Junction Dance Co: Zero Flux

The curtain opened on the first evening of Junction Dance Co’s Zero Flux to an empty, yet brightly lit, stage. The audience clapped in anticipation, their excitement palpable. I could tell right off the bat that Junction Dance Co. possesses a loyal fan base, based on the number of catcalls. The music then cut through my thoughts, pulsing. The cyclorama sparked to life, displaying a projection of outer space. Before that image had settled in my mind, the dancers streamed on stage from the wings for the first piece, “New Americana.”

I first noticed the dancers’ tennis shoes. I made a mental note that things to come would require more grip than a bare foot could offer. The music was electric, heightening the effect of the fast and precise dancing. I was impressed by the musicality of the choreography, clearly crafted in tandem with the flux of the music; no note went unaccompanied. The dancers were committed and full of energy, their smiles infectious and genuine even from eight rows back. And I was not disappointed in my assessment of their shoes: I saw lots of tumbling tricks sprinkled with b-boy steaz.

The second piece, “Freedom,” opened with fireworks, both those projected on the cyc and those coming from the five men crushing it with their footwork. I was impressed with their ability to stay in unison even at faster speeds. Women made their way on stage, joining the men in duets. Although each duet used the same phrase, I appreciated that each pair seemed to make the connections on their own.

My favorite moment happened quite drastically: The music changed simultaneously with the cyc. Everything blurred and was pushed suddenly into a new image, that of a city scene. New dancers cascaded into the group, which had now transformed into a street party. Dancers of all ages formed a half moon. Those who stepped into the middle of the semi-circle owned it, grasping their moments in the center. During this cypher session, I took a scan of the audience; I could see some heads bobbing in time to the music. I was glad to see how this piece pulled in the audience, movement now rippling throughout it. “Freedom” exuded a sense of community that truly included everyone.

“Collard Greens” brought out rows of dancers, clad in green, keeping the beat of the music in their feet on a stage also awash with green. The piece was a tap dance, and one of my favorites of the evening in terms of pure enjoyment. Schoolboy Q blared through the speakers (“Oh [oh] luxury / Chidi-ching-ching could buy anything, cop that / Oh [oh] collard greens”) as the dancers mimed money in their hands. Their feet chugged forward, the taps accentuating each beat. The audience went a little wild, whooping with appreciation. I only wished that the music was a little quieter so that I could have heard all of the taps.

In “Peggy Lee,” the dancers sported leotards, tights, and heels. I couldn’t help but think of cabaret clubs, as the movement was sexy and punchy. The playful piece, set to a fresh remix of “Fever,” offered the women a chance to showcase their technique and extensions. I especially enjoyed that the choreography was reminiscent of old jazz rather than sticking to a more contemporary style.

During “Reading Rainbow,” I was transported to a fond memory and delighted by the piece’s lightness. A vibrant rainbow was splashed on the cyc, the backdrop for a single dancer wearing what were possibly the most 80’s-print pants I’ve ever seen. The score was none other than the theme from the TV show “Reading Rainbow.” The soloist perfectly captured a balance between cheesy nostalgia and quirkiness, to a song that defined and nurtured a generation.

“Atomic Breath” felt fully developed. There was a story, guided along by a narration of movie clips; the words lent a framework that shaped the audience’s experience. Different sections that were all tied together took me on a personal journey through a story I created for myself about the birth of the universe and the dawn of time. This dance had many sections of intense movement, the all-male cast fierce in their physicality. “Atomic Breath” was one of the more temporally dynamic works on the program.

“Still,” a solo performed by a dancer sheathed in a powder blue costume, was set to a song conveying failure and heartbreak. The dancer did a great job of holding her own and of letting the lyrics inform her emotional performance, and the piece’s angular, staccato movement suited her. Energetically, though, the piece felt ill-placed on the program. It may have been a better fit next to “Love Journals” in the second half.

“Pursuit of Happiness,” another large group number, featured a lot of unison and relied heavily on formations to fit everyone on the stage. The choreography took on many of the same characteristics as the other dances, and only one moment really stood out to me. All the dancers were on their backs on the floor, and did a ripple in three groups in which they contracted, clawed their fingers, and splayed their legs at weird angles. The lyrics mentioned night terrors and this canon provided a vivid visual.

