Queer Spectra Arts Festival

Pictured in photo carousel above: Performers in the Queer Spectra Arts Festival, photos by MotionVivid.

“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” - José Muñoz

How might writing about a queer (an adjective) festival queer (a verb) ideas and expectations surrounding arts criticism?

What if the writing resisted any imposed order or conventional sequencing?

What if instead of prose it became a collage of impressions and concepts?

Commonwealth Studios was home to the Queer Spectra Arts Festival on Saturday, May 25, but in many ways the festival began weeks prior, with daily postings on social media about the festival’s artists (including photographers, a ceramicist, dancers, painters, video-makers, poets, and musicians). Every aspect of the multi-modal festival, founded by Dat Nguyen, Emma Sargent, Aileen Norris, and Molly Barnewitz, deepened awareness and opportunities to reflect on art-making and our identities.

Queer Spectra Arts Festival co-founders (from left to right) Aileen Norris, Dat Nguyen, Emma Sargent, and Molly Barnewitz, pictured at Commonwealth Studios. Photo by Nora Lang.

Bookended by a keynote that began at 1:30 p.m. and a post-show discussion that ended at 9:30 p.m., the festival was a mosaic of propositions, images, and questions. Alexandra Barbier’s opening lecture beautifully traced the contours of queer theory, and began by asking us to move the rows of chairs we occupied into a big oval, so she could occupy its center. She spoke about how the word “queer” signals “a state of being and a way of living” that challenges “compulsory thoughts.” Barbier used Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line regarding obscenity and pornography - “I know it when I see it” - as a way of pointing to the contingency of “queer.” As she explained, the word exists as “an active verb, an insult, a reclaimed slur…” This porosity makes “queer” a great partner to “performance,” a word that similarly points to a way of being that can challenge or subvert dominant points of view.

Barbier suggested that queerness engages whiteness by challenging its dominant identity markers: “white,” “hetero-,” “cis-,” and “middle class.” Towards the end of her talk, Barbier theatrically unscrolled a list of 10 questions that the festival’s founders had posed to artists submitting work to be considered. It began with “What does it mean to belong?” and included “What does it mean to be you in the context of larger communities that you may or may not belong to?” and ended with “What do you long for?”

What if queerness is a challenge to any system of oppression, not only regarding gender and sexuality, but also race, class, ethnicity, and ability? As Clare Croft writes, “queer dance, at its best, is in conversation with and often in productive overlap with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial artmaking, activism, and scholarship.”[1] Moments of disciplinary overlap made the strongest impression on me during the nine hours I spent at the festival. They opened up the possibilities of different attunements.

In his video “Them and Me,” Nate Francis presents himself, at first alone onscreen, wearing white shorts and wrapping red string around the skin of his torso, arms, and legs. Two more people wearing white outfits, like attendants or orderlies, join the wrapping ritual, each with a spool of white string. Over the course of the 45-minute performance, Francis is immobilized by the wrapping, the string functioning like accumulating binds that bend his body into a crouched position. When I asked him about the video, Francis shared that it was an assignment developed in a course by Kelsey Harrison at the University of Utah, where he studies sculpture and photography. Aligned with durational performances by Stelarc and by Marina Abramovic, Francis’s video uses his body to comment on societal oppressions and strictures. Although not created for the festival per se, “Them and Me” spoke to the power of art, and the importance of university courses like Harrison’s, to probe questions of identity and perceptions of our bodies.

During the post-show discussion at the festival’s end, Francis wondered about “queer” art that not only “resists” but also “celebrates” possibilities and potentialities. His words reminded me of a quote from Munoz, who defines potentiality not through a binary of actuality and potentiality, but instead: “Unlike a possibility, a thing that simply might happen, a potentiality is a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense.” Performance is a generative place for opening such futurities.

In contrast to the sense of restriction generated by Francis’s video, a duet choreographed by Alexandra Barbier, for Barbier and Colleen Barnes, approached the question of queerness through potentiality: can a duet between two women who appear platonic, not romantic, be “queer”? Aptly titled “Well, is it?,” this duet featured the women in floral dresses with tulle that suggested outfits worn to a 1950s cocktail party. Barnes wore pearls. The costumes themselves were not unfamiliar for a dance performance, but coupled with the music by Arvo Pärt, there was a compelling strangeness. J. Jack Halberstam writes about “queer” as referring to “non-normative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time.”[2] Juxtaposition of the vintage costumes and contemporary movement made me curious about the precision in the dancers’ focus and gaze. Unlike much concert dance that veers towards excess and oversaturation, there was a coolly understated quality in their performance.

