Ballet West's Innovations

Because I’m invested in watching the choreographic process unfold, Innovations has always been one of my favorite Salt Lake City concerts. I find it significant that Ballet West supports the emergence of new methods in dance-making by creating a format for company members to develop new works and it’s a format I wish other companies would take up. Other than “Momentum” a Ririe-Woodbury alumni concert which has been absent for two years, Salt Lake organizations often form clear boundaries between choreographer and performer.

For Ballet West, “Innovations” is a time to break down those distinctions and offer a glimpse into the way each performer is engaged with choreography as well as their ability to propose concepts and a budget to the company. For six years the results have been varied and the past two weeks were no exception. On one immaculate white floor and with complex lighting by Nicholas Cavallaro, patrons could see works by Christopher Ruud, Easton Smith, Christopher Anderson, Adrian Fry and one guest artist, Jodie Gates.

Two highlights were Ruud’s revival of “Trapped” and Easton Smith’s premiere of “Mechanism”. When I first saw “Trapped” in 2011 I felt it was overwhelmed by the score despite an interesting use of space where solos and duets emerged from a confining group structure. This iteration was much more clearly realized but with the same freshness exhibited in the premiere. It was nice to watch him make choices about the work over time and find brevity as well as precision.

Smith’s premiere exceeded his efforts from his last year’s “With You”. Through the two dances his interest in drama was clear but this year the scope of his choreography extended to staging and beyond performance presence. Bringing the lighting structures onto the stage and having the transitions of the dancers take place in the audience space was bold. His choice of costuming was not as clear and much like Adrian Fry’s use of props in “Spun” it revealed that, as with “Trapped” there is work to do beyond these first performances.

While a guest artist, Jodie Gates began her career as most of these choreographers did, while dancing for professional companies. The dancers engage in her rapidly shifting “Mercurial Landscape” with sheer enthusiasm and the dance provides a great cap to the evening with lively partnering, fluid use of space and deep musicality.

Jodie’s work did have me asking where the women of Ballet West were in the choreographic ranks. In past years Emily Adams’ works have been some of the audience favorites but the overarching lack of women’s choreographic ideas speaks to formal traditions of ballet and how there is still much work to do when it comes to modes of representation. Whether it’s coincidence that there were no women in the company interested, it’s worth mentioning that last week at New York’s Danspace Project Katy Pyle tackled these issues and more with her premiere of Ballez, while the BYU Museum of Art showcased women choreographers and Sugar Space prepares their fourth SUITE, a program exclusively for women choreographers.

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

HereAfterHere

Tandy Beal’s HereAfterHere: A Self-Guided Tour of Eternity aims to engage the audience in a conversation about death.  However, the performance is so full of the joy of life, music, movement and creativity that at times death is left in the wings, although still close enough to remind the audience to appreciate all that’s being offered.

The concert is a multi-arts event incorporating dance, video, music, spoken word, theater, magic, humor, and more.  It uses a variety of very creative and effective devices to convey the ephemeral quality of life.  One of the most striking is the use of two levels of “shadow boxes” in which performers appear, then disappear.  These are covered with a transparent screen onto which video can be projected, allowing a mixture of live and video performances.

The choreography, by Beal, who also dances and serves as a guide to the many layers of activity, is excellent, and evokes the wide variety of religions and cultures whose views on death form the backbone of the event.  The dancers are refreshingly diverse, with a variety of ethnicities, body types and ages represented.  Of particular note are a stunning solo by Chien Ying-Wang and the ensemble, all dressed in white, performing a longer, more complex final piece.

The video is a bit predictable, with scenes of stars, galaxies, and someone swimming towards the light.  However, the videos of ordinary people talking about what they believe will happen after death are at times humorous and at times deeply moving.

While humor can be helpful at breaking the ice, communicating things indirectly, and lightening a topic some people find distressing, it is at times distracting.  The show would also benefit from some newer humor instead of tired old jokes we’ve all read online too many times.

The soundscape, by Jon Scoville, is effective and provides subtle openings into the topics using a variety of motifs including the voices of children and babies, thunder, and even subway noises to represent the underworld.  Unfortunately, it sometimes drowned out the voices of the actors.

The performance, which runs about an hour and 45 minutes could use some tightening and a slightly faster pace.