“Dreamers,” featuring another all-male cast, opened with an image of a hallway, maybe a school, projected on the cyc. A lone dancer in a red jumpsuit entered, sweeping. As he started dancing, other “janitors”  wearing the same jumpsuit but carrying different cleaning tools soon joined him onstage. The piece reminded me of all of the times I put on music and jam out, dancing while I’m supposed to be cleaning my house. The piece successfully kept all the dancers onstage doing different tasks while not distracting from the rotating soloists. The music, from the original “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” with Gene Wilder, created a whimsical setting. The quirkiest solo was by a dancer with a red feather boa who danced to a child’s voice talking. At the end, everyone came together to gather all the feathers that had fallen off the boa, as though they were gathering up their wishes because they now had to go back to work.

“The Quest” was funky and fast. I got lost in the movements and felt like I was at a club or a  bumping house party. The songs kept switching and building in intensity. I spotted more canon in the choreography, which was a motif throughout the show. I liked the piece’s abrupt finish, and thought it was a great way stick the ending of the first half.

The second half opened with “Love Journals.” Four women were featured in downpools, frozen as the light shone off of their rose hued, crushed velvet dresses, and moved on musical cues one by one. It was predictable, yet satisfying to watch. The dancers had a lovely sense of timing, each of them aware of the others, and I saw extensions for days that spiraled into attitude jumps. The choreographer here made different choices with timing: They didn’t jam pack movements to accompany every single beat of music. I was actually able to process the movements as the dancers lingered intentionally through their phrases. I appreciated the power of stillness and the purpose of slower movement. I also saw the first bare feet of the evening, which worked well with the concept by allowing the piece to feel more vulnerable.

After the women left the stage, a solo male dancer made his way on. I had seen him performing house tricks and fancy footwork in the other pieces on the program, but in this one he came alive through the contemporary movement, extending and leaping through the air. It was stunning. He was soon joined by another man, the two then performing the same movement but with different facings and spacing. This added a layer of depth, as most other pieces had utilized only front-facing unison. Both also emoted with their faces, making their duet more tender.

“Can you dance to my beat?” featured upbeat music, pops of color on the cyc, and constant motion for the dancers. At times, my focus was pulled to different places as I watched the dancers weave in and out. About halfway through, a drummer entered and began playing in time with the music. I wanted there to be a microphone by his drums, though, so I could hear them better over the loud music. My favorite moment came at the end when a female dancer approached the drummer and the two began creating together as the recorded track came to an end. She was saucy and playful, and he sped up his pace to match her frantic movements. They were very much in it together.

“Positive Vibrations” was performed by the junior Junction Dance Co. group. They were apt performers, showing their growing knowledge of muscular isolation and control. It was easy to see where the name of the work came from as, at different times that matched the music, the women would vibrate their whole bodies. There were also some nice breakout moments from the group, and it was fun to watch an individual dancing versus the group. I was impressed by their ability to lift and partner one another at such a young age.

The standout work was “What Do You Desire?” To begin, a man talked into a microphone, acting out his monologue for two dancers like a teacher lecturing to his students (the dancers were obviously the students as wore costumes resembling school uniforms). There was no music, making it a nice counterpoint to the other pieces. The dancers then performed a duet that visually interpreted the monologue/lecture. The monologue itself highlighted what can be a constant struggle for an artist: Do I make art, or do I eat and pay bills?  The dancers made great, and funny, choices - I laughed several times as their movements matched words perfectly. Altogether, the piece was witty and entertaining, and also made me think about what I value.

The dancers in the fun and lively “Slippy Socks” wore gray shirts and shorts with colorful socks. A live violinist provided the score. She felt included in the work as she moved about the stage, smiling and making eye contact with the dancers as she played vigorously. The piece had several duet vignettes in which each dancer matched their partner’s styles and energy well. This piece had a more “modern dance” feel to it, as the choreography blended together big, sweeping circles and dives to the floor and felt gooey rather than sharp or accented.

“How Come?” also featured live music, this time a guitarist who sang and played a sad love ballad that asked why someone wasn’t interested in him. The dancers had perfect timing throughout and looked well-rehearsed.

