SUITE at Sugar Space

Salt Lake City has enjoyed its share of successful female choreographers and company directors for quite some time. However, there is no denying that the essential role of the female choreographer in modern dance has slowly evolved and is possibly dwarfed by many well-known and successful male dance makers. Of course there are many contributing factors and the discussion about what can be done is a long and complex one.

Sugar Space is playing their part in celebrating work by local female choreographers in Suite: Women Defining Space. It is the fifth year of the series, and for me, it did not fail to inspire confidence in the participating local choreographers: Norianna Diesel a local dancer and Somatic Movement Facilitator, Srilatha Singh of Chitrakaavya Dance, Joni Tuttle McDonald from BYU, and Serena Webb of Body Logic Dance.

Upon receiving the program for the evening, we were told to read the slip of paper with instructions for viewing the first dance. My instructions were to watch the piece while sitting on someone’s lap. Having arrived alone, I was happy to raise my hand when the dancers asked for volunteers to sit on stage, as they were beginning the piece. Four of us were selected to watch from this perspective, which gave me a chance to see that at least one audience member did find a lap to sit on. The two dancers each performed solos to a recording of their voice. They spoke of different things, admittedly I could understand Diesel’s better, and got more out of it with her calm demeanor, strong voice, and luscious movement quality. Both dancers performed clear, direct movements that melted at times, before inviting those of us on stage to return to our seats. We were then given a little more insight to the piece called “Perception” as the dancers asked the audience “What was it like watching this piece while noticing your breath and heartbeat, watching through the eyes of a six-year-old, sitting on your neighbor’s lap, or with one eye closed?” This revealed what the other audience members might have experienced, and gave me the sense that there was something left to ponder about the piece and Diesel’s intentions. It was a short and sweet study into individual perspective, that could have been pushed further to truly explore this idea in depth.

Srilatha Singh presented two pieces of Bharatanatyam Indian classical dance. Her first dance “Mallari” was noted in the program as being performed for temple celebrations. It was a pleasure to see four younger dancers featured, with full ceremonial costumes and makeup. They moved around the stage as a group with complex rhythmic patterns accentuated by the bells on their ankles, and complimented by the specific hand gestures and facial expressions that were easy to pick out in the intimate Sugar Space. Singh truly created something of note in her piece “Legacy,” in which she performed a solo dance to the contemporary poetry of the duo “Climbing Poetree.” Seetha Veeraghanta delivered the lines of the poem on stage in a clear and inspiring voice. It was a performance of mixing cultures and generations from the two women wearing beautiful Indian garments, while reading contemporary poetry from a smart phone, and interpreting through the movement of traditional Bharatanatyam dance movements, to the music of Ravel and Ravi Shankar. But somehow it all came together and worked, very well. The dance and spoken word shaped a piece that was beautiful, strong, delicate, and deliberate in the theme of celebrating life while overcoming challenges. The beautiful imagery from the text “Your children will sing unconquered through hurricanes” was interpreted into true storytelling through the captivating performance that Singh delivered.

“Simply Letting Be” by Joni Tuttle McDonald began with four dancers confronting the audience. The music was unsettling as an arrhythmic soundtrack, layered with the sounds of metal bowls spinning and soft piano, guided the dancers. Each dancer seemed isolated from the others until joining in partnerships dictated by manipulating each other’s body. The dancers’ beautiful lines were featured, and although the dance demonstrated the idea of finding partnership within struggle, no true relationships were formed. The piece ends sorrowfully as dancers leave the stage one by one until the final remaining dancer stops and stands with her back to the audience. I went back and forth between thinking that I wasn’t enjoying the piece to realizing that this sense of discomfort was perhaps the intent of the choreographer, succeeding in her exploration of detachment.

“Anthypophora” by Serena Webb was performed by the dancers of Body Logic. Their luscious movement was interrupted by pausing to gaze, searching into the audience or at each other. The music by local band L’Anarchiste was the impetus for the choreography. I allowed myself to just see the movement and music work together on stage, without really taking away any overall theme or story. Body Logic has an upcoming performance with the band providing live accompaniment, which will create an interesting framework to see what additional meaning comes from the dance when it is performed as part of a whole evening of work, instead of an excerpt.

