Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival 2019: Alexandra Barbier

It is difficult to review something that by its nature seems to defy the expectations of viewership. Yes, while tickets were purchased, and a performance setting was defined, my relationship with Be My Guest Performer by Alexandra Barbier was ultimately one of participation, if not straight-forward collaboration. Barbier’s interest in developing this work is expressed as a desire to blur the audience-performer line. What does it mean to perform for an audience? What does it mean to be in attendance for someone else’s movement experience? My writing about this performance therefore has to be a reflection of myself as a performer as well. It was not a performance to be critiqued or analyzed, but rather a shared space with multiple voices and approaches.

From the beginning, Barbier crafted the space in one of The Gateway’s abandoned storefronts in a way that informed the participants that their bodies, their voices, and their experiences were just as important to the evening as Barbier’s were, if not more so. One of the biggest sources of discomfort in “audience participation” is the fear of participating against your wishes. Barbier offered a solution to this by directing (through projected text) the audience to put on a sticker expressing their level of desired involvement. Among varied discussions of audience consent in performance, I found this to be unexpectedly thoughtful. No one was put on the spot by being asked to relocate, being asked to verbalize their consent, or feeling any pressure from the performance itself. The power was in the audience’s hands throughout the evening.

I’m still intrigued by the premise of the evening, especially when it comes to questions of defining what a performance is. If audience and performer are in a shared space together, everyone is inherently participating by being present. So, why, not just for dance artists, but for anyone who makes a living on “stages,” is the meaning and the focus directed at those who have “choreographed” the evening? Barbier examined this principle by upending the “rules” at the beginning of the show. She spoke directly to us, encouraged us to leave our phones on and take pictures, and sat in the traditionally observational space.

Photo of Barbier’s Be My Guest Performer by Natalie Gotter.

The structure of the evening was fairly simple. Barbier presented a series of choreographic structures that the audience was invited to participate in. The most remarkable element of these structures was how removed Barbier felt as a performer. The piece was structured in a way that felt almost like a less-expositional, composition classroom, with Barbier guiding the experience as opposed to being a to-be-observed performer. She built a score through loop pedals that utilized audience voices, offered paper bags with movement directives, and taught a gestural phrase. But then she removed herself from the space and just allowed the audience to play. At one point, when speaking to the audience, she removed herself from the space by facing away and speaking into a camera that projected her image. Even though she was physically present the whole evening, by the end it truly felt like a dance improvisation with everyone in the room participating.

That said, even though the space was inhabited by dancers (mostly), it took a little bit of time to shed the notion of defined roles. To that end, I’d be curious to see how a longer experience could develop and be guided in varied ways. Knowing that this is Barbier’s MFA thesis research, I’m sure she will continue to grapple with these questions, but in the meantime, she created a safe exploratory space that felt fun rather than pressure-laden.

Be My Guest Performer continues Friday, August 9, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, August 11, at 1:30 p.m. at the The Gateway - in a storefront on the east side of the fountain, near the north end of the mall. Tickets and details can be found on the Fringe Festival website.

Natalie Gotter is a dance performer, choreographer, instructor, filmmaker, and researcher. She holds an MFA in Modern Dance with emphasis on Gender Studies from the University of Utah. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance and Muhlenberg College.

Cat + Fish: Forge

Dancing is this big ongoing thing. More than anything else, it continues – past the blackouts, wings, and curtain calls – far beyond where the bodies come in and out of view.

I think about such ongoingness when I see a show like Forge, presented at Westminster College this weekend by Cat + Fish. Artistic Director Cat Kamrath’s contributions to the evening form a suite – Strong Back, Soft Front, and Wild Heart. The mark of the university as a container for dance – a recent historical phenomenon – is strong in these works. It might be easy to criticize these pieces for the straightforwardness of how they use basic compositional tools. It might be easy to criticize the bodies getting tossed in the air based on a logic common to dances made to make better dancers. But, here indeed are strong, vivid, well-trained but still human performers. They feel their way through what they’re doing with a presence that’s more than academic. They don’t leave you feeling left out of a secret. The pleasures are infectious and intended to be available. 

The dancers even swim upstream a little. Micah Burkhardt, Madaline Maravillas, and Ursula Perry make a striking, unexpected threesome in Soft Front. Mostly, the way they touch each other is exactly what I expect, but there are junctures where the script seems to fall away. Daniel Do, Mar Undag, and Emma Sargent have solos in which I see a much freer practice that I imagine belongs to each of them privately. 

