SONDERimmersive: Thank You Theobromine

SONDERimmersive’s Thank You Theobromine, in collaboration with The Chocolate Conspiracy, is an interactive dance theater production built around the story of a chocolatier who may have poisoned people. Groups of audience members tour downtown shop The Chocolate Conspiracy, guided by performers but allowed the freedom to explore within that framework. Attending when I did, toward the end of the show’s multi-month run, audience management was all figured out and the performers seemed well-rehearsed and well-connected to their characters.

On the sidewalk outside The Chocolate Conspiracy, audience members were initially greeted by Graham Brown, co-creator and choreographer, who gave a welcome speech that included carefully created guidelines for how to interact within the immersive production. Then, we were invited into a tent filled with objects that the sold-out, 30-person audience was encouraged to explore, while a performer took her time welcoming us, whispering to us secrets about characters in the story, serving us hot chocolate, and dividing us into five smaller groups with corresponding colored wristbands. This beginning was a bit underwhelming, and I overheard some audience members expressing impatience as we waited to enter the chocolate shop one group at a time. The excitement did intensify once we left the tent and entered the building.

Once inside, the performers were confident and firm with their verbal and physical guidance of the audience - pushing, pulling, coaxing, and demanding us to participate as they intended. They moved us from room to room, but we were also free to wander. The interactive component of the production involved both theater and dance, and there were often multiple scenes taking place at the same time, such that the music and verbalizations of one scene served as background noise for another.

One success in involving audience members in dancing included a phrase in which Rebecca Aneloski, “The Libra,” took someone’s hand and led them to the window and then back to the center of the room, easing them into the part where she instructed them to close their eyes, and then moving them through ballroom dance-esque postures and finally into a gentle yet sincere embrace. Aneloski then returned that participant to a bench and repeated the sequence with another, and then another. 

I was very pleased with the use of space, both in the sense of performers interacting with the venue’s architecture, and also in the sense of their utilization of the venue to create unique perspectives from which they could be viewed. One of my favorite instances of this was some group choreography on a stairway: dancers thrashed between the wall and railing, with the audience standing beyond and below, and then one dancer lifted another into a back-roll to walk sideways along the wall.

Another good example of the use of space was when Aneloski rolled off the balcony railing to climb down to the driveway below, where she and Lauren Payne threw each other around and clambered up and down the street-level doors, exhibiting impressive strength and choreographic creativity. Payne boosted Aneloski up to a second story window, first to open it and then to climb into it, and seconds later pushed me out of the way, from where I was leaning over the balcony railing to watch Payne below, so that Aneloski could slide across the railing.

Lighting was especially effective in the room farthest to the west upstairs, during a scene toward the end in which the performers guided all audience members to the center of the room under a single bare bulb before weaving pathways among the crowd. In this scene, Michael Watkiss impressed me with his intentional focus and emotion as he performed a ritualistic gesture phrase, seemingly directed only at me.

The most memorable moment for me was one which not many other audience members got to see. Watkiss pushed me into a bathroom and left me alone there for a minute until Elizabeth Golden joined me. Golden mirrored my body position and facial expressions until, without verbally directing me to do so, she was able to lead me to mirror her. As we mirrored each other, she told me she was glad it was me, and began to nervously discuss her hunch that if I stayed here to take her place in purgatory then she could move on instead of me. As our mirroring game eased into a comfortable rhythm, her gestures perfectly led me to open a cabinet to find a jug marked “rat poison,” pour it into a cup, turn on the sink to add water to it, and raise the cup toward my mouth. Just before I would have had to decide if I really wanted to play along enough to drink whatever it was, Aneloski burst into the bathroom, emotional with criticism for Golden’s intentions, and snatched the cup away and poured it out. Then Aneloski led me downstairs where she handed me a chocolate bar, thanked me for coming, and pushed me outside into the softly falling snow.