In the future of modern dance, there is room for many more great choreographers, men and women. I think the most important thing for Salt Lake City is to continue supporting its vibrant community of emerging choreographers, encouraging them to continue making dance. Sugar Space offers the opportunity to see several of these dancers again during the month of February. Body Logic Dance will present “Convergence” with live music by L’Anarchiste Feb 21-22 at 7:30. Dancers Jane Jackson and Desiree Simmons from Suite also perform in co.da which is presenting “Cause a Decision” February 27-March 1st, 7:30.

Erin Romero is a choreographer and the co-director of Movement Forum in Salt Lake City. Her work was seen in the first iteration of SUITE in Spring 2010. This review is shared with 15 BYTES.

En Route Dance Festival & upcoming

Below find a review of a dance film festival brought straight to your computer by Sam Hanson. While the nature of an online festival bridges the gap between the Wasatch Front and other dance communities, it’s nice to know the festival carries a lot of connections to artists based in, or recently brought to, Salt Lake City. After checking it out consider looking at what else is up in Utah, including a casting for RDT’s LINK series presentation by Graham Brown and a Movement Forum fundraiser.

Dance’s Made to Order is an online magazine– every month it brings subscribers three new dance films. As a frequent viewer and one-time artist (March 2012 edition!), I can broadly endorse their work. Some of the films are quite good, and it’s a great way to see diverse perspectives in dance from all over the country and beyond.

Immersion in the outside world was precisely what I sought and received in watching their latest effort. Dances Made’s annual En Route Dance Festival, which ended this Sunday, is part of a growing trend in stage choreography and screen dance: temporary online exhibition (another recent example). The only piece I’d seen before was Simon Fildes and Katrina McPherson’s The Time it Takes, an homage to lush, wet Scottish landscape that screened in conjunction with the couples’s’ visit to the University of Utah earlier this year.

I found myself comparing McPherson’s work to Axolotl Collective’s Panspermia, a sci-fi work where “two aliens perpetuate a cosmic lineage”. The locations chosen for Panspermia were likely in the Mexican state of Puebla, where the Collective is based, but wherever they shot reminds me of desert lake beds of my own experience in the Western United States. It feels appropriate that aliens would do business here and that they would look at turns like orphans of the sea and animated plastic refuse. The excellent performances here remind one of the best of Alwin Nikolais’ work, though here the abstraction of the body seems less about erasure and more about the playful questions about ourselves we have always asked through imaginary animals and extraterrestrials.

A much more approachable effort, Turn Around Tango comes from Canada. There’s not much to say save that a tango performed back to back is much more fascinating than it sounds. This filmmaker has all the stylish dance-in-a-void bravado of Edouard Lock, without being so heavy handed. It’s left to Pas, a brief farce on the use of French nomenclature in ballet to further critique the supercilious. Courtney Harris and Charli Brissey make fun of classical dance in a way that only those versed in it could.

The festival also featured some work where the connection to dance was a little more obtuse. British choreographer Siobhan Davies and David Hinton brought All This Can Happen, a structuralist feature which juxtaposed creatively reframed found footage with excerpts from “The Walk”. The text, a novella by Swiss writer Robert Walser, deals with the raptures and horrors of every day life as an artist. It’s great that work like this is being reframed in a dance context, and I hope lots of people see it in this way, which beautifully demonstrates the simple choreography of the cut– the beginning and ending of a movement taken out of context becoming the way we construct the unitary power of “a singular move(ment)”.

Also very strong was Melting Justice, which was described in the program notes as “a film from the Democratic Republic of Congo…a mediation on agency vs. voyeurism that simultaneously captures instances of embodied critique while confronting the viewer with challenging questions about the passive consumption…” Petna Ndaliko Katondolo’s work was nothing like it’s art-speak byline, but his work is worth researching––  here is an artist who uses the conventions of documentary film in the age of the video to make an audience feel physically implicated as we watch (among other things) a man literally dance through oblivious traffic.

Samuel Hanson contributes regularly to loveDANCEmore and SLUG mag

En Route Dance Festival

Below find a review of a dance film festival brought straight to computer by Samuel Bennett Hanson. While the nature of an online festival bridges the gap between the Wasatch Front and other dance communities, it’s nice to know the festival carries a lot of connections to artists based in, or recently brought to, Salt Lake City. After checking it out consider looking at what else is up in Utah, including a casting for RDT’s LINK series presentation by Graham Brown and aMovement Forum fundraiser.

Dance’s Made to Order is an online magazine– every month it brings subscribers three new dance films. As a frequent viewer and one-time artist (March 2012 edition!), I can broadly endorse their work. Some of the films are quite good, and it’s a great way to see diverse perspectives in dance from all over the country and beyond.

