UtahPresents: Axis Dance Company

Axis Dance Company aims to change the face of dance and disability. The company of disabled and non-disabled dancers recently spent a week at the University of Utah, hosting master classes and discussions on fostering inclusivity within dance pedagogy and performance. On November 8, the company performed at Kingsbury Hall as part of the UtahPresents season.

The first act of the performance consisted of two dances, both of which employed familiar movement vocabularies of contemporary dance. Featuring one dancer in a wheelchair and two bipedal dancers, one of whom was missing an arm, the opening trio had an easeful energy and was full of interplay between softness and strength. Clad in gold-fringed costumes reminiscent of something Tina Turner would wear in her heyday, the three spun and wheeled around each other to “Clapping Music” by Steve Reich and a violin solo by Bach. The dancer in the wheelchair often juxtaposed the fluidity of the rolling chair by making very sharp and angular arm movements in the air. They spun the chair in several rotations as the other two dancers did pirouettes that transitioned to the ground for shoulder rolls and leggy floorwork. The floorwork dancers made a pattern on the ground with their legs that matched the other dancer’s arm movements in space. The juxtaposition of the movement vocabulary with the music and costume selections was a little curious, but the choreographer’s message was clear: all dancers can express the same movement intention, even if it’s through the use of differing body parts and/or with the help of an extra apparatus.

The second dance, a work for all six company members, displayed the dancers’ extreme athleticism. They dove through the air and performed flips on the ground and over wheelchairs. They formed a series of well-balanced tableaux of varying levels – taking advantage of the different levels of space that their bodies occupied – in which they performed strong, quick gestures with their upper bodies. The energy and movement quality shifted unexpectedly towards the end of the piece and we were gifted two intimate duets that had the sensual styling of Jiri Kylian’s Petit Mort or Alejandro Cerrudo’s Second to Last. Both duets were comprised of one partner in a wheelchair and one bipedal partner, each of whom took turns sensuously weaving around each other. Given that our society often de-sexualizes disabled bodies and questions the capabilities within interabled relationships, these duets were extremely insightful and were the highlight of the piece.

During intermission, I wondered about inclusivity in codified techniques (phrasing taken from company member Lani Dickinson’s biography). Do codified movements retain their names as their mechanics are adjusted for disabled bodies? Is there terminology for movements created for and by disabled dancers that non-disabled dancers in non-inclusive companies aren’t aware of? My thoughts were interrupted as the house music got louder and the lights in the house went dim. Not the typical transition from intermission into a second act, but fitting for what came next – a dance-theater piece that explored homelessness through a surrealist lens. 

The piece’s opening image was a collection of cleverly worded cardboard signs, characteristic of those held by homeless individuals in hopes of receiving aid from passersby. The dancers languidly entered and exited the stage in mismatched costume pieces, seeming dejected yet full of whimsy all at once. It eventually became clear that we were witnessing the character of Alice slip in and out of her Wonderland and also the poverty-stricken streets of California. The most striking image was a dancer dressed in camouflage with a sleeping bag around their legs and a cigarette hanging from their lips doing the worm with Alice seated on their back – a clever parallel between a homeless veteran and the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Lewis Carroll’s story. In comparison to the first two dances, this piece relied less on familiar dance vocabulary and there were fewer textbook choreographic structures. It instead leaned heavily into the dancers’ pedestrian or vernacular movements, and used space in a more natural and organic way. With this change in approach, I saw a company of people, momentarily forgetting that “disabled” and “non-disabled” were ever necessary distinctions amongst them. Which brings me to my final thoughts:  

I support fighting for inclusivity in systems that inherently (though not always maliciously) exclude marginalized groups, but I also value working outside of those systems. We can ask to be a part of systems that weren’t created with us in mind, or we can create new systems that better serve us. I think the first two dances did the former, while the final dance did the latter. It was nice to see a range of bodies participate in highly stylized forms that have historically been exclusionary. However, it was exciting to imagine how dance can transform if companies like Axis forge forward with new ideas of what dancing bodies can do and look like, instead of attempting to fit all bodies and abilities into previously formed models. 

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.

Ballet West: Balanchine's Ballets Russes

For the premiere of its 56th season, Ballet West is presenting a mammoth historic revival that also offers - and asks of audiences - something acutely new and different. Assembled for the 110th anniversary of the iconic and incomparable company the Ballets Russes, the bill includes three of George Balanchine’s oldest works, created during the years he spent experimenting with the Ballets Russes under the direction of Sergei Diaghilev: Le Chant du Rossignol, Apollo, and The Prodigal Son. 