Despite these quibbles, HereAfterHere is an effective, thoughtful, well-conceived, extremely creative look at an unusual topic that is rarely discussed in the arts.  And Beal, through her words and choreography, invites us to explore death and what may follow with open hearts and open minds.

Sarah Thompson is a retired physician and psychiatrist, as well as a writer and a fan of the arts. Her writing has been published in a variety of magazines and textbooks and she is currently working on a short story and a novel.

Ririe Woodbury's, "One"

“One…” presented by the Ririe Woodbury Dance Company runs from April 25-27 at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center. This year the company’s season has acted as a countdown towards their 50th anniversary. It has also been the last season for Artistic Director Charlotte Boye-Christensen as well as veteran member Jo Blake. Included in the program were two pieces from 2005, Alicia Sanchez’s “If My Right Hand Would Say What My Left Hand Thought” as well as Boye-Christensen’s “Bridge”. Also included and premiered on Thursday evening was German native Johannes Wieland’s “one hundred thousand” which was created on the company last fall.

The show was a marathon for the dancers with the entire company utilized in each piece. Sanchez’s “If My Right Hand Would Say What My Left Hand Thought” demonstrated the company’s physicality in a way they have become known for. The piece was comprised of seemingly unrelated vignettes each ending unresolved and paving the way for a new story. The material was at once quite personal and then uncomfortably distant. As the relationships between the dancers were formed and destroyed, I had a difficult time understanding my own relationship to the dancers as an audience. Sanchez made occasional use of breaking the fourth wall, but this decision seemed to leave me less involved than expected. The work certainly had a story to tell; I just could not understand it given the language the dancers were speaking.

Following this was Boye-Christensen’s “Bridge” set to a fast past and engaging score by John Adams. To be quite frank, I have never been the biggest fan of Boye-Christensen’s style and normally find her material vague and tedious. “Bridge” however was anything but. It acted as less of a bridge into the future and more of a cannon ball. While it certainly had her signature, I found the piece to be thoroughly engaging and surprising. There were moments that were private and ones that were quite explosive. It was a seamless homage to the past with an urgency and expectancy of the future. I felt that this was a successful farewell from both Charlotte to us and the dancers to her.

Following intermission the dancers completed the daunting task of performing Wieland’s “one hundred thousand”. Though the format of the piece itself was not pleasing to me, I must commend the dancers on their accomplishment of such a production. This company has never been said to be lacking in guts and gusto, and this was more evident than ever in Wieland’s work. The piece itself utilized many theatrical elements that in my mind are becoming quite kitsch. This along with a confusing array of music left me feeling quite alienated as an audience though the work itself was compelling, making me want more. I felt no resolution, and perhaps not even a clear message from the work, but what was evident was that it was courageously inhabited by the dancers and ferociously honest. With little room for error, the movement was raw and one could sense a real camaraderie between the dancers.

The Ririe Woodbury Dance Company has launched itself headfirst into the next phase of its life. Presenting such an energetic and dynamic program leaves me wondering what the new face of the company will look like. There are two more chances to see “One…” at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center tonight and tomorrow both at 7:30.

Katherine Adler is an intern for loveDANCEmore. She will be graduating from the University of Utah with a BFA in Modern Dance.

some thoughts on some spaces

This writing is one of many “non-reviews” that I’ve tended to post on this blog. It’s not a critical look at the craft of dance-making; instead, it’s a focused exploration of the ways in which dance can be experienced here, in Salt Lake City, and the kinds of connections that makes me consider.

Tonight, April 14th, I felt lucky to see Ririe-Woodbury perform some excerpts at the Cathedral of the Madeline, a clearly beautiful space which has housed a lot of dancing over the years, mostly that by children.

I enjoyed myself not only because the space and the performers are always beautiful, but also because it challenged my expectations of Charlotte Boye-Christensen’s choreography and helped me to explain my feelings about works by Johannes Wieland, and others.

It’s not a huge secret that I’ve personally come to find Charlotte’s work repetitive over the years she has served as Artistic Director of the company. The lull I find in that repetition has prevented me from seeing what many friends and peers respect as a strong physicality and an unyielding determination in complex collaborations. Watching her work tonight in the Cathedral was a departure because, for the first time, I experienced the intimacy that others claimed to always see in her partnering. Without the farce of a cyc or bright gels I saw the performers as grounded in a real space, in a real time and with one another. Their glorious shadows illuminating the walls were just the icing.

