Ballet 22: a holiday gift reviewed

For Christmas this year, I decided to gift tickets to the debut performance of Ballet 22, based in Oakland California. So, on Friday, December 18 at 5:00 pm Pacific Time and 6:00 pm Mountain Time, my daughter in L.A., my brother in San Francisco, and I here in SLC simultaneously switched on our laptops and watched Ballet 22’s inaugural digital performance, Breaking Ground.

The company is indeed breaking ground as a classical ballet company adapting partnering and choreography for an all-male cast. With men sometimes on pointe and in practice tutus, Ballet 22 is expanding the vocabulary and fecundity of its dancers. But this is neither Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, nor the bumbling stepsisters in Cinderella, or parody of any kind. There are no false eyelashes or pink tights — in fact there are no tights at all — although costuming still occasionally hints at tradition. 

In Ballet 22’s version of the Odette adagio Swan Lake pas de deux (retitled Pas de Huit for four couples), the camera dissolves one Odette into another, sometimes in black and other times white tutus — ultimately proving that height, weight and gender do not define roles, and the unmannered choreography speaks for itself.

During the Sugar Plum pas de deux, my daughter group texted, “I must say, I really don’t miss the women.” 

My twelve-month old grandson watching the performance in Los Angeles in my daughter's lap.

That is not to say women in dance are unimportant, but rather that when Ballet 22 Artistic Director Roberto Vega Ortiz dances the Sugar Plum adagio, partnered by Donghoon Lee, the camera invites us in and the “don’t let the audience see you sweat” trope is gone. Vega Ortiz’s impeccable musical timing is on full display as he leans into his penché gently floating between notes. My brother texted, “defies notions of a dancer with such strong, thick, muscular legs.”

Choreographer (and dancer on this program) Joshua Stayton’s ballet Juntos leaves the classics yet stays within the vocabulary to focus on composition and bravura, and gives us a chance to pick out our favorite dancer. Again, the costuming occupies a place in the choreography. Dancers switch between black t-shirts and jeans, and black tutus and midriff tops — and just when Duane Gosa (a graduate of The University of Akron and current member of Ballet Trockadero) has captured our attention, Gilbert Bolden III (a Corps de Ballet member with New York City Ballet) whisks it away.

The dancer-choreographed short films Metamorphosis (Philip Glass music) and Before the World Ends (music by Residente) takes viewers on a trip around the globe into each dancer’s world with short solos edited together. My daughter texted, “I like the intimacy of seeing people in their homes.” 

In the last work on the program, Omar Román de Jesús’s choreography Mi Pequeñito Sueño is less captivating than its sound score, lighting, and costumes. But to close this particular program with the design elements leading, is congruous. 

The “live” ticketed format (although previously filmed) really worked for me. I do suggest Ballet 22 produce a clearer format regarding program notes. The credits ran (before? or after?) so fast I couldn’t identify titles or dancers relative to roles. And for all the care taken by videographer Lázaro González, stage design credits are absent from their website. 

Enjoying a run time at slightly under an hour including a brief interview with Vega Ortiz and Executive Director/Ballet Mistress Theresa Knudson, I’m beginning to prefer dance from an editor’s point of view. I recently watched an artÉmotion (Ballet West’s Allison DeBona and Rex Tilton) on IGTV Instagram and in response posted five-phrases connected by semi-colons. DeBona (with my permission) put it on their website with Tilton’s piece Mensa. 

It appears we are all adapting. 

Kathy Adams, formerly the dance critic for The Salt Lake Tribune, writes about dance nationally as well as having been a mentor to us at loveDANCEmore over the last ten years. She is also active in local politics.