I do find myself wondering if Camrath’s use of sound as wallpaper is what’s keeping these pieces from transcending their context. She might do well to take risks with music that would make real choreographic demands, or to play with more silence. 

Daniel Do’s work Fortitude, though at times melodramatic, gestured toward such an approach. Performed by Kamrath, who’s more unorthodox as a performer, Fortitude seemed to be about a woman in search of a self-knowledge available only through sweat, trial, and error. Five lonely balloons shivered eerily in moments when Kamrath paused to reflect. 

Natalie Gotter contributed Anna, a duet for Molly Cook and Conner Erickson. Dressed in matching gray and white uniforms, the two drew pictures on butcher paper and eventually on each other. This twinning pair seemed inevitably a couple – it’s still so hard for us not to imagine a man and women partnering as such. Anna had a coldness that somehow put me in mind of science fiction. I appreciated the commentary about how we relate to each other through increasingly banal signs and symbols. By the end, they might have been tattooing each other with emojis.

Forge continues this Saturday, July 20, at 7:30 p.m. at Westminster College. Photos above by Zach Nguyen.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

Dance West Fest: Topography

topography n. the physical or natural features of an object or entity and their structural relationships

The inaugural Dance West Fest combined workshops hosted individually in the past by Repertory Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, and the University of Utah. The newly branded workshop culminated on Thursday night with Topography, an aptly titled program that featured a hybrid of dances in varying stages of completeness. The evening served as a preview, both of the upcoming local dance season as well as of work from outside the state, and provided an instructive side-by-side of pieces that would not share a program otherwise.

With no printed playbill, directors and choreographers personably introduced each dance and cast; the informality was a nice foil to an otherwise surprisingly polished presentation in the Rose Wagner black box, complete with lighting and (light) costumes. 

Doris Humphrey’s 1949 “Invention,” staged by Limón company alum and veteran repetiteur Nina Watt, opened the program with jubilation. RDT will perform this new acquisition in its coming season; here, it was danced with aplomb by seasoned company members Jaclyn Brown, Lauren Curley, and Tyler Orcutt. 

Difficult feats such as a series of tours en l’air, with bow-and-arrow arms, and suspended hinges to the ground appeared effortless, buoyed by the performers’ horizon-focused gaze. As Norman Lloyd’s piano score transitioned from effervescence to effort, so too, and seamlessly, did the relationships between dancers. Though “Invention” clocks in at just eleven well-paced minutes, “through form and music and shape and gesture, [Humphrey] creates a world." 

Lauren Curley and Tyler Orcutt of Repertory Dance Theatre in Doris Humphrey’s “Invention.” Photo by Tori Duhaime.

The fully-mined finality of an archival work was followed by an exploration of something brand new, as Ann Carlson introduced an onstage rehearsal featuring Ririe-Woodbury artistic director Daniel Charon. Carlson explained that, for her, the audience always completes a dance; this is evident in her 2017 work for Ririe-Woodbury, “Elizabeth, the dance,” which the company will re-stage this fall. 

Charon tap-danced to “Moses Supposes” from “Singin’ in the Rain” and Carlson admitted she knows nothing about tap as she mimicked his movements while calling out directions, her hands fluttering behind her like quaking aspen leaves. Her coaching interjections, which functioned both for Charon and for us, made the case that, even here, the audience remained her final ingredient. 

Molly Heller (left) and Arletta Anderson presenting the start of a new collaboration with Katie Faulkner. Photo by Tori Duhaime.

Bay Area choreographer Katie Faulkner presented a collaboration with Arletta Anderson and local artist Molly Heller. The three women live in different cities, and Faulkner introduced their piece, the beginning of an evening-length one (shown in front of an audience here for the first time), as an experiment in working across distance and time. 

Performed by Heller and Anderson, the duet focused on percussion (audible, prancing pony steps, body slaps, and half-intelligible, breathy muttering) to create an abstracted narrative verging on the humorous. Like a contemporary art rendering of two Stooges, Heller and Anderson’s foibles (literally) pushed off and built upon one another, the two garnering laughs as they raced in circles around the stage, one clearly imagining herself the triumphant winner. 

Rebecca Aneloski (foreground) performing in a piece created by Dante Brown during Dance West Fest. Photo by Tori Duhaime.

