Dance Engine

Dance Engine, under the direction of Brigham Young University associate professor of dance Kori Wakamatsu, is an innovative dance experience created through the integration of technology, audience participation, and live performance. Audience members are able control production elements and make choices that affect or direct dancers with the use of a smartphone app.

This particular production of Dance Engine progressed through phases of tasks and structures, audience members joining in and exchanging places with the performers, and culminated in a group dance party. The use of smartphones occasionally served attendees well, as they became active agents in the production, but more often was an unnecessary intermediary in a fun but familiar interactive framework. Dance Engine was billed for all ages and abilities, an important demographic awareness that the show admirably fulfilled, but the content and style might best have been enjoyed by an audience composed predominantly of families or groups with young children.

“A mash-up of dance, technology, and YOU!” was the tagline for the show. The goal seemed to be co-extension, rather than immersion - a refreshing ambition. Where immersive storytelling fosters an illusory sense of “being there,” coextensive experience is “extending over the same space or time; corresponding exactly in extent” (per its dictionary definition). Within that kind of experience, it becomes alright to explore sharing space and time within a performance, and without pretense. 

There was an immediate sense of active engagement upon entering the Leona Wagner Black Box Theater. The seating was arranged at floor-level, on all four sides of the central stage area. I was encouraged to sit in the first of two rows for an optimally “fun” experience, and then encouraged yet again after demurring, much to my chagrin. Though many of the invitations to participate took on the character of gentle social pressure, much in the manner of church activities and camp recreation, I appreciated that there was a sustained awareness of the audience playing a central and active role throughout Dance Engine. 

The six dancers entered in vibrantly colored activewear and welcomed us all with bubbly enthusiasm. After this energetic prelude, the first of five main sections, “Words,” began. In it, words like “pirate,” “zombie,” and “fluid” were selected via audience smartphones from a curated list of options, which in turn prompted improvised responses from the ensemble. This is a common and pleasant improvisational strategy, and it effectively set up the show’s playful tone, but it was unclear how the use of the app was better than the same things being spoken or written (other than the ability to limit the domain of possible words). 

The sections “Tempo Tag” and “Lights” played with time and control and made the best use of the well-coded Dance Engine app. The dancers’ choices were subject to the whim of the viewers, such as the speed of their execution, as the rate of the rather generic electronic beat was sped up and slowed down. This section mostly featured repetitive and also rather generic hip-hop/top rock that was nonetheless extremely dedicated and energetic.

“Lights” was the most exciting instance of viewer manipulation of the dancers, in which blocks of framed stage lights were turned on and off via the app to perpetuate or freeze the dancers’ movement. One dancer was caught for an extended period of time in the strobe of a particularly relentless participant. The genuine frustration and joy that this drew out of the dancer’s full commitment to the task was the most compelling human moment of the show, and also the moment which best demonstrated the power dynamics and social experimentation that the integrated technology might have enabled. 

“Duet with Dancer” was another familiar improvisational theater/movement exercise: mirroring. An attendee’s phone would light up and the assigned dancer would make their way over to them to mirror the phone’s waving, shaking, and tilting. A piece of colored paper or a hand could have served equally well. This task required some whispered instruction and encouragement from the performers, but seemed to please the engaged participants. The performers began inviting people to the stage - to dance, first in duets in response to the familiar tokens of the “Words” section, and then in a larger network of groups for “Group Dance.”  Almost all of the audience was happy and eager to take the stage and explore dance interactions with each other and the Dance Engine performers. This certainly read as a great success of the model on the one hand, although in the other, most task-bearing smartphones went disregarded.

STEM integration in dance and theater is an exciting collaborative opportunity. The technology itself in Dance Engine was effective and well-made. However, its utilization was mostly a transposition of improvisational and interactive frameworks that could be directly accomplished either through gestures or verbal cues. The third-party granting and withholding of activation through the app, which intermittently selected different audience members to participate, may also have inhibited a more potent expression of the shifting of leadership and authority between audience and performer. 

It is wonderful, however, to see dance-makers collaborate meaningfully with those who work in computing and technology. There is also a significant joy in seeing a room full of theater-goers engaging in playful and uninhibited movement. I especially enjoyed watching a performer quietly invite one of the ushers into the exuberant “Group Dance,” which indicated to me that the performance hierarchies had been pretty earnestly dismantled. 

Dance Engine is an ongoing and evolving project. There is still some room for the critical integration of technology into performance to fulfill its potential, but this is amidst a great deal of existing and successful enthusiastic audience engagement.