RDT presents an online evening of solos

Repertory Dance Theatre’s latest offering, Flying Solo, presented “unforgettable solos” from the company’s extensive library of historical and contemporary Modern Dance works. As the title would have you assume, each of the eight company members had at least one unaccompanied turn on stage. I appreciated this opportunity to study the dancers individually, as I’ve only seen most of them perform in ensemble works. I was especially blown away by Jaclyn Brown’s unexpected weight shifts and organic transitions from one level to another in Nicholas Cendese’s The Impermanence of Darkness, and by Jonathan Kim’s constantly moving, well-balanced yet rollercoaster-like explorations of space in Molly Heller’s Sounding III. Ursula, Elle, Daniel, Kareem, Lauren, and Dan as well deserve standing ovations from your couches; they are truly striking performers.

Kareem Lewis in “Pegasus” from José Limón’s The Winged. Said Lewis, “What I find most difficult, is to try and depict a flying, golden horse.”

That being said, this concert could have given us so much more, in less time. (Plan an intermission for yourself! Fifty-four minutes in, I paused the video and audibly shrieked when I realized there were about thirty minutes left.) Socially-distanced rehearsing, intermittent quarantining, and transitioning from live to live-streamed performances are challenges that come with a silver lining: they are glaringly obvious excuses to try things we haven’t tried before. RDT seems to have the resources to stay in stride with the changing times, but they’re not taking full advantage of them. For one thing, the entirety of Flying Solo was performed and filmed in the Jeanne Wagner Theatre at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center. I understand wanting to stay close to your home, but even NYCB’s recent Festival of New Choreography for their digital fall season used various locations throughout their Lincoln Center home base, including the water fountain and nearby streets and parking lots.

As Mark Morris recently admitted of his newest work, “I’m not making a dance. I’m making a film.” It would be nice to see RDT acknowledge this necessary change in mindset, and then use locations, framing, and lighting that results in a more intriguing finished product. Flying Solo reminded me of my dance recital videotapes from the nineties. The camera only captured footage of the dancers from one angle (front and center), which was a lost opportunity to show the audience what dance looks like from points of view we can’t access in a theater. (They briefly flirted with an aerial view in their last performance and I was really hoping to see more this time around.) Between each piece, there were trite photomontages that moved across the screen to uninspiring piano music, serving as the backdrop for a narrator who needlessly described the upcoming work (plenty of room for this in the digital program). Wonderstone Films provided filming and production for the event, so maybe RDT is not fully to blame for these choices.

Ursula Perry in Sharee Lane’s A Thin Place

The work itself was what I’ve come to expect from the company’s library – historical dances next to contemporary dances that follow many of the same rules as the historical pieces.

An excerpt from Zvi Gotheiner’s Chairs opened the show, a solo that performer Lauren Curley described as, “an endless cycle of repeating the same movements and always getting the same results.” I would apply this description to the majority of what I witnessed this evening: Modern Dance movement vocabularies that dance enthusiasts are overwhelmingly familiar with were repeated in different costumes and to different (though extremely similar) soundscores, and obvious choreographic structures outlined in textbooks like my absolute least favorite tome The Intimate Act of Choreography were aplenty. Molly Heller’s series of pieces, Sounding I, II, & III were a bit of an exception here. The movement seemed to have developed from organic intentions, as though the dancers discovered the movement from within as opposed to “putting it on” their bodies. Sounding I, II, & III were intended to be a triptych, though they were not presented consecutively. This was another missed opportunity for ingenuity, in my opinion.

Daniel Do, Jaclyn Brown and Jonathan Kim in Molly Heller’s Sounding pieces, set to Bach’s famous cello prelude

Editing the three solos so that they appeared to be happening on screen at the same time, side-by-side, could have added an interesting visual dynamic, cut down the run-time of the entire performance, and reduced the number of times we heard a lovely but overused piece of music.

