It was always something big — RW’s 50th Anniversary Season

This weekend, Ririe Woodbury opened their 50th season with “The Start of Something Big” at the Rose Wagner. The concert celebrates the work of Shirley Ririe and Joan Woodbury while welcoming the work of Daniel Charon, the company’s new artistic director. As a whole the evening is Ririe Woodbury’s celebration of dance, one that has employed numerous choreographic approaches over the last fifty years and will continue to play a vital role in the Salt Lake arts community.

The concert opens — and finds each dance interspersed — with excerpts from “Move It” a film by Stanley and Judith Hallet featuring early members of the company. As the film begins, Shirley Ririe climbs out of a sewer and onto the city streets. From that moment it becomes clear that these women have been everywhere and done it all in even zanier outfits than we might imagine. The magical nature of the film creates a situation where anything can happen and the audience is drawn into the action of what these women have been offering. It’s truly rare that something moves a concert along so quickly or creates such a unified investment in otherwise disparate aesthetics.

Many of the works on the program are formal in the way audiences might expect. The works of Shirley and Joan, and those by their choreographic mentors Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, feature a range of specific technical markers: clear lines, turning sequences, strong spatial formations and  complex partnering. The company looked incredible  and after a few seasons of watching them explore aggressive virtuosity, it was refreshing to see them dance with such clarity, and in some cases, softness.

Despite these unifying features the worlds of these choreographic works differ greatly. “Clouds” by Shirley initiated the company’s use of dance to explore concepts for children something RW’s now well known for. The dance takes place in a sweet and sincere space where science can become magic. In a sillier turn, “Affectionate Infirmities” by Joan, takes on the use of props popular in the NIkolais tradition. The dancers perform using colorful crutches and it’s clear that while humorous, there is a complex investigation of extending the limits of the body that was unique to a generation. The dance stands up against other light repertory the company frequently features and despite being less “contemporary” than Larry Keigwin’s “80s Night” for example, the dance seems to speak more and in a timeless way.

Also by Joan, “Play It As It Rings” is a highlight of the evening. Originally made in 1970 for Limon dancers Betty Jones and Fritz Ludin, the dance utilizes fractured vignettes that culminate in a domestic dispute among dancers Alex Bradshaw and Bashaun Williams. The dance demonstrates that the “stop, start then change your clothes” aesthetic popular today was being employed over forty years ago to great effect. The narrative is so fractured it’s hard to know where to begin; whether the robotic movements characterizing interrupted intimacy,  competitive delivery of text, tortured expressions playing out slowly on a bench, or the layers of theatrical costuming shuffling back and forth in space.

The one premiere on the concert, “Everything That Changes” by Daniel Charon seems to draw on the vastness explored by the rest of the program. Utilizing a series of connections that build and disintegrate in space, Charon seems to attempt synthesizing the momentum of this company while questioning the directions in which they may find themselves moving. While it’s easy to physically map Charon’s work in context of other choreographers he’s worked with (namely Doug Varone) it seems more important to say that the dance invites us to imagine where something new might be headed. The dance suggests it could be somewhere as imaginative as the locations in the earlier mentioned film —  on a gondola above the fall trees, outside a barn with some bulls, with in water and sand, together in a way that’s unyielding.

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

performance tomorrow!

Tomorrow is the performance of a collaboration between loveDANCEmore director Ashley Anderson and visual artist Mary Sinner.

As part of the Utah Heritage Foundation Cultural Series honoring 100 Years of the Ladies’ Literary Club the two will present “dead dog song” a performance which feature silhouettes and scenery designed by Mary and revisits choreography Ashley developed at the Workspace for Choreographers in Virginia and performed at venues including the Taubman Museum of Art.

The event includes performances by local dancers Alex Bradshaw, Tara McArthur, Ari Audd, Erica Womack, Alysia Ramos and Katie Meehan but also features a pre-show by Gretchen Reynolds, a visual artist and puppeteer as well as live figure drawing of the performers by Mary Sauer, an artist currently teaching at the University of Utah.

You can read more in the Tribune, 15 BYTES and City Weekly’s Essentials.

15 BYTES will also catch you up on some events we haven’t covered in the past few weeks. Daniel Charon’s show at UMOCA as well as details on his upcoming season as Artistic Director of Ririe Woodbury is featured in the edition and the Rose Exposed is discussed in the Daily BYTES. We’ll be, as usual, posting reviews of the shows previewed at the event and sharing them with 15 BYTES.