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.

Repertory Dance Theatre: Inside/Outside

Selections by Doris Humphrey, Lar Lubovitch, Andy Noble, and Noa Zuk and Ohad Fishof made up the beautifully danced and masterfully compiled lineup in Repertory Dance Theatre’s Inside/Outside program. Four unique islands in RDT’s vast repertoire, these dances exemplify differing eras, goals, methods, and legacies from the wide, rolling tradition of modern dance – here, brilliantly scaffolded and extensively annotated to frame and signal the coordinates of and between each. 

Doris Humphrey’s choreography for the 1949 trio “Invention” calibrates a viewer’s entry at the foundational classics of modern dance. Draped in spare bright light and colors, it is a beautiful illustration of Humphrey’s style and the abiding notions and queries of early modern pioneers. The pulsing, bouncing act of losing and recovering balance out of gravity, finding symmetry between two halves with long directional lines forming and breaking and reforming, sculptural images, and the direction, shape, and space occupied by interacting bodies all act as metaphors for abstracted floating narratives of interpersonal drama. 

Following “Invention” was Lar Lubovitch’s “Something About Night.” Although Lubovitch created the piece just shy of seventy years after “Invention,” the pairing of the two allowed a line to dot along from one to the other, daylighting a common river underneath. Both pieces breathe steadily with variations on the same bounding rise and fall, accruing strength and sculpting imagery through sustained, cycling evolution. In a taped interview which preceded “Something About Night,” Lubovitch explained his desire to use movement as a kind of painting: to evince a world or a mood, to hint toward embedded characters and relationships - familiar territory. “Something about Night” premiered in 2018 at the choreographer’s fiftieth anniversary concert, its movement phrases drawn from previous works. Through transposing tableaux and choral voices, Lubovitch makes offerings to ideals of beauty, quiet, and memory. 

Characterized by all-time ultra-modern favorites - chaotic large groups and gliding, slinky, shifty, shaking, guttural sneak-surprises, with a side of abstracted social dance and pedestrian gesture - the two post-intermission works stood in contrast to the controlled and bobbing poise of those by Humphrey and Lubovitch. Andy Noble, formerly of RDT himself, plumbed the depths of humans’ relationship to technology with jumping jacks in his “Filament”; closing out the program (and adhering to the cardinal rule of every mixed rep in the latter half of the twenty-teens - at minimum, one Gaga-informed work) was “Outdoors,” the arresting first half of a larger piece called “Shutdown” by Batsheva Dance Company alumni Noa Zuk and Ohad Fishof. 

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy Noble’s piece as much as I did. “Our relationship to technology” is an interesting subject, but in dance, one that is frequently accompanied by an eye-roll-inducing lack of nuanced probing and the tendency to use projection technology to throw gimmicks or larger-scale movement up on a scrim behind the dancers, effectively minimizing what should be the most powerful and urgent element - the live performance. 

Happily, Noble averted these pitfalls for the most part. Repetitive mechanical phrasing that devolved into something, a large projected grid that effectively utilized the shape of the entire proscenium stage, and distorted projections of the dancers blipping across several large standing panels which the dancers could actually interact with all helped to integrate the technology with the performance itself. 

The concept of “Outdoors,” by Noa Zuk in collaboration with Ohad Fishof, is simple: one 15-second rhythmic phrase repeated over and over and reformulated to fit any and every variation thinkable. Program notes indicated that the phrase is repeated around sixty times over the length of the piece. In practice, the effect was both stupendous and cleverly subtle and the dancers performed with exceptional power, the movement sitting in their bodies with an easy exuberance and fury. 

RDT is deserving of commendation for its efforts to make modern dance conceptually accessible to all. The inclusion of written and digital materials to introduce, explain, and contextualize every interlocking piece (available before, during, and after the program across multiple platforms) was audibly appreciated: I heard a young tween behind me exclaim to her friend, “I could see it, I could actually see it, what he said in the video,” as they breathlessly dissected a piece during a pause. I would guess that a good fifty percent of the audience the night I attended were of high school age or younger, and they were all on the edge of their seats. 

It’s no insignificant choice to invest in sharing art this way. Spending the time and resources to produce extra materials and facilitate a structure that integrates them fully during every program shows a commitment by the company to their audience - and, one of the best that RDT can make as a company dedicated to carrying the legacy of modern dance into the future. 

