RDT's Women of Valor

This weekend’s performance of “Women of Valor” is the latest in a long line of community outreach efforts by Repertory Dance Theater (RDT). From educational programming to the recent “Green Map Project,” which considered environmental efforts through art-making, making dance accessible to nuanced groups within the general public has become a central part of RDT’s mission.

This recent effort is an attempt to gear dance performance towards military issues. Because these issues might cause some discomfort for someone who has never served in the military, nor has a strong relationship to family stories of those who have, I invited Melanie DeJulis, an old friend who served as a Staff Sgt. in the US Army Reserves from 2003-2012 and who was deployed to Iraq, to join me.

Together we watched a range of dances, old and new, that consider issues of military service, accompanied by dramatic monologues narrating experiences of women including medics, early Women’s Army Corps members and well known figures like Tammy Duckworth. By and large, Melanie enjoyed the concert saying that she felt access to some of the imagery and that the topical nature helped her to understand and relate to the performances. Yet, Melanie also notes that, while thought-provoking, the concert seemed to “dance around women in service,” favoring nurturing women over female warriors. She’s right. It’s a part of Utah’s modern dance history which often highlights women in extremely difficult, yet passive roles.

One exception in this particular program is Lynne Wimmer’s “The Mechanic,” danced and spoken by Toni Lugo. While architecturally designing the space, Lugo expertly narrates the experience of a petite woman serving as a mechanic. Using an informal, direct text as a springboard for gesture and phrasing unites the interests of both military and civilian audiences. The text also enables Wimmer to hint at the more potent topics of sexual harassment as well as casual, unintentional sexism.

Despite relegating women’s experience to the more commonly discussed roles of family, Abby Fiat’s work “A Mother’s Farewell” also uses the inclusion of text to success. While most works in “Women of Valor” rely on abstraction to convey violence and grief, Fiat’s work includes Anne Decker narrating the voice of a mother, who has lost her son, describing her childhood experience visiting the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Rosy Goodman, Katie Winder & Sarah Donohue make the narrative multiple, and therefore collective, as they propel the text through space and physically ponder loss.

As enjoyable as a piece like Fiat’s makes “Women of Valor,” my companion’s observation about the nature of these dances persists: for all the consideration of women in service, through both movement and text, the dancing doesn’t seem very different from RDT’s normal repertory. Joanie Smith’s “Bolero” is a good example as it’s one of numerous works she has contributed to the RDT archive. “Bolero” is gorgeous but with a cast featuring men and women the virtuosic and building nature of the piece has less to do with current debates of women’s role in combat and more to do with historical notions of modern dance partnering. Audiences may sense that the military costumes could easily be replaced, shifting the content away from the objectives of “Women of Valor.”

Susan Hadley’s “Commonplace” is another piece which leaves space for contemplation. Witnessing the dancers engage in ritual mourning is moving but causes one to wonder what resonance the imagery would have had to a person who had seen someone shot, whether at war or in their neighborhood, and what dance might do to bridge the divides we feel interpersonally, war or no.

Ashley Anderson directs loveDANCEmore programs as part of "ashley anderson dances." 

Sample Tracks, an unreview

Before you read on I want to get out of the way that I think you should go see Sample Tracks at Sugar Space today (Saturday). In this writing I problematize the show without really describing it but I think it’s worth seeing.

I started this blog with numerous objectives. One was to find a place for dissenting voices and another was to find a place for documenting emerging voices. Both have happened, I think, with varying degrees of success. But tonight I watched Sample Tracks at Sugar Space and wondered why the audience was so scarce and why audiences in general aren’t as engaged by new work as by historic, and often more repetitively programmed, dance. Before I get ahead of myself I don’t think it’s an either/or situation, you can watch both sorts of dance, among others, but the issue seemed prominent tonight — the issue where we, as a general public, value perceived mastery rather than inquiry. That issue is not always the case, so before my imagination bombards me with the exceptions that might be noted, I’ll just say that regardless of them it’s simply still a majority view.

Sam Hanson, Leah Nelson with Cortney McGuire, and Movement Forum, are my peers. They are young artists working in SLC and they made things to be presented as part of Sample Tracks this weekend. Some people tonight saw their works as incredibly fresh, invigorating and unlike typical fare. Others saw them as haphazard and not very virtuosic. Neither group is right or wrong but that is beside the point; I could write about what each artist or group made and how I feel about it but it doesn’t seem really helpful. That sort of writing wouldn’t get at the problems I think we are all feeling in the current moment, where we all choose to watch dance when it’s convenient and not when it is complicated.