I recently took an online workshop with karen nelson, who demonstrated several ways of adjusting zoom settings to allow for creative ways of showcasing solos, duets, trios, and multiple entrances and exits. I thus felt mislead by the claim that choreographer Marina Harris had “mastered the art of zoom technology” for her piece Remote, since the dancers did not appear in zoom boxes at all, but on stage, just as they had in every piece beforehand. Harris, based in Nova Scotia, shared that her “first impulse was to create a single solo for a dancer that hardly moved and would be watched on a smart phone.” She instead decided to create a solo for each dancer, and presented them on stage. I wish she would have stuck to her first impulse, but I must admit that I was intrigued by Elle Johansen’s opening solo performed with a hairbrush (does that actually make it a duet?).

Elle Johansen in Harris’ Remote

Tickets for Flying Solo are still available on RDT’s website, where you can also find information for a virtual reception with the company on Tuesday, December 1 at 6:30 pm MST.

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

UtahPresents brings Dancing Earth to Salt Lake audiences

On Friday, November 20, UtahPresents premiered the final episode of a six-part series of Dancing Earth’s Between Underground and Skyworld Cyberspace. The event was live streamed for ticket holders to view from home. Following the screening of the last episode was a Q&A with a panel of interdisciplinary artists involved in the project. The night concluded with a performance by Randy L. Barton, a Neo-Contemporary Navajo artist who played a stellar DJ set with his own traditionally inspired Indigenous hip-hop tracks.  

Dancing Earth’s Between Underground and Skyworld Cyberspace merges the talents of a breadth of collaborators working in diverse mediums including dance, sound, audiovisual, and virtual design. The six episodes constitute a multidimensional Indigenous-made work of digital art with a critical message. Despite all the added barriers faced by Indigenous artists in the age of COVID-19, Between Underground and Skyworld Cyberspace will endure as a reminder of Indigenous peoples’ unrelenting resilience and capacity to adapt in the face of extreme adversity. 

All photos, courtesy of Dancing Earth, by Paulo J. da Rocha-Tavares

The dancers in Dancing Earth engage in and communicate profound meaning through embodied performance.  In many Indigenous cultures, one's actions on the earth act as offerings back to the land and its life-sustaining resources. It is commonly held within Indigenous thought that our actions are recorded and felt by the earth.  Indigenous peoples have always danced as a means of passing on stories, making offerings to the earth, and honoring all relations. Dancing Earth engages in their performances with this conviction as the foundation.  

A phrase invoked commonly within Indigenous communities is “all my relations”. The expression is offered to honor all of one’s relationships with the earth. These may be relationships to surrounding natural environments, or the relationships amongst communities of people. There’s a certain level of balance that is required to cultivate the most ideal relationships. By maintaining good relations, one will find balance and live sustainably.  

This fairly simple premise of maintaining good relationships with all of one's surroundings is a guiding principle within an Indigenous worldview. Despite the simplicity of this ideology, Indigenous peoples have struggled to maintain these good relations. This struggle is steeped in centuries of fighting colonial oppression imposed by settling nations. In the United States, Indigenous peoples and the lifeways necessary to their wellbeing, and quite frankly, their existence, have been under attack since the inception of European settlement in the Americas.  

Natalie Aceves, photo by Paulo T.

“It has been a rough 500 years” heaves dancer Justin Gieham in the third episode of Dancing Earth’s Between Underground and Skyworld Cyberspace, “From Resilience Blues to Journeys”. This lamentation is made with a deep exhale as the other dancers gather around to convene about how they will survive the apocalypse of settler colonialism. The group decides to look towards the wisdom of their ancestors to lead them forward and venture on a journey to seek this knowledge. 

The indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced an apocalyptic invasion by settlers. This invasion continues to disrupt the prosperity of Indigenous peoples, which is reliant on sustainable balance to exist between all of life on earth. A balanced relationship to the earth and land is the essence of Indigenous life and culture. The prolonged loss of land and culture brought on by settler colonialism is a violent assault on Indigenous peoples. Modern generations are still surviving through the apocalypse that began centuries ago with initial settlement. As lands and lifeways continue to be occupied and threatened, indigenous peoples are forced to remain in a state of survival and mourning.  

Natalie Benally, photo by Paulo T.