New York-based choreographer Dante Brown mined both poetry and personal life in his offering performed by four students of the workshop, which he introduced as a “text to movement experience.” For the most part, any clarity was derived from the poetry read aloud by Brown at the front of the stage. The dancers began by moving in a rather amorphous blob and Brown’s relationship to them, as well as his choice to wear feathered wings, was not abundantly clear, lending the selection the air of a classroom exploration (in fairness, it was created in just several hours over the course of the workshop). But a solo by Rebecca Aneloski colored the space between performers and text beautifully, providing both heft and purpose. 

Yin Yue, also based in New York, presented twice on the program; first, a duet performed with Grace Whitworth, who is rehearsal director for Yue’s YY Dance Company, and then, to close the program, an excerpt of a new commission for Ririe-Woodbury to premiere in April 2020. 

Yin Yue (left) and Grace Whitworth in Yue’s “The Time Followed.” Photo by Tori Duhaime.

Lights rose on “The Time Followed” (2019) on what appeared to be one figure - the soon-revealed duo of Yue and Whitworth continued the idea of a singular, eight-limbed body with responsive, intelligent, and close-quartered partnering. Each manipulated the other through challenging weight shares and elegant promenades, both remaining in simultaneous control throughout. The ending image had Yue and Whitworth facing each other, arms outstretched and hands slowly rising while moving closer together, like moths seeking the light.

The program-concluding excerpt of Yue’s Ririe-Woodbury commission gave an enticing glimpse of company newcomers Dominica Greene and Nicholas Jurica. Similarly task-oriented partnering once again emphasized movement itself as concept (if the chosen selection is any indication of the whole). The dancers of Ririe-Woodbury appeared freer to inject daring in their approach to Yue’s choreography, or perhaps their sense of abandon was a product of their bodies’ interpretation of a new language - either way, it was a rewarding expansion upon the previous, more carefully calculated, pas de deux. 

Dominica Greene and Brian Nelson (pictured in rehearsal attire) performing an excerpt of a new commission by Yin Yue for Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company. Photo by Tori Duhaime.

Amy Falls manages and edits all reviews found on loveDANCEmore.org. Please send press releases for upcoming shows, and inquiries about writing, to amy@lovedancemore.org.

NOW-ID: Rite of Spring

Industry, productivity, labor, ritual, depletion, exhaustion.

These are some of the themes that emerged while watching Now-ID’s Rite of Spring. Even the path to the stage, surrounded by railroad tracks, chain-link fencing, and brick and concrete block buildings, felt like part of the performance.

The raised stage underneath the 600 North on-ramp (498 West 600 North) emerged like a destination in the midst of this industrial setting, an oasis for people curious to see what unfolds when an opera singer, four phenomenal dancers, and Igor Stravinsky’s landmark score come together to create an event. The performance began at 9 p.m. and ended less than an hour later, just as the sky had darkened and night had come.

Now-ID’s Rite was a study in contrasts: between the vibrancy of the dancing and the desolation of the landscape that surrounded it, between the glimpses of mountains and the concrete that surrounded the stage, between the timelessness of the music and the ephemerality of this moment, between the perseverance of the performers, and the ultimate collapse that ended this Rite.

Avoiding an explicit narrative, Rite unfolded as a series of images: beginning with the four dancers seated on stools at the corners of the stage. Evoking boxers waiting on the edges of a ring, they seemed focused and primed. Jo Blake stood, as if to signal the beginning of a ritual, and slowly walked by the other dancers (Sydney Sorenson, Liz Ivkovich, and Tara McArthur) to greet Joshua Lindsay as he stepped onto the stage and began singing. Lindsay’s voice, sonorous and lush, heightened my attunement to sensorial engagement, of letting the sounds, sights, and actions of this event convey meaning.

When Lindsay exited, Stravinsky’s score began, and Blake’s solo presented a transformation: from human to extra-human, with arms that morphed into wings as if he were performing an invocation. He danced like he was propelled by forces, and the clarity and strength of his performance was mesmerizing to watch.

Although the performance was choreographed by Charlotte Boye-Christensen, with Nathan Webster providing the concept, the dancers made their ideas into realities with a performance that was impressive in terms of both stamina and precision. Each dancer presented distinct qualities, while also maintaining a sense of coherence. Sorenson danced with a rare combination of power and extension. Ivkovich had a compelling expansion to her movement, limbs stretching away from her center of gravity in ways that seemed to resist gravity. McArthur presented a flickering, quicksilver quality, with movement that was so fast it seemed superhuman.