Overall, the performers’ commitment to character, and specifically their eye contact, was important to creating the overall impact of the experience. The program credited four writers for the project, and I could tell that the performers were motivated by a specific and detailed story. However, the work of the writers seemed somewhat diminished by the mysteriousness which was brilliantly cultivated within the performance. I’d love to see a bit more clarity of story and characters to balance out all the intriguing mystery.

 It is possible, however, that other audience members experienced greater, or different, clarity than I did, and the fact that each individual’s experience could be so unique is a magical element of this project.

SONDERimmersive’s Thank You Theobromine continues through Sunday, January 5 at The Chocolate Conspiracy in downtown Salt Lake City.

Photos above courtesy of Graham Brown.

Kendall Fischer is the artistic director of Myriad Dance Company, and has enjoyed performing opportunities with Voodoo Productions, SBDance, Municipal Ballet Co., and La Rouge Entertainment, among others. Her choreography has been performed by Myriad, Municipal Ballet, and at Creator's Grid, and her dance film project “Breathing Sky” received the 2017 Alfred Lambourne Movement prize.

Molly Heller & Heartland Collective: Cosmos

On December 21, the sun set in Salt Lake City at 5:03 p.m. Normally this, the shortest day of the year, reminds me of my desperate need for more sunlight (if you’re like me, you may want to check out a seasonal affective disorder light, which helps to combat the winter blues). But this year, the Heartland collective invited us to celebrate the winter solstice with them at Cosmos, a performance and dance party at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA). 

The date of the performance was no coincidence. The winter solstice holds significance in many indigenous cultures and various religions as a celebration of the longest hours of darkness. Winter is about to begin, but hours of daylight also are about to begin lengthening, and the solstice is a time to embrace reflections upon and rituals of regeneration and renewal. The evening, curated by director Molly Heller alongside her troupe of Heartlanders, was dedicated to this kind of communal reflection. 

As I entered the museum, the walls, normally illuminated to highlight galleries, were darkened. A kaleidoscope of rainbow light was strewn across the space, resembling the aurora borealis. Inside a gallery, two benches were filled with dozens of handcrafted silver boutonnieres for guests to select. I was delighted to admire each tiny piece of charming art and to select one for myself to pin onto my clothing. Cosmos also then invited me to have my face bedazzled with silver jewels. This was a theme throughout the evening: attendees were continuously invited to participate, becoming part of the art themselves.

Nick Foster and Michael Wall entered the upstairs gallery, both wearing shimmery, silver tops, and filled the space with serene sounds that carried the evening from performance to dance party and on the journey in between.

Florian Alberge, an unbilled surprise guest who recently moved back to Salt Lake City, invited the audience to write a letter, beginning “Dear Closure,” that would be burned by the Heartlanders on New Year’s Eve. This idea calls upon the tradition of a fire-releasing ceremony, often practiced on the winter solstice, where what is desired to be released is first written down and then burned as a symbol of closure. 

Heller has noted her fascination with closure: “The vulnerability within letting go and in allowing closure to be non-linear and self-actualized is what we’re exposing within Cosmos. I am discovering on a personal level that healing/release can happen with strangers and if we can’t choose our endings in life, we can practice curating beginnings.” Throughout the evening, attendees were offered many opportunities to explore such ideas of release through writing, witnessing, and dancing. 

As the performance continued, attendees outlined the long row of windows that look down upon the lower-level galleries. Heartlanders Nick Blaylock, Brian Gerke, Molly Heller, Marissa Mooney, and Melissa Younker entered and began diving in and out from the gallery walls, like atoms vibrating, darting, and pivoting. One person remarked what a magical fish bowl we were peering into, as we witnessed the Heartlanders expand and contract throughout every corner of the space.

One of the most striking moments began as Blaylock took off in a full sprint and dove to the floor, sliding nearly twelve feet across the gallery. The rest of the performers soon followed suit. There was something so whimsical and playful as they slid with such vigor in between the gallery walls that still displayed art by Cara Krebs and Stephanie Leitch, among others - all while wearing silver vintage costumes. It was a dazzling juxtaposition that brought a smile to my face.

