thrashed and fell to the floor over and over in passionate protest. The piece ended in silence and with a fade-out as she continued to jerk and twitch, suggesting any measure of peaceful acceptance might be out of reach.

Lacie Scott and daughter Shae in "Jammies" by Scott and Jaclyn Brown. Photo by Sharon Kain. 

JAMMIES

Cue audible squeals and cooing from the audience - newborn Layla Brown and small, giggling cherub Shae Scott accompanied Jaclyn Brown and Lacie Scott onstage in a testament to the life of dancing mothers, and what was very likely the cutest thing ever presented on stage. Inspiration drawn from the games, rocking, bouncing, and cradling of real life to create the choreography, the two mother-daughter pairs sweetly bobbed and capered around the stage to the tune of Bob Marley’s “Be Happy.” Their hijinks were punctuated by a section for the mothers alone who danced a weaving duet, nodding to the compound layers of identity that come with motherhood.

Dan Higgins and Natalie Border in Higgins' "Denizen." Photo by Sharon Kain.

DENIZEN

Dan Higgins’ choreography for “Denizen” depicted an intense relationship between a pair of strong and violently entwined forces. Natalie Border was tremendous and compelling in her uncompromising intensity. Brooding and moody, Higgins battled her. The exact nature of their spiraling relationship remained unclear, alternating between roaring aggression and something that was not quite tenderness, but maybe the insular comfort of familiarity. She got in his way and he attacked, neither able to extricate themselves or eliminate the other.

Dancers in "Doors" by Justin Bass. Photo by Sharon Kain.

DOORS

Justin Bass has been with RDT for four years now, and recently announced this season will be his last. “Doors,” likely one of his final pieces with the company, reflected this dawning life-shift, exploring themes of change, saying goodbye, nostalgia, and keeping faith in oneself, communicated through a spoken monologue by Bass that played over soft instrumentals. Four dancers stood apart, oriented toward each of the stage’s four corners. They performed subtle movements, sometimes in unison but holding the distance between them. While each dancer was lovely and interesting to watch on their own, the choreography of the piece as a whole underwhelmed when paired with Bass’s personal, moving, and deftly crafted poem.

Ursula Perry in "I'm OK, I Am Okay...I'm Still Here." Photo by Sharon Kain.

I’M OK, I AM OKAY…I’M STILL HERE

Ursula Perry’s work is always a personal favorite and often a revelation for me; nearly every time I see her perform I learn something that feels astounding and vital. (Perhaps a hyperbolic statement, but it feels true.) Her technical skills and power are beautiful and unforced. “I’m OK…” displayed a devotedly tended and honed strength, bowing and cracking under the weight of a pain the body can’t expel. A story of treading water, of keeping the surface intact while the inside roils, trying to glimpse the thing that used to make you feel joy when the world keeps tossing salt in your eyes. Twisting and flaking into the most beautiful and fragile shapes, Perry’s solo was devastating.

Tyler Orcutt and Tiana Lovett in Efrén Corado Garcia’s “Collateral Beauty." Photo by Sharon Kain.

COLLATERAL BEAUTY

Efrén Corado Garcia’s “Collateral Beauty” was a light-hearted duet, simple and sweet, danced by Orcutt and Lovett and accompanied by Michele Medina on violin. The piece gave me the sensation of watching a ballet - something neoclassical, attuned only to music, lightness, appealing lines and a shimmering feeling. A little goes a long way with that kind of ebullient frivolity; the willful obliviousness and over-saturation of it in my own balletic background can feel exasperating, but it’s very refreshing in smaller doses. I particularly enjoyed the moment in which Orcutt won over Lovett with some jellyfish-esque grand pliés. The two flirted, they dipped, swooped, darted, and brushed softly into each other without allusion to any world beyond.

Winterdance Workshop participants in "The Color of Sand." Photo by Sharon Kain.

THE COLOR OF SAND

Following last year’s model, Emerge came at the end of RDT’s Winterdance Workshop and utilized the final piece as a showcase for the workshop’s participating dancers. This year’s workshop, unlike last year, was also an audition for the company. This seems to have drawn a larger group than previously: a good thing, but one that made for a somewhat uncomfortably tense viewing experience. The dancers did an admirable job with the crowded space and choreography that appeared overly tricky for a large group of newly-acquainted people to pull together in several days, but the “they’re-looking-at-me” tension was viscerally palpable. A more informal, workshop-dedicated showing might have been more appropriate, and still could have offered dancers a chance to both prove their abilities and partake in a rewarding performance experience.