Barbier’s choreography is subversively subtle and resistant. Shifting from more Apollonian qualities at the beginning, to swirling falls to the floor that suggested Dionysian rituals, the pair ended by calmly lighting their cigarettes and asking, “Well, is it?” Leaving the question unanswered let us, as their audience, fill the empty space. Was the cigarette at the end of the duet a kind of synecdoche for post-coital bliss? Is dancing ever divorced from some kind of pleasure for its artists and audiences? Refreshing in its refusal to subscribe to familiar movement vocabularies, the duet was a captivating blurring of full-bodied expression with quotidian gestures.

If “belonging” was a theme of the festival, “Well, is it?” signaled the importance of artists belonging-in-difference, of carving out their own definitions of “queer” rather than assimilating. The festival’s discussions were as thought-provoking as the artists’ work and one question in particular, from Samuel Hanson during a Q & A with the artists, still percolates as I write this review (this is a paraphrase): “As someone who is interested in Salt Lake City communities, I wonder what lineages, queer or otherwise, you situate yourself in and how they may be different from lineages of San Francisco or New York?"

A couple days prior to the festival, its founders appeared on KRCL’s RadioActive. Dat Nguyen spoke about obstacles he faced in his university courses: “In my dance education, identity was separate from the work, but for me identity is never removed from performance.” His words made me think of how entrenched whiteness has become in dance settings, to the point where identities, and their disproportionate access to representation, are seemingly ignored.

All movement and all performances emanate from people, contexts, and communities. Gerald Casel, in “Activating Whiteness” by Rebecca Chaleff, explains, “there is no such thing as pure movement for dancers of color… One of the assumptions that postmodern formalism arouses is that any body has the potential to be read as neutral - that there is such a thing as a universally unmarked body. As a dancer and choreographer of color, my body cannot be perceived as pure. My brown body cannot be read the same way as a white body, particularly in a white cube.”[3]

During the festival, Dat Nguyen presented a workshop called “Looking at Queer Experience Through Performative Collage.” He prefaced the lecture-demonstration with a little of his own biography (he grew up in Vietnam and moved to the States at age 19) and danced throughout his lecture, a kinetic background of fluid sequencing and refined stillnesses for his statements and insights. What if queering is resisting dominant modes of discourse or delivery?

This would explain why I was drawn to Dillbilly’s “Winged Refugee” set, with its arrangement by Dillbilly and Rhonda Kinard. They are queering a conventional concert format wherein musicians tour and sing for isolated communities, and instead are collecting stories from working class people at each place they visit, then sharing them with audiences at their next locations. In this way they are creating “a map of oral histories” that focuses on experiences of people who identify as queer, POC, non-binary, and trans. Two of the stories shared during the festival came from the Bay Area (Dillbilly is based in Oakland) and featured photos by Kinard. Their multi-sensory evocation was straightforward, compelling, and lush, with Dillbilly’s crystalline voice and Kinard’s bass guitar reverberating long after the songs ended.

In “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” Jasbir K. Puar addresses questions of identity and corporeality in terms of “assemblages” that “allow us to attune to intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities. Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information.”[4]

The festival’s closing conversation grappled with complexities of a “queer” festival that offers a designated space for work that wants to be seen through this lens. If there are multiple ways to define “queer,” does such a festival limit its aesthetics or representations? Artists responded by speaking of the gratitude they felt for the festival and its curation. Rhonda Kinard added, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Others spoke to the power of creative expression that comes from a place of discomfort or dissensus.

Singer/actor/poet Alborz Ghandehari, who delivered a phenomenal poem called “A Politics of Desire,” spoke about his own performance that night which traversed scenes of the 1979 Revolution in Iran, sexual longing, living as an immigrant, and the horrors of war. Such multiplicity - or “assemblage” in Puar’s theories - resonates with a queerness that both challenges and accepts. Queer as potentiality, as the “if only” that Ghandehari translated from Persian: “I long for this, but now it cannot be.”