Emily Snow is a Denver native who now calls Salt Lake City home. She has most recently been seen performing with Municipal Ballet Co. and with Durian Durian, an art band that combines electronic music and postmodern dance.

Myriad Dance: Penumbra

Penumbra, presented by Myriad Dance, offered a series of short pieces inspired by the relationship of movement to lighting. 

Picture, if you will, the moon during an eclipse. Those who have been lucky enough to experience even a partial eclipse, such as that seen in Salt Lake City in 2017, may quickly locate an image. Now, mentally zoom in on the space between the illuminated moon and the area in shadow - this is the moon’s penumbra. 

What’s interesting about a penumbra is that it is not a stagnant area. Rather, the word itself implies a changing, merging border - a place of movement. This term framed Myriad’s show as an exploration of light and shadow, and “their creation, contrast, co-dependence, and convergence,” as explained by artistic director Kendall Fischer in her opening remarks. 

The performance took place in a space at the Gateway, where a draping white expanse became the backdrop for the overlapping shadows of dancers. Purple, white, and blue incandescent light bulbs hung from long cables, decorating the space with splashes of color. Symmer Andrews and Leslie Babalis entered the space and turned on two sets of lights pointed on a diagonal. The appearance of light was a choreographed component, intentionally initiated through the dancers’ actions. For a moment, they relished in the light, moving gently as if to absorb the warmth of the beams on their limbs. 

This brought to mind the work of renowned lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, who often considers the way a lighting cue feels to the performers as she designs. She has noted that the sensation a light cue evokes for the dancers ultimately shapes the performance. Tipton, who has designed for Paul Taylor, Jerome Robbins, and Twyla Tharp, among other greats, has spent her career researching the relationship of light and performance. In a 1995 New York Times article, she remarked, "I feel that light is like music. In some abstract, emotional, non-cerebral, non-literary way, it makes us feel, it makes us see, it makes us think, all without knowing exactly how and why." 

In many ways, Penumbra encapsulated this very comment. Myriad used the impetus of light to shape movement, and the way that the dancers embraced a combination of detailed articulation, emotive tension, and swirling patterns of momentum created an ode to light’s mysteriousness. However, in a show built around light, Penumbra lacked a significant component: a lighting designer. With only two simple shifts in lighting, I was left craving more of the foundation of the performance. Today, even shows taking place outside traditional proscenium theaters and their ample light plots may house installations and other lighting technology - all great opportunities for collaborative processes.

Nine individual pieces made up Penumbra, with choreography by Kendall Fischer, LayCee Barnett, Ashley Creek, Charity Wilcox, Amelia Martinez, Temria Airmet, Emily Haygeman, and Fiona Nelson. The show provided an excellent framework for connecting multiple pieces by distinct artists in a cohesive experience. Throughout, dancers wore an array of buoyant jumpsuits in tones of white, brown, pink, and blue. Each piece also overlapped with the next, transitions seamed tightly together to create an overall sense of unity. 

Ashley Creek’s “Paene (Almost)” featured a circularity that emerged in the spatial patterns and pathways of the dancers’ torsos and limbs. Tawna Halbert, Alyx Pitkin, and Jana Young glided into and out of the floor, dragging their toes against the concrete surface and articulating through their upper backs. The piece featured a refreshing number of jumps and spurts of energy that progressed to a point of climax.

“Shadow Self,” choreographed by Emily Haygeman, referenced, from psychology, the unconscious component of human personality. "Everyone carries a shadow," wrote Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, "and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." This idea served as a framework for the movement in “Shadow Self.” A tension coalesced between the four dancers. Hands concealed faces, eyes observed intently, limbs pulled and shifted. Through touch and through weight-sharing, the dancers manipulated each other’s bodies, provoking push-and-pull responses. The end of the piece brought about a resolution: the dancers stood in a tight clump and gently mirrored each other’s movements.

Throughout Penumbra, Myriad Dance offered a study on the interaction of light and shadow through movement, achieving the theme less through elements of design than through the embodiment of light and shadow as abstract characters. 

Rachel Luebbert is a Utah-based dance artist. She also teaches and works in arts administration and programming, and has previously worked in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C.

Performance Art Festival 2019 at the SLC Public Library

While I was seated on the second floor of the Salt Lake City Public Library, staring at paper shapes suspended from the railings of the “bridges” in the library’s main Urban Room, Joseph Ravens approached me and asked, “Do you mind if I join you? I need to just sit for a minute!” 