In their essay, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Indigenous scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang define settler colonialism as being “a structure and not an event”.  Tuck and Yang write: 

In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage. 

Settler colonialism threatens the life-sustaining relationships Indigenous peoples have maintained to land for centuries. 

Dancing Earth pushes against the oppressive forces of settler-colonialism and imagines an Indigenous future by re-engaging traditional knowledge and understandings. Each of the dancers maintains their unique relationships to indigeneity stemming from their diverse Indigenous backgrounds. For the dancers of Dancing Earth, dancing is a modality of reconnecting to the sacred and embodying traditional ancestral knowledge. 

In an interview with members of Dancing Earth facilitated by UtahPresents and Dr. Elizabeth Archuleta of the Ethnic Studies department at the University of Utah, the dancers spoke to how Dancing Earth provides a platform for embodied healing, decolonizing, and reconnecting to Indigenous knowledge and traditions. Company-member Lumhe Micco Sampson (Mvskoke/ Seneca), a multidisciplinary artist and traditional hoop dancer, related how the company connects back to traditional Indigenous ways of life through dance. These traditional lifeways Sampson explained are not just “myths” or “legends” but are in fact “proven ways of life that have been going on for thousands of years”.  Sampson continued: 

So what we’re doing with this modern time with dance is telling a story and creating energy. Often, that energy is very healing. The individual doing the dancing, but also anybody watching can obtain healing as well. Our movements are influenced by our everyday lives, which help put those movements into action and for us to be able to teach them to coming generations so that they will be able to connect to the movements and the teachings and pass them forward.

Quetzal Guerrero, violinist, visual artist, actor, and dancer within the cohort of artists interviewed described his collaboration with Dancing Earth as a means of connecting with his Indigenous heritage. Guerrero offered that: 

Being involved with DE has been a huge opportunity for me to start to reinvent or manifest the narrative I see for myself as a living and breathing Indigenous person of this current era.  I don’t have the wealth of knowledge to pull from language and ceremonies that so many Indigenous peoples have. I’ve had to make a concerted effort to discover that for myself and what works for me and how I can express it through art, and how I can inspire others to do the same.

By connecting to ancestral knowledge through dreams and elders, and embodying this knowledge, Dancing Earth breaks barriers built by settler colonialism. As a result, dancers and audience members are afforded the opportunity to reconcile with loss and move towards a decolonized future, wherein Indigenous peoples and their principles are centered and honored.  

Raven Bright, photo by Paulo T.

Scholar Tria Blu Wakpa observes the members of Dancing Earth as “culture creators” who are “drawing on past and working forcefully and gently with their materials in the present, evoking understandings for the survival and humanity of Native and non-Native peoples and the wellbeing of the planet.” Inspired by the knowledge that has sustained Indigenous peoples across time from all over the world, Dancing Earth is paving the way for Indigenous futurism and the healing of all life on earth. 

Dancing Earth’s multifaceted work, Between Underground and Skyworld Cyberspace, offers a platform for a decolonized, Indigenous-centered perspective to infiltrate the world of concert dance and dance film. Most significant of all is the company’s aptitude for invoking a revitalization of Indigenous knowledge and healing across Indigenous communities. 

The digitalized nature of Dancing Earth’s presence within the Salt Lake community has allowed the company to reach a broad audience. As a part of their residency with UtahPresents, Dancing Earth generously hosted virtual classes with different local organizations including, the Urban Indian Center in Salt Lake City. Connecting with and giving back to local Indigenous communities is a priority Dancing Earth upholds wherever they are on tour.   

Indigenous art such as that created in collaboration by the artists of Dancing Earth is deeply embedded with meaning. Creating art informed by traditional ways of knowing and beliefs that have survived centuries of forced oppression and erasure is an act of decolonization. By embodying cultural principles and traditional knowledge, Dancing Earth resists colonial subjugation and conceives a future for Indigenous peoples wherein our/their cultures and traditions are no longer oppressed, but rather embraced and enacted as a means of survival and resistance. 