“If only” speaks to an idea of “queer,” as feeling or seeing “beyond the quagmire of the present,” in the words of Munoz. In Cruising Utopia, Munoz writes about the role of the arts as “identifying certain properties that can be detected in representational practices helping us to see the not-yet-conscious.”[5]

If I personally associate queerness with undermining oppressive structures, redistributing access and resources, and building power from the ground up, then I think it’s important to remember, in the words of thomas f. defrantz, “we don’t all get to be, do, or make queer. if anything, the unmet challenge for queer theory and queer dance might be an opening of access for anyone who wants to think-move queer; an allowance for more people to understand strategies of queer [black/asian/trans/aboriginal] performance on our bodies, in our imaginations, and among our friends.”[6]

[1] Queer Dance, page 3.

[2] In a Queer Time and Place, page 6.

[3] “Activating Whiteness,” page 79.

[4] “Queer Times,” page 128.

[5] Cruising Utopia, page 3.

[6] Queer Dance, page 179. 

Performers in the Queer Spectra Arts Festival during a Q & A. Photo by Nora Lang.

Kate Mattingly is an assistant professor of dance at the University of Utah. She has a doctoral degree in performance studies from UC Berkeley, and has had writing published in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Dance Research Journal, Dance magazine, and Pointe magazine, among others.

Karin Fenn: Girl Child

Girl Child ultimately tells us that we “have to keep going, you have to get up and keep going”; but this hopeful sentiment is only the conclusion after exploring less optimistic scenarios. The show, with original music by Wachira Waigwa-Stone, has been described by choreographer Karin Fenn as an exploration of female stereotypes and trauma.

Six dancers enter, a procession of women in white slips, finding themselves in a space filled with piles of rose petals, a rack of dresses, and folding chairs. They settle in fetal positions, atop the mounds of rose petals. Ai Fujii Nelson awakens first, bathing herself in the petals, sensual and uninhibited. She makes her way over to Eileen Rojas, rubbing the petals on her skin and swaying with the ritual. The movement is soft and gestural; arms unfolding, hands reaching, hair swirling, circular torsos with necks exposed to the sky. The two younger dancers, (both sophomores in high school), Frieda Johnston Dicke and Sadie Havlicek, remain onstage, witnessing this female community.

Fujii Nelson performs another memorable section in which her torso is wrapped in a long piece of red fabric and she progressively unwinds herself. Emily Haygeman holds one end while she is tethered to the other, highlighting her limited mobility. I anticipated this developing into a struggle, a woman trying to free herself from outside constraints, but after a short period of restriction, Fujii Nelson simply unrolled herself from the end of the fabric and continued moving through the space.  

Corinne Penka, always a powerhouse performer, frantically moved about while the audio droned on about how to achieve domestic perfection. The crowd laughed at her futile and desperate attempts. She later yelled to us (or into the void?), “What were you THINKING?! What are the outcomes of YOUR actions?!” She continued on with fury and pointed emotion as the ensemble reverberated to her words.

Moments like these were uncomfortable but also felt necessary to the arc of the piece; they gave something to build up to, and then something to recover from. (Other moments that teetered, or crossed over to violence, included Fujii Nelson and Penka dancing as if at a club, their vernacular moves erupting into pushes and yelling, and later Rojas, scared and bewildered, being groped by the ensemble.) Penka was finally soothed by the two younger performers - as if their presence reminded her (or maybe just reminded me) of a more innocent and optimistic time, of youth. This moment was my favorite as it highlighted the disparity between the adult women and the young women, and somehow justified their inclusion in other sections where they had remained more on the periphery.

Haygeman had the last solo of the night, titled In my own Image, which showed a quiet, resolute power. The sensual innocence and/or indulgence that we witnessed in the beginning was gone, as was the pain and aggression. What we were left with as a final image was an ensemble of women standing up, continuing on.

Karin Fenn’s Girl Child continues through Saturday, May 18, at Salt Lake Arts Academy.

Erica Womack is a Salt Lake City-based choreographer. She coordinates loveDANCEmore’s Mudson series and contributes regularly to the blog.