I had just watched Ravens travel from one end of the third floor bridge to the other with a playful energy, flirtatiously peering down, his fingers dancing across the railing, with a yellow dunce cap on his head. He now sat in the chair across from me, dropping turkey feathers that had been painted black over the edge of the balcony, one by one. 

“These were originally attached to my elbows but they came off. Sometimes I put them on my toes but that would have made it too hard to go up and down these stairs.” 

I took notes as he continued to tell me that repetition of simple tasks, like ascending and descending staircases, is a frequent device he uses in his art, that performance art is very popular where he lives (Chicago), and that he made the piece that I’d been admiring with children’s responses in mind. He eventually asked,  “Anyway, are you here for the Performance Art Festival or are you just hanging out?” 

I was shocked that he’d told me so much about himself and his art, unaware that I was taking notes for this review. Such an interaction reveals several qualities of an experienced performance artist: the ability to be adaptable and responsive to the present moment (He needed a break so he took a break! His feathers malfunctioned so he repurposed them!), the confidence to interact with strangers, and the awareness that some spectators of performance art want more information about what they’re witnessing so that they can “get it.”

Is making sense of what you’re seeing always necessary? Isn’t it invigorating to stumble upon the unusual in the midst of your predictable library experience, regardless of whether or not you understand what’s going on? 

I wondered this as I watched a group of University of Utah School of Dance students and alumni improvisationally dance to a soundtrack I couldn’t hear (they were wearing headphones) while a speaker intended for the audience’s ears played NPR’s “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” Seeing the smiles on the spectators’ faces as the dancers eventually took off their headphones, turned their attention to the crowd, and playfully bombarded us with countless balloons filled me with delight. 

As a choreographer and performer myself, I am keenly aware of how premeditated and alienating (and sometimes pretentious) dance performances can be, leaving spectators (or myself, at least) longing for inclusion, spontaneity, and surprise. This group provided just that. My favorite part of this performance was one of the dancer’s closing remarks: “It’s never over! Take a balloon!” 

Which brings me to one of the pillars of performance art: the exploration of time. 

I am a sucker for durational performance pieces that you will inevitably catch less than half of, because it’s rare to have six free hours to spend watching someone rearrange piles of glass-like particles. This was Chelsea Coon’s task. By the time I saw her, she had made three large circles of glass on the floor and was sitting in the center of them, transferring handfuls of leftover glass into clear bowls. A pool of sunlight illuminated the entire scene magically. Though I was mesmerized by her concentration and the calmness of the display, I knew I needed to catch a few other pieces that were scheduled to end soon. 

In a nearby room, Marilyn Arsem sat behind a table, poised like a fortune teller but helping passersby to recall their pasts instead of intuiting their futures. My love affair with all things nostalgia couldn’t resist her invitation to calculate how many days I’ve been alive (11,684 in case you’re curious) and then trying to recall the events of one of those days, which was selected blindly by pointing to a date in “101 Years: A Calendar Book.” I was very surprised that, with a series of calculated questions, Arsem was able to help me recover some very forgettable details of a Tuesday during my senior year of high school. I departed just as a child, born in 2013, exclaimed, “I’m old!” after being told his age in days (there was a collective cringe and then giggle from the adults in the room) and once again I found myself entranced by Coon, who had begun placing a fifth circle of glass around herself, just as focused and meditative as before. 

Other performances I saw, too many to describe each in detail, included asexual alien creatures performing reproductive dances, women dressed as men reciting poetry in soothing voices, and a woman taping blank sheets of loose leaf paper onto a wall as a reflection on dyslexia. To supplement this piece, I encourage you to visit the Festival’s lineup while it’s still available and to find the websites of all participating artists. The Festival’s founder and curator, Kristina Lenzi, has her finger on the pulse of some exciting artists and, as this is an annual event, I look forward to seeing what she puts together next year. 

Chelsea Coon (pictured six hours later than above photo) at the 2019 Performance Art Festival, in the Urban Room at the Salt Lake City Public Library. Photo by Paul Reynolds.

Alexandra Barbier is a dance artist and performance-maker. She is a modern dance MFA candidate at the University of Utah and has taught courses on creative process, queer performance art, and dance in culture.