We were soon invited down to wander the lower galleries. In a moment of delightful surprise, the side garage door (normally used to transport large works of art in and out of the gallery) opened and the Heartlanders re-entered in a series of repetitive, quirky gestures. Foster and Wall transitioned into a whimsical, carnival score. A mist of whispers filled the space: “How fun!” “How exciting!” “How wonderful this all is.”

Heller began to give verbal instructions; attendees and Heartlanders alike participated in an improvisation score that spread throughout the space, the instructions guiding everyone first to spin on an axis, then to prance through the feet. It was a carefree, unpretentious, and shared sequence. An attendee later expressed, “I felt like I was inside of this world and the characters were unraveling right in front of me. It was exciting to be in the middle of the chaos and also inside the resolution.” The model of Heartland events is unique in this way -  it interweaves performers and attendees in such a way that facilitates a shared experience. You do not simply watch a Heartland event; you become a part of it.

As performance bled into dance party, everyone began to jump, shimmy, spiral, wiggle, sing, and bop together. Heartlanders swirled throughout clusters of attendees, sharing hugs and inspiring new dance moves. One attendee remarked on the palpable shared energy. It was fun. It was tiring. It was meditative. In a darkened museum on the winter solstice, we jammed out together, sweating through our shimmering clothes. 

Heller’s work has long been dedicated to her research of performance as a healing practice. It felt important to me that this performance-cum-party took place in such a shared setting. I found myself deep in thought about the role of community in supporting the health and wellbeing of ourselves and those around us. Heartland events have introduced a very special ritual to the community for these reasons. 

Those that stayed until the end witnessed Younker, Heller, and Mooney sing and shout a manifesto dedicated to release, healing, and closure. Attendees shouted along (even when we didn’t know the words), and I couldn’t stop myself from bouncing and clapping. The evening ended with catharsis, in the presence of friends, strangers, and glittery boutonnieres. 

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.

Ballet West: The Nutcracker

The Nutcracker is as much of a holiday tradition as streaming White Christmas on Netflix. We depend on it as a marker of the season, a reason to call up favorite friends and family for a jolly holiday date. We revel in the familiarity of the story, the staging, the characters. We know what is coming next and wait with bated breath for our favorite solos. We compare this year’s show to last year’s show, or to the time when we were in it. We pick out something special to wear to the Capitol Theatre.

This is the 75th-anniversary year of Willam Christensen’s The Nutcracker. As with anything where familiarity has come to the forefront (hello, long-term relationships!), there is the danger of taking it for granted. In knowing it by heart, we don’t have to listen to the story carefully, or mine for the nuance beneath the surface. In short, we don’t really look at what’s in front of us.

It lies, then, in the performers to shock us awake. This past Saturday, at Ballet West’s The Nutcracker, I found myself longing for that soon into the first act.

Christensen’s Nutcracker, the longest-running version of the production worldwide, is heavily influenced by vaudeville, and incorporates a certain amount of shtick and comedy.  As a program note by Ballet West artistic director Adam Sklute described, this was one of the stylistic choices Christensen employed in making a “uniquely American” Nutcracker. But at times, a focus on entertaining bleeds into parody of characters, where there may otherwise be room to root them in reality.

I wondered, even while staying true to Christensen, if there was still room for a deeper sense of storytelling? A more committed research of character? An approach to a beloved performance focused not on delivering familiar high points, but on approaching the original source material with true curiosity?

And then I got my answer.

When Emily Neale took the stage for the Arabian dance, she shook me awake. Through every languid extension and elastic suspension, she exuded seductive, exotic energy. Her gaze confident and a bit playful, she fully embodied, rather than just portrayed, the role. Together with partner Dominic Ballard, she renewed the infamous duet. I felt like I’d never seen it before. It felt gutsy and alive.

I became immediately aware that this difference was a crucial factor in my experience, as I noticed it in other places. The moments in which dancers risked taking a role dead-seriously, theatrically diving in head first, popped out like bolded font. As the Nutcracker Prince, Kyle Davis brought such grounded and calm energy that, in the brief moment he took to the center, the audience went quiet. Hadriel Diniz, Amber Miller, and Gabrielle Salvatto let the rhythm of the Spanish dance flavor their every step, bringing with each leap and turn the full emotion of a foreign land. In committing like this, they honored their characters.