There are dances I enjoyed tonight and dances I didn’t. But I left with the understanding that I can’t expect dances to improve if the conditions for dance-making don’t improve. If, as part of a community, I choose to watch something that is cool by virtue of being European or being well-regarded in a long ago newspaper, I miss out on what the people around me are trying to make. Similarly, if I don’t start to comprehend the deficits left between academic institutions and presenting organizations in the city I can never make sense of why people with so few resources are unable to give dances the time they need to develop while also managing paying jobs among other facets of personal life. Some projects step in to close the gaps (whether intermittent programming such as this or others in the city, including those run by loveDANCEmore) but if, at the end, there is no audience to see the work and reverberate their energy, their questions and their interpretations, how can we imagine this will grow?

Of course in current funding models that is up to the artists and the assessment of tonight’s show is as simple as better marketing. But I think that it’s harder than that. I think it’s about the value we are placing on our fellow choreographers and the time they are worth. I think it’s about the expectations we’ve cultivated rather than the material we are seeing. I think it’s about us investing in ourselves before imagining that the general public ought to.

I will probably write more about this later. And, for the record, I think those who have seen the show should leave their own commentary whether about the work or otherwise. I don’t think I have all the answers, I just think I’m mapping the terrain that we all see but maybe haven’t begun to describe.

Ashley Anderson directs loveDANCEmore projects as part of "ashley anderson dances" 

Dance Theater Coalition's "Microdance"

Earlier this week I wrote a preview for 15 BYTES about MicroDance; a performance that tasks choreographers with making dances for a 32-square foot stage in the Blackbox Theater of the Rose. Audiences view the work in the round and because of the limited seating, I am writing my review from tonight’s dress rehearsal. While a rehearsal lacks the vibrancy of a packed house, it certainly showcased the intimacy that DTC hoped to achieve with the use of this new format.

The evening opens with The Perfect Pirouette made by Ai Fujii Nelson for Juan Carlos Claudio. Juan Carlos spends the piece avoiding the task of one pirouette opting instead to warm up, discuss what teachers have always been saying to him (up!) and use the audience to demonstrate “spotting.” For as much as the piece uses dance vocabulary, I think it will read to a larger audience. Juan Carlos shows, in a purely physical way, how even the most simple movements are constructed from the body with all its idiosyncrasies. Having watched Juan Carlos perform numerous times with Ririe Woodbury and SB Dance I thought I was familiar with his dancing but up close and under the choreographic eye of Ai Fujii, I get to see so many more interesting aspects to how he initiates movement, how he describes it and also a window into how he experiences it. The Perfect Pirouette doesn’t interrupt my expectations of concert dance as the marketing suggests but it does something better — it distills and magnifies them.

Jerry Gardner & Kimberly Schmit have similarly contemplative works but rather than using text they rely on visual images. For Schmit those are created using small lights to illuminate the performance and for Gardner a projected floor and collapsable pole that extends beyond the stage. The slow nature of each piece wasn’t always matched by myself as an audience member. After watching so many dances with the same ambient music and general flow I’m not sure I was giving back to them the energy their performances were offering me.

Both Impact by Ashley Mott and Vida Ride by Emily May utilize traditional idioms within partnering and I wondered whether the works would be different if made for the larger stage. While certainly consolidated, they maintained a consistent energy with one of the Wasatch Front’s more common threads — matching virtuosity with emotionally laden subtext. Although I didn’t see the space completely transformed there were many moments to enjoy. In Ashley’s duet Efren Corado and Sofia Gorder were fluid and engaging and being so close revealed the delicate transfers of weight that audiences may not always notice from a distance.

Each piece on the concert invited my curiosity about “ten tiny dances” the Portland-based series this event was modeled after. As a biannual event their (slightly higher) platform has been moved to sites beyond the theater space. With the diverse casts and methods curated by DTC I know that the MicroDance series could similarly expand in numerous ways, all of which I would welcome enthusiastically. The more I considered each dance as “site non-specific” and let my imagination roam to a place I could see the work again (a hillside, a seashore, a parking lot, my laundry room) the more I knew there is more micro-dancing to be done in SLC.