The production, Balanchine’s Ballets Russes, is an impressive window to the inception of tools, images, and themes Balanchine would carry into the work he did throughout his lifetime. All of the flexion, angularity, layering of bodies, and familiar archetypes were evidently present even then, as were the first inklings of an ethos that would someday define an entirely new approach to ballet. These three one-act ballets are also an incredible view into the rich collaborative relationships fostered by the Ballets Russes, with opulent intricate costumes designed by Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault and scores by Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev. 

Ballet West’s casting for each ballet was gorgeous and precise. I especially enjoyed Adrian Fry, Katie Critchlow, Sayaka Ohtaki, and Beckanne Sisk in Apollo, and Hadriel Diniz opposite Katlyn Addison’s steely, nuanced Siren in The Prodigal Son. 

The three ballets were presented sequentially, in the order of their creation dates, which allowed the audience to trace the progressing results of Balanchine’s experimentation and collaboration. While each ballet was a stunning and cohesive achievement in its own right, each is now also made exponentially more powerful and relevant both through juxtaposition and a new ethos of presentation. 

The sparks that made this program truly noteworthy were fueled by its endeavor to be not just a series of beautiful ballets rich in legacy and refined in craft but also an ambitious, eye-opening, and socially conscious course of study. 

A bulk of this attention fell to the revival of Le Chant du Rossignol. Bringing back this lost piece of history demanded a precise and nuanced balancing act to recover its essential charm and beauty, as well as demonstrate its influence as Balanchine’s first ever work for the Ballets Russes – without the undertones of racist exoticism that infused the original. 

Addressing the racial and cultural issues at play with even more up-front and earnest clarity than during the redux of The Nutcracker’s Chinese divertissement last year, Ballet West took an approach involving partnerships with multiple specialist and community collaborators to effect this modernized revival. The process was three-fold: a project of in-depth research and dialogue; concrete changes made in response to that work; and a campaign to provide enrichment, transparency, and accessibility for audiences. 

Following extensive research done by the restaging team of Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, who recovered existing knowledge of the original production, Ballet West invited leaders of the Asian American community, including Phil Chan, of the organization Final Bow for Yellow Face, and local arts advocate Max Chang, into the rehearsal process to begin a dialogue and develop a path forward. This was followed by further discussions with and feedback from local schools and the general public, prior to opening weekend. 

It was wonderful to see Ballet West show up for this challenging, complex, and necessary conversation. It is also of utmost importance to note that Ballet West is responding to a pressure and cultural shift in the landscape that has been ongoing for some time now. The momentum begun and directed by dancers of color like Chan and his partner at Final Bow for Yellow Face, the New York City Ballet dancer Georgina Pazcoguin, may be attributed to the force now pushing companies across the country to expel outdated, harmful, or appropriative choreography in recent years. Final Bow’s website features a slew of information and resources for dancemakers looking to make more responsible choices and a pledge “committing [the signer] to speak up against Yellowface on our stages, and work[ing] to create more positive and nuanced representations of Asians in ballet.” Chan and Pazcoguin advise performing organizations in their re-staging of classic works, and, since 2017, have succeeded in gaining the pledges of nearly all major American ballet companies (information taken from the website and Instagram account of Final Bow for Yellowface). 

In Le Chant du Rossignol, these efforts culminated in the elimination of choices in costuming, choreography, and characterization that were deemed the most problematic. Ballet West has enumerated several of these changes, including the choreographic replacement of caricatured hand movement, shuffling of the feet, and bobbing of heads, and also specific changes to the makeup design for all characters to eliminate traces of yellowface and exaggerated exoticism. 

To me, these changes certainly appeared to result in a more respectful and educated perspective in performance. It felt less uncomfortable and upsetting than similar ballet productions I’ve attended previously. But, not being a member of the Chinese or Chinese American communities, it’s really not for me to say whether they went far enough in alleviating the damaging insensitivities of the past. I sincerely hope they did, so that those communities may feel seen, welcome, and respected. 

The final key to making these efforts truly effective was in the transparency and resources that Ballet West offered their audience to create an experience that far surpassed mere entertainment; the audience was expected to learn something. A program note four times longer than any I’ve seen before, from artistic director Adam Sklute, doubled as a history lesson; a letter from restagers Hodson and Archer about their process gave insight into their arduous treasure hunt, complete with juicy details from mythic figures of ballet past; multiple panels in the lobby covered costume design, reconstruction in conversation with representation, and the history of Chinese railroad workers here in Utah; and a letter from Phil Chan of Final Bow for Yellowface articulated the need for these kinds of changes and his experience with the production process (there was also a pre-performance lecture that I sadly couldn’t make it to). Many of these resources are also available online - they are fascinating and I would highly encourage anyone to make time to peruse them and then to visit yellowface.org for further context on the critical work that Final Bow for Yellowface is doing. 