In unison sections the women generated a sense of solidarity, bounding across the stage with a loping gait that seemed to gain momentum as they moved. At other times, the four performers divided into pairs that suggested rival tribes: Ivkovich and McArthur wore red-ish pants that contrasted with Blake’s and Sorenson’s attire. In partnering sections, they seemed to engage in combat, like wrestlers grappling.

Tara McArthur and Jo Blake in NOW-ID’s Rite of Spring, in costumes by Mallory Prucha. Photo by Jeffrey Juip.

The costumes, by Mallory Prucha, added to the rough and exposed environment: pants were made of heavy cotton (“monk’s cloth”) but shredded at the hems and stained with dark streaks. Make-up and hair by Stephanie Ericson, Rikki-Lee Thomas, Brittany Botarri, Kevin Truong, and Vanessa Alfaro enhanced the sense of severity with body paint and spiky hairstyles. As the performance continued, the body paint disintegrated, leaving traces of colors just as the surroundings presented traces of former industries and communities.

It’s hard to decipher the connections between this landscape and this Rite: in some ways the choreography presented a familiar tale of a woman’s sacrifice for the betterment of a community. In other ways, the dancers seemed to be exposing the exhaustion and depletion of cultures and sectors that are no longer sustainable or viable, perhaps suggesting that we become more judicious in where we invest our energies and resources. No matter the interpretation, the dancers’ commitment to the choreography was impressive, and their ability to execute the phrases while maintaining a sense of understated calm was riveting. Each one is a compelling artist, and the lighting design by Cole Adams made it appear, at times, as if their bodies were glowing. A gorgeous and appropriate effect.

NOW-ID’s Rite of Spring, with lighting by Cole Adams. Photo by David Newkirk.

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.

SB Dance: Sleeping Beauty

In addition to re-imaginings of company repertoire as well as happenings and installations throughout the year, SB Dance produces an original new work each June. Their latest, a two-night run of Sleeping Beauty at the Rose Wagner, contained many of the unique hallmarks that have developed with the company over its 20-year span. These hallmarks include intricate and energetic movement that retains the vitality of just the right amount of creation and rehearsal time, consistently deft prop and set piece incorporation and manipulation, interdisciplinary collaborations, thoughtful production choices, and representations of elements of queer identity. Also included is frequent reference to S&M, bondage, and sexual power dynamics. This could easily play out as a short-cut to dynamic tension, but it instead emphasizes charged human connection in the well-practiced and integral role it plays in SB works. Themes of consent as well as physical and psychological dominance and submission are modally fitting for movement-based theater. These very themes are subtextually quite present in existing classical interpretations of The Sleeping Beauty, and explicitly take center stage in SB’s retelling.

In the program notes, director Stephen Brown cites two books that re-engaged his interest in the “typically misogynistic classic.” One is Robert Coover’s metanarrative novel, from which Brown borrows the multiple-perspective approach of the different fairytale archetypes to frame the show. But the show is critically divergent in this way: Where the novel is postmodern in structural form, SB’s reverts to the classic storytelling device of explicit narration. This is an apt choice for the more abstracted media of interdisciplinary live dance theater. The narration is carried out with stagey charm by vocalist/actor Ischa Bea and string accompanist Raffi Shahanian, jointly billed as MiNX. These two serenade us in song and introduce the primary characters and their conflict: Annie Kent as Aurora and Nathan Shaw as Maleficent, in a dramatic first romantic encounter.

The introduction is an intense duet. Both characters wield a carving knife in each hand. The flourishing knives never supercede their interplay; they serve as an extension of the sharp, symmetrical movement quality. Annie Kent is instantly a compelling performer in the titular role whose presence reads well in the intimate black box theater, a space with effective technical production and unobstructed sightlines from the stadium-style seating. The audience gazes down on this private moment of consensual, equal powerplay; it is the show’s last. Maleficent alludes to the classic cursing pin-prick with a knife cut along Aurora’s skin, thus felling her. Aurora is put in her figurative box as an inert object of desire - by being stuffed quite literally into a cardboard box and loaded onto a dolly, which Shaw step-ball-changes, impressively lightly yet ominously, into the wings.