Deseret Experimental Opera: Life Relegated

Desert Experimental Opera is full of enthusiasm and ambition. Their new show Life Relegated, at an empty space (formerly Urban Outfitters) in The Gateway Mall, brings together several bands and an army of local dancers. It’s a bit like a talent show, in the best sense. Things unfold under the auspices of a plot that feels intentionally loose - each band is “dressed” as one of Utah’s national parks, who, personified, are recently out of work and facing down the “Invisible Hand” of the market, as voiced by a Stephen Hawking-esque computer voice.

Zion National Park explores its religious identity, Canyonlands submits to advertising, and Bryce Canyon sells out to a pharmaceutical company for better health insurance. The ballads of these anthropomorphized landscapes are sometimes clever, but the writing never feels like more than an excuse for the gathering. The whole experience is familiar if you’re from Utah. A place that’s still nominally a theocracy can elicit a kind of vague solidarity among those who fancy themselves outsiders.

The best thing about this show is the chance to see so many local performers all at once. Bands It Foot, It Ears and Durian Durian both shine musically. It’s encouraging to see a whole new generation of dancers who seem to be establishing themselves in Salt Lake for good. Emma Sargent partners with a panel of broken red-rock in a solo that recalls Eric Handman’s heroic soliloquies and also, somehow, the rune-like gestures of Daniel Nagrin. Emma Wilson, Meagan Bertelsen, and Amy Freitas, who we’ve recently lost to Moab, shine in some of the wilder moments when bodies fill the space. These three know how to listen and thus how to take the lead in the large group improvisations which make the rock and roll in this rock opera visual as well as aural.

That things never quite coalesce is hardly a problem - although I do wonder what some of these artists might really have to say about the politics of wilderness. We do have a bizarre relationship to the natural beauty in the southern part of our state. That this production doesn’t have much more to say about it than the craft beer bottles that celebrate hoodoos and arches is perhaps intentional. But I look forward to some of these artists making a deeper foray into some of the thornier questions.

Deseret Experimental Opera’s Life Relegated continues through Sunday, May 19, at The Gateway Mall.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

Municipal Ballet Co: A Collection of Beauties

A Collection of Beauties, presented by Municipal Ballet Co. under the direction of Sarah Longoria, was a concise, aesthetically driven, and immersive experience. Utilizing The Clubhouse (formerly the Ladies’ Literary Club), the show was committed to the classic, rose-colored-glasses ideals of the 1920s and 1930s. From the soft, loose-fitting peach- and cream-colored costumes to the cabaret-style tables and plush couches lining the performance area, the show created and maintained an atmosphere of time travel.

Coming in at around 40 minutes, including an intermission, the performance was concise and comprised of movement vignettes set to the music of Matteo, a (formerly) local band. Although each song featured choreography by a different artist, separating the movements didn’t feel necessary, as both the auditory and visual aesthetic were carried throughout the performance.

Admittedly, I cannot recall a ballet performance I’ve seen that utilizes such an intimate space and performer-audience relationship. The nature of The Clubhouse requires the dancers to enter through the audience and dance in close proximity to both each other and to audience members. Throughout the performance, this was both an advantage and a hindrance. Instead of projecting false emotions, the dancers looked at ease with the movement and it showed through their characterizations; although there were a few moments, specifically some grand jetés, that felt cramped in the space, overall the dancing felt like it was actually for the individuals in the audience rather than for an unknown audience entity.

The weakest element of the show was the inclusion of a narrative in the program notes. The choreography itself did not portray a narrative beyond that of a group of friends that came together to dance with each other; which, for me, was not enough to warrant its inclusion in the program. The show did not need to be, nor was, a story ballet; even the title, A Collection…, insinuated that it was a presentation of dancers or dances rather than a story. I wish I hadn’t read about the narrative in the program, as it hindered my ability to fully enjoy the movement while searching for a story where there didn’t seem to be one. That being said, the overall environment was enjoyable and relaxed, which was a sufficient tone for me.

As a company, I was impressed with Municipal Ballet Co. - I know it is connected to and draws from the local dance community in a number of ways, and is currently host to a number of technically strong dancers, but I hadn’t had the pleasure to see a performance previously. Both the company’s relationship to the community, as well as its dancers’ strengths, made the community created onstage feel all the more authentic. The dancers truly seemed to enjoy what they were doing and as an audience member, this allowed me to sit back and be present for the experience.