Each work was distilled to the smallest excerpts and accompanied by interludes on the guitar by Jon Yerby which helped me to find easiness as an audience member. The situation helped me to see the dances not as the “masterful” work that the marketing always claims but instead as honest and reflective work.

There were times I laughed of course because the imagery so frequently resembled a crucifixion and while I wouldn’t think twice in a theater it was curious how and why certain images come to be in certain spaces and how we can never predict the associations made when our circumstances shift. There were times that shifting circumstance also caused be great discomfort, particular in a preview of a new piece by Johannes Wieland.

Stylized domestic violence is a brand of modern dance that I started to think that only I was seeing. I had begun to wonder whether the persistent, aggressive, heterosexual partnering which so often features the flung female body is only troubling to me. When I watched it enacted in the Cathedral, as part of this work the changing context revealed to me that I wasn’t making it up, that so much dance really does center on the premise of replicating physically the trouble we find in our personal relationships, no matter what larger projections it means about the bodies of the women and men involved.

Thankfully I didn’t leave with only that feeling of expectations confirmed, I also got to be surprised which was worth it.

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

Salt Lake Municipal Ballet at Sugar Space

Below is Sarah Thompson’s take on the Municipal Ballet Co. at Sugar Space,originally published by 15 BYTES. We are excited to share her writing and also that more collaborations are on the horizon with 15 BYTES. While the details are still in flux, you can expect to see more dance writing on 15 BYTES and more contributing writers to the loveDANCEmore pool in the coming year.

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Sunset District, by Salt Lake City’s newest dance group, Municipal Ballet Co., debuted at Sugar Space Thursday evening. Formed by Sugar Space artist-in- residence Sarah Longoria, a graduate student in ballet at the University of Utah, Municipal Ballet Co. hopes to provide an outlet for ballet artists to create and perform their own work for a more diverse audience.  The company also hopes to transcend the stereotype of ballet being old-fashioned, elitist and boring.

Sunset District accomplishes both goals beautifully, with ten live dances and two dance films, more than can be reviewed here. From the first piece, “Adrift,” which introduces all nine of the company’s members, it’s obvious that this is not traditional ballet. Dressed in modern dance attire and soft shoes, the dancers gently guide the audience into the performance with a strongly balletic opener by Longoria that still manages to signal that this is something new, and provides an opportunity to get a feel for each dancer. This segues seamlessly into Longoria’s sparkling duet, featuring dancers David Riskin and Stacie Riskin.

Kaya Wolsey’s “She was not alone,” which follows, ventures further into contemporary dance, with dancers clad in black shorts and socks, and features a much more contemporary movement vocabulary and more physical interaction among the dancers.

The remainder of the program flows gracefully through a wide variety of approaches to ballet, including solos, storytelling, intensely emotional work, and lighthearted, jazzy fun. Of particular note are “The Crowd,” choreographed by Sarah Judd and featuring Saena Fukui, Eve Allen’s “Psychotic Girl”, and Ellie Hanagarne’s heartbreaking and heartbreakingly beautiful “Inverted Out” featuring the remarkable Eri Nishihara, the only dancer to appear in toe shoes.

Interspersed with the live dances are two films by Ben Estabrook.  His “Rebirth” is a lovely minimalist short, choreographed by Holly Martin and featuring the impressive Jessica Liu, accompanied only by the sounds of her shoes scraping the floor and her own breathing.

Many of the dancers also serve as choreographers, and every dance succeeds in holding the audience’s attention and offering a new take on what ballet has to offer.  The dancers are technically accomplished and the music selection is diverse and as close to perfect as one could hope.

Municipal Ballet Co. fills a much-needed niche in the Salt Lake dance scene offering a high-quality, accessible complement to the more traditional Ballet West, as well as to the city’s thriving contemporary dance companies.

Municipal Ballet Co.’s Sunset District will be performed again Friday evening, April 12, at 7:30 pm at Sugar Space.

Sarah Thompson is a retired physician and psychiatrist, as well as a writer and a fan of the arts. Her writing has been published in a variety of magazines and textbooks and she is currently working on a short story and a novel.