Provo Sites: A new venue for dance in the Southern reaches

The third iteration of Provo Sites, a mobile dance series, took place last Monday at the Central Utah Gardens, which is an unassuming oasis somewhere in Orem. Choreographer Ashley Anderson, whose loveDANCEmore umbrella produces the series in partnership with Kate Monson and Kori Wakamatsu, opened the evening with “holiday”, a short solo performed by Repertory Dance Theater alum Chara Huckins. Though she’s been out of the company for two years, Huckins still dances with an understated facility that far outstrips most of her former colleagues. Monday night she wore a simple peasant dress that was the same striking green as her eyes–– the last thing revealed as she slowly rolled up through her spine from the folded over position in which “holiday” began. As she unfurled herself, tiny silver pellets fell from inside the folds of her dress. It was a miniature hailstorm, rife with metaphor, set to music from an “unmarked Christmas album”. The dancing that followed made magic out of repetition. Arms and legs reaching through familiar pathways slowly revealed something precious and strange about the lone woman on stage. It was “dance as a vehicle for the performer” at it’s best.

After “holiday”, Movement Forum lead us out of the amphitheater to an area called the gathering space which became a pedestrian traffic circle. Simply titled “an improvisation”, there was an easy, meditative quality to the whole affair. The audience, which included many sprawling families and older folks, promenaded behind the dancers. Movement Forum crawled and fell in and out of each other’s negative space with a rambling casualness that’s hard to achieve on a proscenium stage. The sun was setting, and Nick Larson of the Salt Lake Whalefishers was strumming a banjo, while crooning one of his brilliantly playful and sardonic lyrics. It was a dance for the summer. MoFo wasn’t breaking new ground here, but I think they ushered a lot of people into seeing dance in a way they’d never have signed up for if they’d had to think about it. Watching the people of Provo and Orem discover what it was to follow an unfolding dance around a corner was a pleasure in itself.

Then we arrived in the lower part of the garden where three more dances awaited us. Love duets by Kori Wakamatsu and Pat Debenham struck me as underdeveloped and predictable. Though I am sure they were a positive point of entry for many, I’ve just seen one too many dances featuring one woman, one man and two benches. Perhaps they also suffered from seeming presentational and flat after MoFo’s offering. Wakamatsu’s “Inicio”, had been commissioned by a Brazilian artist as a basis for a dance scene in an animated film. Perhaps if the final product could have been seen in tandem with the live performance, the piece might have held more interest.

The night’s most ambitious effort was Kate Monson’s “Women/Femme 10”, a suite of three dances for the formal garden and the model landscapes, which were quite literally a suburb in miniature. (The Gardens’ laudable mission is to teach the residents of Utah county how to use less water for landscaping.) In Part 1: Hand Wash in Cold, Leave Overnight, Jon Thomas stood still, facing the audience with a dead expression while the wryly comic Maylene White sipped water from a champagne flute, regarded her partner and grew increasingly exasperated with her costar’s unwillingness to dance. White’s style was jocular, even broad, but it worked surprisingly well as a vehicle for Monson’s choreographic agenda. White plucking each finger with a fork prong or sawing a butter-knife into her wrist had me thinking of much more earnest works from twentieth century art history. I was surprised to be reminded of performance artists like Martha Rosler, or even Marina Abramovic and Ohio choreographer Susan Hadley, who’s work has frequently been seen locally on Repertory Dance Theatre. The tone of this work was just right for this audience, but still carried a clear, feminist voice that had the children laughing and the crowd charged with that palpable, generative tension that means they’ve been forced to think.

Most Salt Lake City dance aficionados won’t venture down to Provo to see these shows, but they shouldn’t dismiss them. With or without us, these artists are carving out a place for themselves in an environment that looks even less like downtown Manhattan than Salt Lake City does. The attendance, enthusiasm and work were all comparable to what’s going on here in the capitol, and as someone interested in the ecology of dance, seeing that process unfold is an engaging way to spend an evening.

Sam Hanson regularly contributes to loveDANCEmore

The Wedding then the Garden Party

I said it in the June edition of 15 BYTES and I’ll say it again. While summer can be slow going for dance in Utah, things have been steadily building with concerts nearly every weekend of June and now well into July. As new projects emerge, artists capitalize on the off-season of mainstay companies and find new venues to support their work.