I know, I’m not mentioning the obvious technical prowess inherent in pulling off a flawless Nutcracker, but when we are in a long-term relationship, it just takes more to get us flushed. This show has stood the test of time as communities across the country refuse to live without it. The gorgeous trappings of sparkly colorful costumes, whimsical sets, and promising young talent cannot help but bring Christmas cheer. But what’s underneath is also for the taking.

There is a chance to reconnect with The Nutcracker on a deeper, more meaningful level. It lies in the performers giving the ballet’s characters their due emotional weight. It’s in the subtle moments of pantomime at the party, in the delicacy of the Snow Queen, in Drosselmeyer believing he can conjure magic. It cannot be layered on top of choreography but instead has to inform it from its roots. This ballet is dance theater, after all - the storytelling is as paramount as the pirouettes. 

Ballet West’s The Nutcracker continues through Thursday, December 26, at the Janet Quinney Lawson Capitol Theatre. 

Emeri Fetzer is a dancer and communications specialist. She works at the University of Utah, performs with Phantom Limb Company, and is looking forward to developing new choreography in the coming year. 

Dan Higgins: Speak

Dan Higgins’ new work Speak, which opened yesterday at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, looks like it might have been made for his employer, Repertory Dance Theatre (it was sponsored by RDT, as part of the company’s Link Series for independent choreographers). The seventy-minute dance, in its finer moments, brought to mind teenage memories of seeing that company. There was a pleasure in watching the eight dancers — four women and four men — swim through the project of being together on stage for more than an hour. 

At the outset, we heard a disembodied Higgins reminding us to silence our phones. Then he enjoined us to look over our left shoulder, to take stock of what we smelled, to revisit a recent significant decision we’ve taken in our own lives. Soon we were watching six black benches being rearranged on white marley floor. Eight dancers folded and unfolded, glided and slowly toppled, were careful and precise in the harmonics where they faced, how they followed a looping initiation from elbow to knee to fingertips, in and out of unison.

There was a spareness and a wakefulness in this first scene that I didn’t expect. The air was cut by a leggy, bouncy solo from Emma Eileen Hansen. A frontal assault of technical prowess changed hands a few times and eventually gave way to a tactical confrontation between the men and the women — a study in changing focus and walking on the beat. The benches lined up like chess pieces.

The lithe Mar Undag and Jaclyn Brown disappeared smoothly behind these black slats of wood — moments like this returned to the spirit of the first five minutes. Higgins sometimes got lost. He sometimes relied too heavily on the kind of music that stands in the background and tells you vaguely how to feel without saying much else. But he made a believable seventy-minute dance. There were no big questions, but I respected getting to see these eight talented dancers coexisting and, at times, rising to the occasion of play. 

Speak was at its best when it didn’t know where it was going. One section comes to mind where the conceit of a common struggle gave way to chaos. A meandering trumpet (the music for the piece was by Michael Wall) whirled through the air under a series of harried runs across the stage — six-second character studies from Brendan Rupp, Micah Burkhardt, Bailey Sill, Jonathan Kim, and Morgan Phillips. 

Higgins knows how to use stillness to effect. Sometimes, I wish he would lean into that more than other implements of the scholastic modern-dance toolbox. The ending: Higgins himself came out and picked up where his opening speech left off, recounting a vague fable about a boy bravely jumping over an infinite void. This was a little much, but I can forgive him. The fleet-footed romping of his cast was enough. 

Speak by Dan Higgins. Photo by Sharon Kain.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

The Penguin Lady, joBdance & LAJAMARTIN in SPHERE: Phase One

SPHERE: Phase One brought together three distinct choreographers in a shared evening in the Leona Wagner Black Box Theatre, presented by The Penguin Lady. Unique in their voices and visions, Natosha Washington, LAJAMARTIN (Laja Field and Martin Durov), and Joseph “jo” Blake shared themes of identity, resistance, and empowerment. 