Dancing Earth’s performance was lived-streamed upon occupied Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, Ute lands known as Salt Lake City, Utah.  

Raised in Southern California, Talia Dixon moved to Salt Lake City in 2017 to study dance at the University of Utah. She plans to graduate with her Honors BFA in Modern Dance as well as a Minor in American Indian Studies in the Spring of 2021. As an enrolled member of the Pauma Band of Luiseño Mission Indians, Talia is passionate about involving her community in her academic and artistic pursuits.

Discussing what Should Be Discussable

I have not seen (this version) of Nine Sinatra Songs by Ballet West and have no plans to review it. In this show, which was given locally at the Capitol Theatre, Ballet West ignores that more than one in one hundred people in Utah have COVID-19 and they refuse to talk about it. I understand that there were masks and other hygiene measures, but of course no one goes to the ballet for the social distancing. 

People are asking whether Ballet West’s type of show is the new art form. Potentially killing strangers as an art form? Yes, yes, I suppose disease can be art in a screwily post-neo-Dada sense. But this is not the sense intended by Ballet West, even though some of their programming is billed as experimental. 

If I understand Ballet West here, and I think I do — the publicity has been deafening — it is a kind of messianic return to the theater, designed to do some good for sufferers of fatal illnesses, both those in the cast and those who may be in the under-capacity audience. If we ask what a show does that no hospital, clinic, church, or other kind of relief agency has so far been able to do, I think the answer is obvious. If we consider that the experience, open to the public, as it is, may also be intolerably dangerous, the remedy is also obvious: Don't go. In not reviewing Ballet West, I'm sparing myself and my readers a dangerous experience, and I don't see that I really have any choice.

A critic has four options: (1) to see and review; (2) to see and not review; (3) not to see; (4) an option — to write about what one has not seen-becomes possible on strange occasions from which one feels excluded by reason of its express effects, which are more intelligible than theatre. I don't deny that seeing dance in a pandemic may be of value in some wholly other sphere devoid of responsibility, but it is as theatre, dance theatre, that I would approach it. And my approach has been cut off. By ignoring dying Utahns to produce their act, Ballet West has put themselves beyond the reach of criticism. I think of them as literally refusing to discuss the public as their victims and their artistry as martyrdom. 

In theatre, one chooses what one will be. The pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic audience members at Nine Sinatra Songs will have no choice other than to be sick. The fact that they are there in person intensifies the starkness of their condition. They should be there on videotape, the better to be seen and heard, especially now. They are the prime exhibits of a company administration which has crossed the line between theatre and reality — who thinks that victimhood is a sufficient presupposition to the creation of an art spectacle.

The thing that Nine Sinatra Songs makes immediately apparent, whether you see it or not, is that ignoring the pandemic is a kind of mass delusion that has taken hold of previously responsible sectors of our culture. The preferred medium during a pandemic is video (see your computer at almost any hour of the day), but the cultivation of in-person attendance demanded by institutions devoted to the care of art is a menace to all art forms, particularly performing art forms. The critic is part of the audience for art that COVID-19 also threatens. I can't review someone I am worried for or hopeless about. As a dance critic, I've learned to avoid companies who ignore the obvious problems with their events in context of our larger society. 

The strategies of dance companies as the victims of pandemic are proliferating marvelously at the moment. There's no doubt that the public is filled with much more hardship, which companies will meet with fewer patrons and less applause. This a politicized version of blackmail, that certain companies have resorted to, in a self-pitying moment. Instead of compassion for Utahns truly suffering, they invite a cozy kind of complicity demanding that their audience support local artists. This perfect, mutually manipulative union is formed which no Governor has put asunder. 

Photo by Luke Isley, courtesy of Ballet West.

