RDT's brings new works by the company, and others

Repertory Dance Theatre’s virtual performance of Emerge premiered on January 16, 2021. In this sixth annual presentation of Emerge, company dancers and staff have taken on the role of choreographer. RDT takes pride in the opportunity it provides artists to practice the art of dance-making. The show consists of seven works created by Rebecca Aneloski (winner of the 2019 New Century Dance Project choreographic competition), Lauren Curley, Jonathan Kim, Jaclyn Brown, Dan Higgins, Daniel Do & Edromar Undag, and Nicholas Cendese. 

A stunning opening to the evening was Odes choreographed by Rebecca Aneloski. The original sound score composed by Michael Wall had a pulsating meditative drive throughout the work. On a minimally lit stage, the piece developed seamlessly, shifting between solos and duets performed by the dancers. The first duet between Daniel Do and Jonathan Kim exhibited beautifully intricate partner work. In a delicate yet captivatingly powerful manner, their bodies appeared to weave between and around one another hypnotically. This duet transitioned into an enthralling and powerful solo performed by Daniel which swiftly led to a dynamic solo from Jon. After another mesmerizing duet performance by Jon and Ursula Perry, the piece finished with a solo danced by Ursula accompanied by an instrumental version of “America the Beautiful”. This suddenly gave the piece an entirely different meaning for me, one that was slightly ominous.  I couldn’t help but notice the chilling connotation attached to the song in light of the current political moment.  

Jon Kim and Daniel Do, photo by Sharon Kain

Jon Kim and Daniel Do, photo by Sharon Kain

Solace was a duet choreographed by Lauren Curley and featured more beautiful partner work between Daniel Do and Jonathan Kim. The piece begins with a subtle golden light illuminating the dark stage, which looks like a black void when viewing the piece through a screen. Slowly, the lights brighten to reveal more of the surrounding space. The camera angle shifts throughout the piece offering new perspectives of the human architecture morphing and transmuting on stage. Daniel and Jon danced with stunning strength and compatibility. Their connection was palpable.  

The moving camera angles continued to offer unique perspectives of Dusk Fades, a solo choreographed by Jonathan Kim and performed by guest dancer Kerry McCrackin. The sound score begins with exciting string music and is accompanied by frenzied arm tosses and giant strides across the stage. The music transitions into a mediative soundscape punctuated by the sound of ocean waves. The dancing takes on a suppler quality. This shift in sound and movement quality is paralleled by the shift in the lighting design from bright oranges and reds to deep purples and blues. All of these components culminate in the emulation of a sunset.  

One By One was a series of seven solos created for each company member by Jaclyn Brown. Carefully crafted with the dancers’ individuality in mind, the solos take us on a journey revealing the unique qualities possessed by each of the dancers. The solos were performed to live accompaniment by musical artist, Nate Anderson who played a variety of exciting electronic music. 

Kareem Lewis and Ursula Perry, photo by Sharon Kain

Kareem Lewis and Ursula Perry, photo by Sharon Kain

Knowhere was choreographed by company member Dan Higgins and danced by Ursula Perry, Kareem Lewis, and Elle Johansen. The partnerships were in a constant state of flux throughout the work. The trio morphed seamlessly into separate duets, solos and reassembled again as a trio. The soundscape mimicked atmospheric/space sounds that appeared to be embodied by the orbiting pathways taken by the dancers.  I couldn’t help but wonder whether the title of the work was reflecting upon these cosmic themes.  

Space in Sonder was a duet choreographed by Daniel Do and Edromar Undag. The performers Jaclyn Brown and Ursula Perry have danced together as company members since 2014. The longevity of their relationship as fellow dancers showed in their unwavering synchronicity. The partner work in this piece was beautifully balanced and powerful. 

Nicholas Cendese, artistic associate and development director of RDT was the choreographer of the final piece, Another Day in Quarantine.  The four-part theatrical work included a solo, trio, duet, and group dance all performed to songs by Doris Day.  Each segment reflected in some manner upon the experiences of Americans in self-isolation over this past year. The piece was a fun and light-hearted end to the show. 

Despite the turbulent year all performing artists and audiences have experienced, the silver lining of it all is perhaps the novel ways in which art is being dispersed and consumed. Though nothing will quite beat the live experience of concert dance, virtual performances, I’d argue do have their perks. As a viewer, you are provided with an entirely new perspective of the action unfolding on stage. The point of view offered by the camera in this year’s presentation of Emerge shifts continuously, offering insights into the performance that were never available before. 

Tickets to Emerge are still available on RDT’s website. Ticketholders are granted access to the performance via a personalized link that expires within a week.  

Talia Dixon was raised in Southern California. She 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.

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.

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.”

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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. 

DE_BTW US_Outdoor Cut_Cast.jpg

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.

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.