The next scene features four boxes, each containing a languid, sleeping someone in navy gender-neutral jammies - Aurora and the three Beauties, performed by Christine Hasegawa, John Allen, and Ari Hassett. Arms flop and butts lift from within as harpsichord strains evoke the Baroque, to great effect. These sleeping cuties re-emerge and re-enter their packages and sprawl onto their pillows in a very realized dreamstate, and momentarily make us wonder just what they’re up to in there. They begin to interact, and execute a catching and falling sequence into the pillows. Shaw then reappears to partner the dreamers. SB newcomer Ari Hassett sought her withheld pillow by avidly scrambling up Shaw into a high-flying press lift, to general gasps. She consistently displayed the great strength and agility of someone you suspect may be more comfortable inverted than not. Shaw packs them and stacks them, continuing the deft utilization of props with a believable slapstick drop of the topmost box before exiting to leave the lone packaged princess center stage.

The narrator next introduces and campily sexualizes Prince Phillip, played with hyperbolic virility and suavity by Juan Carlos Claudio. He distributes flowers amongst the audience in the single house-lights-up nod to immersive audience interaction. Then begins the beautiful and effective and creepy duet with a half-lucid, half-conscious Kent. I have been recently discussing the classical dance trope of the partnering of an exhausted/poisoned/dying woman a la Swan Lake, La Sylphide, etc., and was gratified to see it so explicitly treated here. The narrator jumps the gun with a “happily ever after”: As Aurora awakens to the Prince’s (steamy) nonconsensual attentions, she slaps him and heads out. Here the “reworking of a classic fairytale” metanarrative becomes central. The narrator frantically rewrites the story (adorably, with a feathered quill in a very contemporary libretto binder). Her accompanist, enjoined to “play something!,” delivers a cringily deadpan rendition of Sublime’s “Date Rape.” Directed to play anything else, he moves along to Eurythmics’ hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” Tellingly, this is a shift from a direct naming of the violation of body autonomy to fantasies of dominance and submission. There is herein some precedent for the show’s glancing identification of abuse pivoting to the focal artistic treatment of desire and sexuality.

We next see Aurora striking out for L.A., a classic naive waif with tattered nighty, shawl, and old suitcase in tow. The former cohort of Beauties in forced slumber now become minions of their malevolent captor. They are intriguingly costumed in black, their bad-guy hats still sporting tags, Hassett in full mustachioed Groucho mask, all sporting bedroom slippers. This last addition made all the following choreography exceptionally interesting and beautiful - lots of fluid petite allegro and gliding undercurves. The three Beauties establish themselves as a compelling ensemble, whose different movement qualities mesh together in a cohesive whole.

This cohesion holds well throughout the knife-wielding dance led by Shaw in what seems to be a warehouse of the boxed. Shaw’s Maleficent grinds on the cardboard containing the Princess, gaining pleasure from his control. The Prince obsesses over the same object from behind a stack. The two begin a voyeuristic game of withholding and expressing proprietary power over the box, deepening their characterizations and dynamic tension. The captured and bound Prince must watch the sadistic stabbing of his object of (unilateral) desire as the box is repeatedly punctured by Maleficent and company. Thus follows another hard reset of the story as the Prince charms his way into a telling of his version of the fantasy. It is narrated as “an Aurora who wants saving,” and is presented as the male fantasy contradiction of an experienced, sexually mature woman who is also lacking power (while literally bound at the wrists) and who requires childlike protection. This Aurora duets with each Beauty in turn before being carried off by the Prince. Kent’s duet with John Allen begins in struggle but features moments of lilting beauty, especially encapsulated by a swinging turn where her feet skim and glance off the ground in a dreamlike slow skip. Christine Hasegawa expertly twines with and directs Kent in a more dominant mode, and Ari Hasset brings a forceful tenderness to their duet. Aurora’s long velvety cuffs are then positioned over her eyes as a blindfold, with her elbows pointed upwards. This makes for a very interesting posture in her dancing with Nathan Shaw and Juan Carlos Claudio as well as underscoring her lack of free and informed choice.

After Princess Aurora is swept away, another abortive “happily ever after” is cut off by The Beauties, now clad in frilly frocks and silly tutus, skittering about and demanding their turn in the telling. By slumping against and running into the many cardboard boxes in a believably haphazard stupor, they in fact artfully rearrange the set pieces into a central cluster upstage. The Prince arrives to kiss them awake, with comically loud smacks, only for them to be repeatedly cursed by Maleficent, as heralded by the loud “snick” of the knife. It is a light treatment of the dark theme of the willing recidivism in The Beauties’ victim/perpetrator role. This cycle of drugging and waking escalates and intensifies until it comes to a head. The bodily manipulated John Allen and his repeated falls to the pillowed floor become untenably frantic, like something between Pina Bausch’s Café Müller and The Three Stooges. This built tension is capitalized on as the Prince and Maleficent forge a felt erotic bond in a charged look over the inert bodies they control. The two pair up and the narrator resignedly sighs something to the effect of “you two, of course, no, that makes perfect sense.” And moreso than any other moment, this one has been prefigured and developed; it perfectly does make sense.