“Etude No. 2,” a duet between a male dancer and a female pianist, was my favorite of the pieces to live music. The pianist began playing as the dancer held his position on the floor in a meditative position, his eyes closed. The anticipation built until he suddenly began dancing. Each phrase was convoluted and twisting. He tied himself in knots and untangled them, and was up and down, giving a visually dynamic performance. The pianist had her back to the audience, so I could see her fingers flying across the keys (she didn’t look at his dancing). Throughout the piece, he moved closer and closer to the pianist, as if he was being pulled to her inevitably by an unseen force. He ended the same way he began, on the ground with a straight back, knees folded, and eyes closed. As the pianist finished, both turned to look at each other. The lights stayed up to emphasize this powerful moment, and I was struck by the simplicity of their final acknowledgement of the other.

The closing piece, “Earthquake,” was fast and furious like I would expect an earthquake to be. Set to a driving beat that continually sped up, the dance featured the show’s entire cast of performers and packed a punch to conclude the program on a high note.

Overall, I was highly entertained by the evening. Each piece had me tapping my feet because I couldn't help being swayed by the music and movement. The first half felt more planned, with transitions accounted for and dances moving from one piece to the next with no pauses. It also felt more cohesive in content - I could see and make connections between most of the works.

The second half was more random. None of the pieces connected energetically or conceptually. This didn’t necessarily detract, but the sheer number of pieces in the show (nineteen in total) was overwhelming. I found myself wishing that Junction Dance Co. had spent more time developing some pieces, maybe exploring their depth versus just their short aesthetic value. I was, however, impressed with each performer in the show. They were all stunning in their authenticity and performance quality. Not only were they expert performers, but they were (dance) multilingual, performing a variety of styles.

I was reminded that the dance world is constantly evolving. Dancers who can tumble and do tricks are in high demand; they must have the technique, but then also be able to throw it all away. More and more, I see a fusion of styles, with this show being a prime example - a crockpot filled with many ingredients. To extrapolate, I find this evolution within dance to be an apt representation of the fusing of cultures happening all around us.

Ashley Creek is co-director of Brine and can be seen performing with Myriad Dance Company and The Penguin Lady. She also works for Ballet West, teaching Academy students, schoolchildren, and female inmates at the Utah State Prison.

Chitrakaavya Dance: Manubhuti - Being Human

On Sunday afternoon, ChitraKaavya Dance presented Manubhuti – Being Human at the Jeanne Wagner Theater. The program’s five offerings brought together a multigenerational cast of performers steeped in classical Indian dance forms. It struck me how elucidating it can be to see young dancers and older dancers together on stage. Even if you’re not deeply familiar with the traditions being presented - I know next to nothing about the history of Indian classical dance - you begin to see how dance traditions exist across the span of many interrelated, individual lives. The evening also featured contributions by modern dance artists Erica Womack and Katie Davis.

Womack’s “Ages” and ChitraKaavya director Srilatha Singh’s “Hyphen-ated” exist as a part of a longer conversation between these two artists about how to collaborate across their distinct choreographic heritages. I spoke a little bit with Womack after the show and she shared stories about moments when Singh and her company members challenged her instincts, ultimately leading her to make a riskier choice. The highlight of “Ages” was Srilatha Singh dancing in silks to Cesaria Evoria’s famed rendition of “Besame Mucho,” as Womack held a large fan, dead-pan. I was reminded of Kazuo Ohno’s Admiring La Argentina, except it was a little more lighthearted and a little less self-serious.

One of the most exciting elements of Sunday’s performance was an excellent live band: Suchinth Murty singing, Tarun Gudipati on the tablas, Abhishek Mukherjee on sitar, Sriram Krishnamoorthy on violin, and Shreyas Hoskere on keyboards and flute. Their presence raised the bar, particularly in “Hyphen-ated,” which began with an intense exercise in mirroring between Srilatha Singh and Malavika Singh, whose opening number at the top of the show was the evening’s namesake. (I don’t know if the two are related.) As they peered at each other through the empty wooden frame, I was drawn to their different strengths as performers. In Srilatha’s dancing, I watch her hands, and how quickly she can shift my focus without my expecting it - in short, the mastery of someone who’s been at it a while. In Malavika’s dancing, it’s her expansiveness, the ability to fill the empty stage, and her proclivity for off-balance rests and unexpected pauses - a hip tucked at an obscure angle, a lunge that seems too deep to sustain and then crumbles silently. I’m eager to see more of these conversations in the future.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

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.