Rire-Woodbury: Traces

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s Traces includes a sharp, stylish duet by company artistic director Daniel Charon as a prelude and Ann Carlson’s evening-length “Elizabeth, the dance,” originally created for the company in 2017. My pet word is almost always “effective” when I critically appreciate and evaluate a production. But, regarding Carlson’s astounding “Elizabeth,” I find that the words sending me to the thesaurus are related to ‘“strength” -  strong choices, strong chemistry, and an overarching strong sense of deliberate purpose.

The focal point of the opening tableau in “Elizabeth, the dance” is a modular wall of dense foam blocks, each around two and a half feet square, that are stacked in rows of five or six. The company of six sits contemplating the blank, imposing structure. They proceed to launch individual full-body assaults on the wall, egged on by off-the-cuff verbal appraisal from their cohort. The wall gives way with a truly jarring crash and its constituent blocks are claimed, scattered, and repurposed by the dancers with intense motivation. This sequence presents a literal foundation, and also its figurative analogue. The theme is structure: obstruction, destruction, construction. These incredibly versatile blocks are later counterposed with light white balloons. Archetypal simplicity belies complexity of craft in “Elizabeth, the dance”; a textured collage of speech, movement, and sound proliferates within this elemental framework. 

Carlson drew directly from the lives and experiences of the dancers in the creation of this work, and the dancers embody it beautifully. Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company is thoughtfully peopled with distinctly virtuoso individuals who, together, have an incredible working chemistry. Their ensemble unison in silence was especially impressive. Some singular moments and images in “Elizabeth” stand out from the piece’s gestalt enactment of human endeavor: Melissa Younker is the first dancer to fully arrest the viewers’ attention, in a series of draping poses on a block pedestal with all the exaggerated static angularity and total living force of the classical statuary figures she invokes. A recording of Bashaun Williams telling a personal story is accompanied by William’s solo movement, which, though adept and sharp, left room to focus on the utterly compelling cadence and content of the narration. The dancers emerge and re-emerge from behind the wall in accumulating states of clown get-up, starkly breaking the aesthetic monochrome, and enact a furtive pants-tugging, crotch-rubbing, shiftily ambiguous probing of erogenous bits that hits the perfect note of discomfort and grotesquerie.

(From left to right) Bashaun Williams, Dominica Greene, Brian Nelson, and Melissa Younker of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Ann Carlson’s “Elizabeth, the dance.” Photo by Stuart Ruckman.

Other moments of note deal more explicitly with the overarching theme of dance history and precedent and its patent impact on the lives of dancers. Clad in pointe shoes and tutu, Megan McCarthy executes bravura balletic movement, only to break against human impediments and collapse dramatically to the floor. The director stops the scene to redo the fall again and again, which McCarthy accomplishes not only with wit and intensity but also the blithe, performative deference demanded of a dancer receiving vague, disparaging rehearsal notes. In another vignette, newest company member Dominica Greene speaks directly to the problematic framing of historical legacy. Greene and two other dancers ascend and descend a block, draping their long black costumes in pan-Hellenistic toga fashion and striking the corresponding languid poses. They respond warily at first to unvoiced questions about unnamed forebear Isadora Duncan. The series culminates in Greene stating that this historical figure was a racist, that she prefers personally to look to the many women of color who innovated and originated modern dance, and, in an admission of confliction, acknowledges Duncan’s contribution to the field with the certainty that Greene would have been excluded from her work. In “Elizabeth,” the treatment of modern dance as subject never feels like an in-joke. Rather, it is explicit and integral, driving conflict and inquiry.

Watching “Elizabeth, the dance” reminded me both of reading Italo Calvino’s lectures on lightness and weight and of trying feverishly to stay awake through the hippo, crocodile, and ostrich ballet in Disney’s Fantasia. It made me consider the difference between intention and objective. We are often called on to appreciate and acknowledge the intention or internal process of a performance. But it is refreshing and exciting to be swept along with unremitting craft and purpose, with the sense that each artist is driven by a strong objective in every moment, and on a path of deliberate choices. The path here terminated in an on-stage popcorn party, so thoughtfully scaffolded and respectful of boundaries that I participated in it comfortably and gladly.

Ann Carlson has long-standing connections with the University of Utah and the founders of Ririe-Woodbury and has recently presented work for UtahPresents and the inaugural Dance West Fest. I fervently hope she will continue to create here in our community.

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s Traces continues through September 28, with a family matinee and full-length evening performance, at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center.

(From left to right) Dominica Greene, Brian Nelson, and Melissa Younker of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Ann Carlson’s “Elizabeth, the dance.” Photo by Stuart Ruckman.

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.