Those who have read New Yorker critic Arlene Croce’s original essay “Discussing the Undiscussable” will realize that I have more or less stolen it to make a comparison between Bill T. Jones’ piece Still/Here (made during the early years of the AIDS crisis) and Ballet West’s Nine Sinatra Songs (produced during the coronavirus pandemic). 

It’s worth noting that my criticism is more than witty plagiarism. Ballet West has made headlines for contributions to racial justice such as: calling for more pointe shoe shades and being part of the “final bow for yellowface” in The Nutcracker. However, just like they’ve made no change to other equally racist divertissements, Nine Sinatra Songs ignores not only that the pandemic rages on but that it disproportionately impacts Utahns of color and low-income Utahns. The danger of opening the theater is not only for affluent, masked patrons, but for all employees of Salt Lake County. 

Another danger that’s misconstrued? Using (exclusively heterosexual) married couples for pas de deux underscores the heteronormativity of concert dance, while also pretending that their safety will somehow extend to the audience. 

Arlene missed out on some of why Still/Here was important; the dance looked at HIV/AIDS and other chronic and/or terminal illnesses as something that impacts more than one group. While many Americans failed to apprehend that AIDS wasn’t only a crisis for (cisgender white) gay men, we seem to have done the inverse. We assume that the pandemic applies only to smaller subgroups and do not acknowledge the way a space, like a theater, impacts us all. 

Ashley Anderson is the founder and director of loveDANCEmore and Ashley Anderson Dances. At the time of writing, the state of Utah is at a 20% average positivity rate for COVID-19 with neighborhoods near the theater at over 30%. 661 Utahns have died.

Ballet West mounts a modified Tharp classic during coronavirus

On Friday night, I went to the theater. I even went inside the theater. Ballet West’s Nine Sinatra Songs is a return to the stage, but not a return to normal — and that’s a good thing.  

The mixed repertoire of three works is the company’s first live indoor performance since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic eight months ago. It is beautiful, impactful, and reflects the moment we inhabit. Their return to the Capitol Theater stage was marked by rigorously enforced safety measures, including mandatory masks, distancing, a symptoms checklist, and staggered audience seating and release. It also featured curtain speeches by Artistic Director Adam Sklute that presented care and respect for those precautions and for one another as a basic premise of the evening; an acknowledgement of the unprecedented challenge to the artists and appreciation of their growth and investment in meeting it; and insight into the process of both the creation and commission of the works presented. I appreciate the transparency and clarity those remarks imparted.  

Artist Victoria Vassos and First Soloist Hadriel Diniz. Photo by Luke Isley.

Ballet West has a continuing responsibility to meaningfully and materially address equity and systemic racism institutionally and structurally. Their “Substantive Policy Changes to Allow for Greater Equity for Dancers of Color” is linked here. The first installment of the ongoing discussion panel series “Dismantling Racism in Ballet” led by Dr. Elizabeth Pryor and hosted by Ballet West is linked here. Though it is not an institutional responsibility in the same material and absolute sense, I am very glad that the night’s works explicitly reflected and responded to the emotional quality of living this year. Jennifer Archibald’s premiere Tides evoked resilience in the face of omnipresent change, and Nicolo Fonte’s premiere Faraway Close treats the loneliness and solace of distance and connection. The Nine Sinatra Songs for which the performance is named sets a precedent for what the restaging of existing works during the ongoing and locally escalating viral outbreak looks like. 