This weekend is just one example with NOW-ID’s inaugural performance, The Wedding, in the Masonic Temple theater. Tonight Erica Womack will be offering her take after the 7:30 performance so check back and offer your own thoughts.

On Monday, the third Provo Sites concert takes on the Central Utah Gardens in a mobile tour highlighting the areas amphitheater, formal gardens, gazebos and other gathering areas. Featuring choreography and performance by Ashley Anderson, Chara Huckins, Movement Forum, Kate Monson, Kori Wakamatsu, Pat Debenham & more, the concert offers an array of approaches and styles designed to both amplify and challenge the non-traditional spaces. From an unseasonal solo using Christmas Carols to a duet featuring a wife who dances and a husband who doesn’t, the concert offers new perspectives.

This iteration of Provo Sites has one show only! Monday the 29th; 7pm in the Central Utah Gardens; 355 West University Parkway; Free Admission. The show will take place rain or shine. If you miss Monday, it’s the third in line of a traveling series that has visited numerous unconventional spaces in the Utah Valley. 

The Wedding, in review

NOW, a brand new Salt Lake based dance company that seeks to be international and interdisciplinary, premiered their first work The Wedding to a enthusiastic and receptive crowd this past weekend.  The performance took place at the Masonic Temple, which houses an interesting in-the-round theatre.  This space bears a charge and a history of the rituals and ceremonies that are known to occur regularly.  Even walking up the many steps at the grand front entrance, flanked by stone lions statues, felt processional and added to the atmosphere of the night.  Audience members were free to pick from the three different facings of the theatre, a choice the undoubtedly affected how the movement was experienced.

The piece began with Ted Johnson, tall and calm, tracing the shape of the space, preparing both himself and the audience for what is about to take place.  Jo Blake, a former dancer for Ririe Woodbury, and Katherine Lawrence Orlowski, a Ballet West dancer, stood together, waiting for the experience to begin.  It may be assumed that the wedding was to be between Blake and Lawrence, as they have numerous duets, and both have the most developed solos.

Much of the dancing has an urgent unyielding quality, familiar textures in Boye-Christensen’s choreography.  There was also an air of solemnity and ritual, created both by the choreography, and especially by some of the music selections.  Yumelia Garcia, a Joffrey Ballet dancer, performed a solo that felt particularly severe and final, her body and performance at times rigid and uncompromising. The duets between Lawrence and Blake were cool and precise, displaying Lawrence’s strong lines and technical abilities.  They danced with a sense of execution and drive.

Blake had a solo that was both urgent and yielding, and served as a needed exhale to the mounting tension of this ritual.  He danced with beautiful abandon, allowing the movement to seep in his bones and sincerely be affected.  The moments of calculated uneven timing made familiar movement motifs seem new again.

Four Groomsmen flood the space, immediately filling the space with a non-dancer non-performer energy.  At times this pedestrian aspect of the piece works, particularly when the movement is kept to walking patterns, standing still or shifting from side to side as if in a real wedding, and at times their inclusion is alternatingly awkward and obvious, such as the moment when they pull flashlights out and begin to menacingly shine lights on a frantic Blake.

Later, a duet between Blake and Johnson gave the warmth and sentiment that some imagine and expect when a wedding is what is at stake; it is curious that this tenderness was not more explored between the two dancers (Blake and Orlowski) that were presumably the two that were undertaking the nuptials.  It is in this duet that we see Johnson, as he faces Blake, pass onto Blake his knowledge or blessing through a series of gestures.  It was striking to see these two men move and breathe together on stage.  They both are able to perform without the shell that sometimes encases a performer.

The last section of the piece includes the four dancers coming together as one united group.  This is the one part of the piece that felt choreographically rushed or underdeveloped.  The ceremony and ritual is climaxing, and just as soon as the audience catches on that the end is perhaps near, all but one are on the raised stage, arranged by the installation and four placed chairs.  Johnson, again marking a change in time and space, giving importance to what is being witnessed, quickly finishes the ritual with embodied and solemn movement.  And then the lights go to black, and similar to the events after two people experience the lightening quick change of marriage: the audience claps, congratulations are exchanged, and the crowd continues with their evening.

Erica Womack is a Salt Lake based choreographer. She currently teaches at SLCC.