Ashley Anderson runs this blog as part of her 501(c)3, ashley anderson dances

Bowfire in Park City

Bowfire, which came to the George S. & Dolores Dore Eccles Center for Performing Arts on March 8, is advertised as Flying Fiddles, Stepping Feet, Glorious Voices.  The fiddles were definitely flying, but the stepping feet and glorious voices were few and far between.

While there might not have been many numbers with step dancing in them, the little dancing there was was quite good.  The two step dancers were Linsey Beckett and Stephanie Cadman and each danced in two numbers by themselves and two numbers together.  Their styles were a bit different; Beckett seemed to be a more traditional step dancer while Cadman had hints of rhythm tap dance in her style.

Cadman stood out a bit more to me than Beckett.  She had a nice “call and response” section with the drummer.  The drummer would drum out a beat and Cadman responded with the same rhythms on her feet.  They would keep trying to one up another, making their rhythms harder and harder.  And in true tap dance fashion, Cadman performed some fun steps that I am going to try to “steal”.  But arguably the most impressive thing that both dancers did was when they fiddled and danced at the same time.  They were traveling about the stage, turning and jumping around, and yet they never missed a single beat.

Overall, both dancers were energetic and caught the audience’s attention.  The most unfortunate thing was that many of their sounds were lost because the stage was not equipped well to capture tap sounds.  Sitting in the front row it was sometimes hard to hear their sounds.  I can’t imagine their sounds traveled well to the back of the theater.

So, if you are looking to go to a dance show, Bowfire is not it.  If you are looking to go hear some good fiddling with a bit of good dancing thrown in, then look no further.

Carly Anderson is a longtime tap dancer who teaches classes for Janet Gray Studios. She also works at the Marriott Library.

co.da's Romance Novel

Last night co.da confirmed what I noticed at their first concert last year; they are a collective of strong women who know that if you want to be a dancer in this cultural climate you may just have to make the dances yourself. The cooperative company is made up of adept movers who are genuinely invested in the choreographic processes of their peers. But you do get the impression that on the whole, they just want to be dancing, a lot.

This comes across most in the guest work of Camille Litalien, assistant professor from Utah State. The dancers come alive, divergent approaches to performance presence notwithstanding, and show us that their primary focus is navigating the work of others.

But that’s not to say that Camille’s work has the most choreographic legitimacy. In fact, it’s the work of Ariane Audd and Shira Fagan that stand out for me as an audience member. Ariane fostered excellent performances by Jane Jackson & Emily Weaver who truly took risks within the expected structure of women dancing to Billie Holiday. Shira Fagan’s “The Breakup” also transformed the somewhat predictable dance where women act sad and find empowerment through a gestural phrase on a bench. But the choreography sticks to its idea really well and the dancers do too, so it doesn’t seem cheesy or one-off, “The Break-up” is both honest and interesting.

These two works suffered the least from an attempt to fit into the overall theme of the concert, Romance Novel. While a theme helped centralize audience expectations, and certainly elicited laughs as each co.da member narrated a passage from a particularly odd pirate romance between pieces, it also caused some dances to deviate from from their choreographic objectives.

Anne Marie Robson Smock shared her work in progress not too long ago and it began a really poetic system which challenged idioms found in backup-dancing and music videos. As the dance evolved the additions, including a cardboard fake boyfriend and lots of popular guilty pleasure music, began to take away from the bold spirit of the first iteration. She concluded on a high note with a sweet and sad dance to the Magnetic Fields where Temria Airmet is seen as simultaneously confident and vulnerable.

Annie’s work spoke to a larger concern I had about the program. There is an alternating pleasure I take in watching people joyously and humorously dance alongside a nagging feeling that maybe co.da could take themselves more seriously. That isn’t to say address deeper concepts or include more ambient music (please don’t! never!) but instead to follow their own instincts rather than try to create themes or jokes that they imagine the audience will respond to. Some of those instincts might be funny or include allusions to The Bachelor but I think others would not. I think that having a guest choreographer also downplays the exceptionally earnest efforts made by all co.da members to grow as choreographers and dancers.

Based on the enthusiasm of the audience for each work I would say my criticism may be an outlier, but it is something I look forward to investigating in the next iteration as the group comes even more into their own ways of making and doing.

Ashley Anderson directs loveDANCEmore as part of her non-profit, ashley anderson dances.