Thereafter, as the audience can only have been eagerly anticipating throughout, Aurora takes her turn at directing the narrative centered on her experience. She voices and then enacts her own fantasy, bringing the show to its abrupt, violent conclusion.

The other book Brown cites as inspiration is Joan Gould’s Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal About the Transformations in a Woman’s Life. It is a nonfiction exploration of fairytale as allegory for the breadth of the changing, lifelong experiences of womanhood. And though SB Dance presents strong and vital personalities across the gender spectrum, the central character of Aurora was not terribly developed. Rather, the multiple-narrative perspectives sacrificed her singular ontological continuity to the presentation of an object through multiple lenses. Annie Kent embodies Aurora completely and performs the role stunningly, but the role is object and naif. When she finally wrests back her agency (through engagement with the super-structural narrator, not her abusers), she enacts a brief and frenetic revenge fantasy à la Quentin Tarantino. Revenge fantasies make us feel the reward of redressing grievance, but don’t do the rhetorical work of conclusively addressing expository complexity. Sleeping Beauty features Kent as a performer but doesn’t center Aurora’s experience as a character.

I grant that the processing of trauma, confrontation and accountability of (living) abusers, complexity of emotional attachment, and complicities would make for a very different ending - one that is less of a campy-dark combo, more truly dark. And I’m not advocating for that alternative, necessarily. However, the presentational scaffolding of program notes, press releases, and interviews invite this expectation. A City Weekly profile indicates that Aurora’s character will be especially rich, and the ticketing blurb asserts a “#MeToo warp” to the classic tale. Organizations like Whistle While You Work (@whistle_whileyouwork) facilitate a platform for whistleblowing and providing resources for the dance and performing arts community to actively benefit from engagement with the #MeToo movement. While metacommentary doesn’t easily make a work artistically stronger or more enjoyable, when artists choose to reference social and political movements there is then a greater onus to address them responsibly and more fully. Not to do so then borders on appropriative. Sleeping Beauty beautifully and inventively updates a classic fairytale and peoples it with darkly compelling archetypes. But I did wonder if it intended to address or redress the entrenched misogyny that it identifies in the original.

In his program notes, Stephen Brown expresses gratitude to his truly fantastic group of co-creators with the witty neologism “WTF-people”, as in “WTF are you doing in Utah?”  This is an example of the counter-cultural positioning that, as a non-native, I find intriguingly endemic to Salt Lakers. It implies both separation from Utah’s political and social establishment and affiliative solidarity with the subversive underground. But actually, and hopefully not to their chagrin, SB Dance is a pillar of the local arts community. Besides being a long-running successful company with lasting internal relationships and frequent new fruitful collaborations, they are teachers and college/university faculty, alumni of other longstanding dance institutions like Repertory Dance Theatre and Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, and entrepreneurial arts therapists. Not least is artistic/executive director Stephen Brown, who creates programming connecting arts organizations, businesses, and local non-profits, such as Eat Drink SLC, and serves as president of the Performing Arts Coalition, which addresses arts and culture policy making, was instrumental in the needs assessment and creation of the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, and represents the Rose Wagner’s many performing companies in residence. In fact, less so than anarchic countercultural arts rebels (of which Salt Lake is certainly possessed of a few, like personal favorite Forbidden Fruits [@slcfruits]), SB Dance is very much a part of the fabric of the Salt Lake arts establishment. And as an innovative, sex-positive, broadly collaborative company, that is to the establishment’s benefit. Perhaps this bit of podunk posturing is an ironic understatement by an artist, producer, and organizer who in fact takes immense pride in the standing legacy and ever-growing stature of the Utah arts scene.

Photos at top: (left to right) of Nathan Shaw, Annie Kent, and Juan Carlos Claudio in SB Dance’s Sleeping Beauty, courtesy of SB Dance.

Nora Price is a Milwaukee native living and working in Salt Lake City. She can be seen performing with Durian Durian, an art band that combines post-punk music and contemporary dance.