Immersion in the outside world was precisely what I sought and received in watching their latest effort. Dances Made’s annual En Route Dance Festival, which ended this Sunday, is part of a growing trend in stage choreography and screen dance: temporary online exhibition (another recent example). The only piece I’d seen before was Simon Fildes and Katrina McPherson’s The Time it Takes, an homage to lush, wet Scottish landscape that screened in conjunction with the couples’s’ visit to the University of Utah earlier this year.

I found myself comparing McPherson’s work to Axolotl Collective’s Panspermia, a sci-fi work where “two aliens perpetuate a cosmic lineage”. The locations chosen for Panspermia were likely in the Mexican state of Puebla, where the Collective is based, but wherever they shot reminds me of desert lake beds of my own experience in the Western United States. It feels appropriate that aliens would do business here and that they would look at turns like orphans of the sea and animated plastic refuse. The excellent performances here remind one of the best of Alwin Nikolais’ work, though here the abstraction of the body seems less about erasure and more about the playful questions about ourselves we have always asked through imaginary animals and extraterrestrials.

A much more approachable effort, Turn Around Tango comes from Canada. There’s not much to say save that a tango performed back to back is much more fascinating than it sounds. This filmmaker has all the stylish dance-in-a-void bravado of Edouard Lock, without being so heavy handed. It’s left to Pas, a brief farce on the use of French nomenclature in ballet to further critique the supercilious. Courtney Harris and Charli Brissey make fun of classical dance in a way that only those versed in it could.

The festival also featured some work where the connection to dance was a little more obtuse. British choreographer Siobhan Davies and David Hinton brought All This Can Happen, a structuralist feature which juxtaposed creatively reframed found footage with excerpts from “The Walk”. The text, a novella by Swiss writer Robert Walser, deals with the raptures and horrors of every day life as an artist. It’s great that work like this is being reframed in a dance context, and I hope lots of people see it in this way, which beautifully demonstrates the simple choreography of the cut– the beginning and ending of a movement taken out of context becoming the way we construct the unitary power of “a singular move(ment)”.

Also very strong was Melting Justice, which was described in the program notes as “a film from the Democratic Republic of Congo…a mediation on agency vs. voyeurism that simultaneously captures instances of embodied critique while confronting the viewer with challenging questions about the passive consumption…” Petna Ndaliko Katondolo’s work was nothing like it’s art-speak byline, but his work is worth researching––  here is an artist who uses the conventions of documentary film in the age of the video to make an audience feel physically implicated as we watch (among other things) a man literally dance through oblivious traffic.

Samuel Hanson contributes regularly to loveDANCEmore and SLUG mag

Momentum

Momentum, the annual showcase of choreography by alumni of Ririe-Woodbury, took place this past weekend. For the first time, it was partially funded by the dance company and included on the season schedule for their fiftieth anniversary. So inclusive was this convocation, that the four performances were split into two programs. It was almost a miniature festival of fifteen dances—a smorgasbord standing in strong contrast to the thematic evenings we’re used to from this group. Much of the work looked rather collegiate, some in the sense of being immature, some simply in that they bore the mark of having been made at colleges and universities.

One of the most affable pieces was Stevan Novakovich’s “Urban Awakening.” Picture a metrosexual Daniel Nagrin, pretending to smoke a cigarette, drinking some bottled water, then trying to hail an imaginary cab. If you can imagine that, then you have a fair idea of what Novakovich was doing on stage Thursday night. Here was a prissy urbanite, the guy at Starbucks who orders twelve drinks and then immediately takes a phone call. He’s a joy to watch rendered in dance because he’s a character we love to hate.

Jillian Harris’ “In Crisi” was similarly silly but fun. Hierarchically, it’s worth noting that hers was one of four pieces set on the current company, commissioned last year by Charlotte Boye-Christensen before her departure. The piece made use of music, espresso demitasse and flamboyant gestures to evoke tired clichés of Italian-American gusto and bombast. I’m not sure why all of that was necessary, because it was a million times less interesting than watching the company engage in the complex, lush partnering that made the work worth seeing. The company looks better than ever.