Inescapably prominent in Jennifer Archibald’s Tides is the great individual strength of the dancers, their nuanced fluidity, and most notably the way these qualities combine in partnered duets. Although the costumes of sea blue mesh-paneled leotards and pants were gender-specific, these qualities were not; shifting vulnerability and strength were equally embodied by all. And often in quick succession, like the entrance of slides en pointe into the abrupt and contained hand gestures that punctuated the piece. Or the poised inversions of the men in group one, of stable handstands rolling to the floor and stalled cartwheels, where Adrian Fry’s lanky grace recalls his Apollo. The trio of Katlyn Addison, Chelsea Keefer and Kristina Weimer in group two battement their legs with such power, and in remarkably controlled unison, to music that is explicitly sacred in tone and sometimes more felt than rhythmically countable. The small motif of a piked position caught my eye, legs and torso forming an acute, tight angle, first in a partnered turn skimming above the floor and later in a lift, but especially in a duet between Vinicius Lima and Dominic Ballard. Beginning in a piked fireman’s lift over the shoulder, a kind of awkward and powerless position, it evolved into a gorgeous give-and-take of assertion and support characteristic of the entire work.  

Nicolo Fonte’s Faraway Close is spare but striking in staging. A central platform symmetrically flanked by stairways stands to the back. It is perfectly lit and ascended by single dancers at moments throughout, moving in unison with those below, so simply and effectively representing distance and longing. I have scrawled in my notes that everyone standing up there looked incredibly beautiful, and sad.  Emoting in that way is all the more impressive given that the dancers were masked, as they were for the entire performance. An early mirroring from across the stage between Chelsea Keefer and Katlyn Addison sets the emotional tone. The distinct quality of sharp attack into suspension of these two dancers truly stood out and complemented the style of the night’s two premieres. The unfurling of an outstretched arm is a recurring thematic gesture that also ends Faraway Close, with enough plaintive ennui in the port de bras that face masks are no impediment. I was struck also by an elongated attitude, a barely bent leg that might easily look like a broken line but which epitomized unbroken strength as danced by BW’s artists.

Both premieres were thoughtfully titled. The figurative breadth sets up expectations of abstraction, the non-narrative representation of action under fluctuating external forces in Tides and of distance as both a physical and emotional metric in Faraway Close. Both works were created in response to the pandemic, and in place of what was originally commissioned.  The pieces were developed within the strict constraints of small pods of dancers, with contact only among those who cohabit. Both Jennifer Archibald and Nicolo Fonte are resident choreographers, Archibald as the first Black female resident choreographer of a ballet company at Cincinnati Ballet and Fonte at Ballet West. They seem well equipped to meet these constraints by continuing to identify the individual strengths and personal qualities of the artists, and to integrate these with craft and consideration. Whether in Tides’ sharp hand gestures and acute pikes or Faraway Close’s more lyrical reaching arms and obtuse attitudes, the experience of isolation/connection under duress which has been felt universally was expressed singularly.

Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs closes the performance. How existing works are presented now is also precedent-setting for works like Nine Sinatra Songs that require repetiteurs to set them. There is an interplay between expert fidelity to legacy and responsibility to the here and now. Permission was granted to add matching masks to the costumes originally designed by Oscar de la Renta to prioritize the health and safety of cast and crew. Partnerships were determined not by height or hierarchy, but by true interpersonal relationships. It reminds me of the Waltz Girl’s hair cascading down in beautiful braids in 2017’s Serenade, or the re-costuming and movement adaptation of the Chinese divertissement in the entrenched annual production The Nutcracker. These iconic moments in established works are made better and truer by respecting those who embody them and those who come to see art that reflects their humanity.

Artist Lillian Casscells and Beau Chesivoir. Photo by Luke Isley.

Nine Sinatra Songs was iconic Twyla, and very charming. Emily Adams’ poise and outwardly-radiating epaulement immediately establishes the mood and mode in Softly As I Leave You; it wouldn’t surprise me if she had a secret closet full of Ballroom trophies. Olivia Gusti and Tyler Gum were particularly synchronous and bright in Forget Domani. Each couple was a pleasure to watch. There was a surprising melancholy tinge to that pleasure, as watching people out for a night of dancing is somewhat wistful now, and nostalgic in a complex way that is more related to lockdown than the Rat Pack. Though the applause was thinner, with the audience necessarily so much sparser, I believe we were all deeply appreciative of this experience of live ballet, and of the dedication and care that made a night at the theater possible.

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.