In an excerpt of “Pinot Noir,” Laja Field and Martin Durov (LAJAMARTIN) invited us into a day in their lives, in both mundane moments rooted in reality and the fantastical musings of a dream-state. Truly dance-theater in style, “Pinot Noir” transitioned between twisted floorwork and elastic partnering to grounded pedestrian action without hesitation - one moment suspended in an elegant balance, the next casually propped in an everyday stance. Both ways of being (the trained mover and the human) existed in equality, and neither had hierarchy onstage. Fleeting scenes, from lip-syncing lines of “Cat On a Hot Tin Roof,” to a hip-swaying, skirt-whipping quick step, to catching a flopping Field on a fishing pole, painted a holistic story of a couple. They were not clichéd, but relatable in their whimsy. None of us is a cohesive sentence; we are all a mess of dreams and fantasies.

The twelve dancers of Weber State University’s Moving Company paid tribute to the female voice in their excerpt of “Take Us As We Are,” a continually evolving work, much like its subject matter. Choreographer Joseph “jo” Blake reiterated in a program note that the choreography remains responsive to the discussions it catalyzes.

Clad in long, flowing fabrics in watercolor shades, the dancers surrounded a long table, fixed in shifting tableaus. Soon, they began to work together to break down the structure of the table into thirds, laying it flat, clearing the center of the stage. The work was not without tension - at times they moved in synergy, at times with resistance. Voices of iconic women echoed through the theater: Michelle Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Yursa Amjad, Emma Watson.

Soon they enveloped a single dancer with her back against a wall (in this case, one table’s top). They evoked memories, both personal and historical, of female fortitude against diversity. Solo moments, with the community never far away, each reminded us that even when an individual seems to stand alone, an army is behind them. As the table barriers cleared, they danced with exuberance and freedom. Finally, the group climbed over a last wall toward the audience, their faces open and resolute.

We had the opportunity to see Blake’s choreography course through his own body in “only he might know?” - a solo that grappled with identity expression. His back exposed to the audience, Blake rippled his shoulder blades, the beginnings of phrases percolating through his spine. As these motions sometimes stopped at his neck, sometimes escaped through his fingertips, it felt as if something was gradually working its way to surface. With staccato movement, he brought himself to his feet, then shifted back to the bench where he began. The action was both sinewy and sharp, fluid and broken.

The music stopped to reveal Blake’s breathing, another exposure. His space was one of quiet vulnerability even in its voyeurism.

In The Penguin Lady’s “Pluck,” a band of women gripped apples. Shuddering, vibrating, they seemed inseparable from the force that the object had over them. Their faces suggested something beyond fascination. Something more menacing. Corinne Penka, dressed in apple-red silk, whipped and darted in all directions, diligently following the apple in her hand.

Apples immediately connote original sin, the story of Eve tempted in the garden. There was certainly something tempting in this reference, particularly when paired with this all-female collective. But as the dancers furiously explored a changing relationship to their apples, spanning from obsession to repulsion, other associations arose. At one moment, Penka gathered armfuls of abandoned apples. Trying to protect them, the group restrained her with long red cords, her limbs stretched in opposite directions.

In both scenarios, she was controlled by an outside source. It was only when both apples and restraints were shed that the dancers gained liberty, moving in nurturing pairs. We are so often bound by our personal narratives, yet lost when we shed the things we believe encompass our identities. The dancers went back to the apples, this time with reverence. They took a bite.

The common threads running through SPHERE: Phase One are perhaps the natural workings of a viewer’s mind forging connections. But in a dance community this tight-knit, this inherently supportive, it cannot be all coincidence. As artists, our work influences, inspires, and catalyzes our circle. On to phase two. 

SPHERE: Phase One continues through tonight, Saturday, December 7, at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center.

Emeri Fetzer is a dancer and communications specialist. She works at the University of Utah and performs with Phantom Limb Company, and is looking forward to developing new choreography in the coming year.