Natalie Gotter is a performer, choreographer, instructor, filmmaker, and researcher. She recently completed her MFA in Modern Dance at the University of Utah and is on faculty at Utah Valley University, Westminster College, and Salt Lake Community College.

Wasatch Contemporary Dance Company: Nerve and Sinew

What is contemporary dance?

As a dancer myself, I have encountered this question more times than I can count; Wasatch Contemporary Dance Company attempted to answer it with Nerve and Sinew. The performance spanned multiple techniques and featured pieces by both established professionals and emerging artists. I appreciated the performance’s variety but, at seven pieces, it felt a bit long.

When I think of contemporary dance, I tend to think more along the lines of the pop, “So You Think You Can Dance” sense of the term; a coupling of emotion, narrative, and both ballet and jazz techniques. Each of the pieces in Nerve and Sinew included elements of this to varying degrees of success. However, purely from a performance standpoint, the first act felt questionable: the dancers did not seem to be physically invested in the movement, which left the choreography feeling forced.

I am familiar with Eric Handman’s work, so his piece, “Permanent Now,” was to me the biggest victim on the program of lack of energy - it was missing the tension, vigor, and attention to detail that is most often present in his work.

On the other end of the spectrum, Lyndi Coles presented a new piece, “Spill,” that was so full of energy that there was a lack of attention to technique in moments of suspension, and instead the focus seemed to be on presenting tricks (i.e., high lifts and the dancers throwing themselves to the floor).

WCDC also presented a piece by Angela Banchero-Kelleher, which invoked emotions and sensations of Americana through its color palette and score. However, the political sentiment expressed in the program notes simply didn’t come through in the choreography. A lack of desperation and of authentic weight-sharing, as well as forced facial expressions, left the piece devoid of any real emotion. That being said, the piece’s ending trio of duets set to Johnny Cash was incredibly satisfying.

The first act concluded with a solo choreographed by Sarah Donohue, “Luz e Lorraine,” that featured Lyndi Coles. It is always a pleasure to watch Coles, and I was excited to see this piece again after first having seen it at Brine last fall. I was slightly disappointed, however, as the characterization of Coles comedically reacting to a spotlight felt completely different than that found throughout the rest of the piece. This stood out to me because Coles is such a controlled and fluid performer - but the moments of comedy looked unfamiliar to her body.

Going into the second act, I was prepared to continue to feel as ambivalent as I did in the first; instead, I felt like I was watching a completely different show, each piece more exciting than the last.

I had no idea that the Regent Street Black Box at the Eccles Theater housed floor-to-ceiling windows, but Jocelyn Smith opened the back curtain in her new piece, “Melodic Jargon,” to reveal complementary natural light. The dancers directed both the audience and themselves in rhythmic patterns that provided the score for the piece. The dancing didn’t always match the joy and energy of the rhythms, but the dancers did seem to experience joy.

WCDC also shared a work they’ve performed before by Brooklyn Draper, entitled “unaccustomed acquaintances.” Out of the whole program, I would argue that this piece was the least “contemporary,” but it was very successful. Each of the four dancers was committed to the awkward movement material and, without necessarily trying to be humorous, the piece felt unexpected in its held shapes, unheard whispers, and embodied characters.

Jake Casey’s “pop.” was the final piece on the program. The company’s performance and ongoing commitment, a strong duet by Coles and Smith, and the piece’s overall intensity made “pop.” the only piece that indicated to me that WCDC is in fact a professional company.

I went through a range of emotions during Nerve and Sinew. As a modern dancer, I often hear “contemporary” dance getting a bad rap. However, when it’s performed with commitment and gives a real experience of emotion, it too can be powerful, as demonstrated on this program.

In its 10th year, I hope that WCDC will continue to define its voice as a company and to hone in on what makes it successful. I could have watched the last two pieces of Nerve and Sinew over and over and would have continued to find exciting new details because of the dancers’ commitment and relationship to the movement. Regardless of the genre of dance in question, it’s those two things that connect performers and audience.

Natalie Gotter is a performer, choreographer, instructor, filmmaker, and researcher. She recently completed her MFA in Modern Dance at the University of Utah and is on faculty at Utah Valley University, Westminster College, and Salt Lake Community College.