“still no words” by Stephanie Nugent was a somewhat underdeveloped, but promising study of company dancers Yebel Gallegos and Alex Bradshaw. Engaging in a similar exploration of relationship and complementary performance textures was Chia-Chi Chiang’s “III”, a trio comprised of Scotty Hardwig, Florian Alberge and Yasin Fairley. Just that night I had been complaining to my companion about the pitfalls of dances with all-male casts. “III” suffered from none of the gratuitous posturing or misplaced theatricality I’d been whinging about. There was nothing obviously ingenious about this rather understated work, but it brought something out of Hardwig and Alberge that I’d never seen before–– a deep quiet, a sense of internal listening. (It was also a pleasure to be introduced to Fairley, I hope to see more of his work soon.)

The one truly ambitious work was Keith Johnson’s “The Green is the Unraveling”. As another strong male cast tenderly explored each others spheres of physical intimacy, a green rectangle slowly expanded to fill the cyc. John Allen, Juan Carlos Claudio, Efren Corado Garcia and Bashaun Williams are a quartet I’d love to watch together again. The work was an ode to four other Ririe-Woodbury men–– Paul Callihan, Robert Martinez, Lynn Walter Topovski and Dennis Wright–– who the world lost to the AIDS crisis.

Sam is a regular contributor to loveDANCEmore and SLUG mag in addition to making his own creative work. His review is posted in collaboration with 15 BYTES.

Flight of Fancy

Aerial Arts of Utah performed Flight of Fancy to a sold out Rose Wagner audience. The company’s debut was a showcase of the dancers’ impressive skills off the ground. I saw a lot of variety between the different pieces, and the performers were able to capture the nature of each apparatus for the audience. It was also refreshing for me to witness shorter pieces (11 dances in 90 minutes!) with a full range from serious to lighthearted themes. I also want to acknowledge the seamless tech team behind the scenes for a show that must have been complicated to rig and negotiate during the live performance.

There were a variety of apparatus on display, with some dancers performing on several over the course of the show. Elizabeth Stich and Amy E. Olson opened the show with the intricate Salty Sisters Trapeze. They performed in excellent unison with a variety of impossible poses that required increasingly complex partnering while one dancer was suspended from the trapeze while supporting, lifting, or being climbed upon by the other. The equally impressive duet of Stich with Trisha Paulos on fabric was able to emphasize a distance between the dancers as one performed high above the audience, and the other closer to the ground. The two dancers would also meet in the middle of the piece of fabric they shared in this mysterious piece that demonstrated strength and endurance.

To keep the program light, there was a fun performance by Nancy Simpson Carter on the aerial hoop, wearing bright colors in a reflection of childhood fantasies. Adriane Colvin was playfully awkward in her solo. It was a nice change to see her fabric moving and swinging towards the audience to begin the dance, breaking the dynamic of a purely vertical plane of movement. And Carter returned to the stage with Mikael Thelin in Just a Little Ditty, an amusing take on acroyoga and an ironic look at a partnership built on trust. I was confused about their simple choice for costumes in subdued grey that did not seem to compliment the comic mood of the performance.

A few performances were also of a more sensual nature. Amy E. Olson and Nicholas Irwin Kubilius wowed the audience while suspended from a rope. Amy danced a beautiful solo to begin the piece, but it took on new life when Nicholas joined her on stage and the two demonstrated their partnering skills. I found it interesting that the show’s female/female partnerships were equally impressive with the skills that were being performed, but the male/female duet automatically had dramatic sexual tension, either through choreographic choice, or through my own interpretation.

My favorite performances of the evening were solos by Jenny Lucas and Elizabeth Stich. Lucas was accompanied by musician Margaret Lewis on cello. Not only did the live music enhance the piece performed on fabric, but Jenny’s timing, fluid movement, and specificity were captivating. It was a beautiful performance with sudden drops, slow methodic climbing, and seamless transitions from one idea to the next. Stich mesmerized the audience with her final trapeze solo, Shedding Skin. Her choreography had a graceful strength that gave her a quality of being unreachable as she hovered above the audience, both physically and on an emotional level as well.

The final piece by Anne Kocherhans and Deborah Eppstein concluded the evening in a fitting way. The two owners of the company performed Duo Celeste on fabric. Each dancer was suspended on their own apparatus, donning sunburst unitards, designed by Valena Magill. The dance had a very ethereal quality and I was surprised at how easily I was taken into the world that these dancers created.

For me, the evening was a successful fusion of circus arts with a choreographic focus. Hopefully, the next performance will run for more than one night, and if the chatter during intermission was any indication, Aerial Arts of Utah will be getting a surge of new students soon.

Erin Kaser Romero is a local choreographer and dancer who can often be seen performing with Movement Forum.