Emily Snow lives in Salt Lake and can be seen performing with Municipal Ballet Co.  She is also a member of Durian Durian, an art band that combines indie electronica and modern dance.

Justin Bass: A Bag of Nuts

When I first saw the list of shows that loveDANCEmore would be reviewing this spring, I immediately “called” reviewing A Bag of Nuts because I love Justin Bass’s choreography. This show met my high expectations.

Upon entering the Rose Wagner, we were greeted warmly and directed through a door across the way, down a flight of stairs, and into Studio A/B. The lighting and the atmosphere were warm and soft.

Justin Bass introduced the event in a good-natured and straightforward manner.

Act I was "Walnut", which Justin described as being revamped from when it was first presented a year ago. The performance featured only small tweaks the second time around, and was as delightful as I remember it from last year.

Last year, Justin said he purposely choreographed this work to challenge areas that each featured dancer struggled with. I thought that was a great idea, and I loved how it contrasted with the common approach of featuring dancers’ strengths – both great approaches in their own ways.

"Walnut" began with the dancers informally stretching on the stage, a concept also employed in NOW-ID’s NOWHERE a couple years ago. "Walnut" progressed with choreography that incorporated the stretches, and I was glad for the way that created continuity.

The piece included solos, duos, and trios, and the three dancers flowed in and out of unified choreography. I especially loved the concept and execution of the dancers repeating a short series of movements with varying timing, so that sometimes they matched up, and sometimes they sped ahead of each other or lagged behind.

Elyse Jost had a pretty neutral vibe throughout "Walnut". Her demonstration of control with transitions from quick movements to moments of stillness and balance was impressive.

Elle Johansen seemed intense, ranging from annoyed to angry. The way she holds and moves her neck is uniquely hers. In this choreography she demonstrated attention to artistic detail with spinal undulations that were at times flowing, and at times rigid with resistance.

Tiana Lovett exuded a feminine boldness, or maybe even haughtiness; this was perfect for her excellently contrasting solo choreography, which alternated between straightforward movement and more coy gestures. A fellow audience member noted that Tiana’s interpretation made walking a worthwhile inclusion in a modern dance piece.

Act I ended with a unified snap of the fingers and fall to the floor. From the back row, Justin started the applause.

After a five minute pause, which I thought was the perfect amount of time, Act II began.

Justin’s choreographic style was the common thread that connected Act I and Act II, which otherwise didn’t seem directly related but nevertheless meshed together within the show.

The music of the second half of the show was especially noteworthy, featuring songs I would describe as sassy, spliced together with excerpts of speaking by current U.S. Republican political figures. This was well-done as far as the flow of the audio, and how the choreography flowed through the audio transitions.

In solos and duos, the cast of six performers took turns dancing in the center of a semi-circle created by the rest, who sat and watched attentively, occasionally raising a hand as if in question, or raising both hands as if in indignation. In transitions between featured dancers, the others got up and walked to a different spot in the semi-circle, which I liked as a way to keep things connected. The choreography featured a mix of awkward and sassy and demanding and proud.

The last piece within Act II included all six dancers in moments of unity and divergence. The last bit of audio was along the lines of “I think how you laughed at me just now is indicative of how the media treats women. I’m just going to ignore that. I'm bigger than that.”

I imagine some audience members wondered what Justin “meant” by Act II. I can’t speak for his true intentions, but I wonder if he was less trying to make a specific statement, and more just pointing some things out and having a chuckle.

At the end of "Walnut" last year Justin did a Q&A session, which I found to be very interesting. I wished that we had gotten to do one this time too. It’s tough for artists to know when to shut up and let the art speak versus when to let their fans in on what’s behind it all.

Overall, A Bag of Nuts was an enjoyable evening. I was pleased that the show was both interesting and aesthetically attractive – sometimes a tricky balance to find. I look forward to seeing what Justin Bass comes up with next.

Kendall Fischer currently performs with Myriad Dance. She has also enjoyed recent opportunities with SBDance, Municipal Ballet Co, La Rouge Entertainment, and Voodoo Productions, among others.

RDT: Emerge

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

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You Can Sit With Us, choreographed by Justin Bass:

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

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

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

Miasma, choreographed by Jaclyn Brown:

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

Figure it out, choreographed by Tyler Orcutt:

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

Folie a Deux , choreographed by Nicholas Cendese:

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

Ipseity, choreographed by Daniel Higgins:

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

after/ever, choreographed by Lauren Curley:

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

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

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

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

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