It is incredible and exciting to see a company like Ballet West digging into and committing itself to a journey down this road. This performance was a very far cry from the experience I had just three years ago reviewing their production of Madame Butterfly for this publication, and I am grateful for the many voices inside of and outside this company that are pushing them into a new and better future. 

I hope to count on Ballet West’s future endeavors (looking at you, Nutcracker Arabian and sundry gendered stereotypes) following suit – no longer feeling indebted to a self-serving and self-destructing nostalgia but instead examining, creating, and re-creating with respect, accountability, and transparency. This willingness to adapt without preciousness and engage audiences and communities in meaningful conversation will be a vital new way for Ballet West to stoke fresh interest, provide leadership in the arts, and keep its legacy alive and vibrant. 

Ballet West’s Balanchine’s Ballets Russes continues through Saturday, November 2, with a matinee at 2 p.m. and a final performance at 7:30 p.m.

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.

SALT: When I am Lost, we Speak in Flowers

SALT Contemporary Dance premiered co-founder and artistic director Joni McDonald’s When I am Lost, we Speak in Flowers, beginning a three-weekend run at the Eccles Theater’s Regent Street Black Box. The audience entered on the heels of one of the last warm evenings of the year, through the still, quiet lobby, to join a sparse, quiet crowd. The performing area was littered with the heads of flowers and backed by two sections of chain link fencing as well as the theater’s tall glass windows that look out on the McCarthy Plaza. Everything was bathed in a glowing blue, the same as that used perennially by photographer Chad Kirkland for his gorgeous portraits of SALT company members. 

Hot tip while I’m setting the scene: anyone coming to see this show will be treated to a 2-for-1 complementary (and complimentary) art viewing – through the back windows, the recently installed Pages of Salt is visible from an eye-level perspective. The massive wave of panels by artist Ned Kahn had its grand opening just days ago, through the Salt Lake City Arts Council’s Public Art Program. 

SALT’s six dancers began seated in a line in front of all this with their backs to us as McDonald, who danced in as well choreographed this concert, walked in with a large bundle of additional flowers. The sound of chatter from a crowded room came over the speakers as they began. The group moved smoothly in unison, gliding through gesture and a series of overhead lifts with an unshakably sedated calm as the intensity of the recorded voices peaked and gave way to a humming choral composition by Andrew Maxfield. 

The structure turned here to a long series of duets aimed at “find[ing] the collateral beauty inside the struggle.” Most duets suggested the processing of trauma by, against, and through the dynamics of isolated romantic heterosexual couples in traditionally gendered archetypes. We saw a slowly drained and forsaken woman and her wandering-eyed man; the endlessly supportive muse and a man who just couldn’t stand up on his own; puppet-stringed tangling; a moment of abrupt, unexamined violence; and a group of women consoling one another, each subsequent duet laundered through the hammered smoothness of the company’s trademark movement style. 

It’s a smoothness that, purely as a quality of movement, is clearly desirable and beautiful to watch. The dancers of SALT are trained to move like an unstoppable liquid force, technically brilliant, pouring seamlessly into each successive and intricate phrase. At times, though, it is an aesthetic preference that feels a little bit lost - not finding its purpose within the narrative it constructs, steering content toward its own prefigured destination rather than the other way around. 

The most memorable scene of the evening came during a solo by Aubry Mason. Her portrayal of a long slide into a looping snare of dissociative hallucinations and paranoia was an extremely affecting and nuanced performance. Her movement spun like an uncoiling chain, and her interpretation both employed and transformed the smooth, seamless liquidity, unraveling it and filing it to a point. 

When I am Lost, we Speak in Flowers portrayed stories of trauma and support, was danced beautifully, and ended with a long, held gaze at what the dancers constructed from the eponymous flowers. The message was simple and total: from tragedy comes beauty. Beauty is the goal, comfort in others is the way. What was less clear is how SALT may feel about the operational particulars of its promise, or premise – why or how “beauty” grows, what finding it may do, what it doesn’t do, what does or does not count for it, what happens when it can’t be found, who gets to find it, what else can come in its place, and last but not least, why is it what we look for? 

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. 

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.