Halie Bahr presents a new interactive work in Liberty Park

The muggy summer air was just beginning to cool as the colors of the sunset bathed Liberty Park in golden light. I dialed in on my cell phone to join the zoom call, ready for Halie Bahr’s voice to guide me through an innovative technological experience. After a brief explanation to the assembled attendees about the logistics of the immersive performance, we dispersed to wander the park as the piece unfolded.

During the pandemic, I became accustomed to video being the primary medium to consume dance. It was a pleasant surprise to have technology be used in a way that carved a path for new possibilities. Most dancers are familiar with the frustrations of using zoom for class: the constraints, technical difficulties, and the impersonal experience. Using only her voice and no visuals, Bahr was able to use this technology and weave it into a performance that navigated those difficulties with nuance. It was the most effective and unique use of Zoom conferencing that I have ever experienced throughout this pandemic. This was by far the most impressive use of technological dance art I have seen this year.

Two bikes left behind as the audience/performers dispersed.

It’s easy to begin zoning out during video performances, but Bahr’s work forced a pull of focus in the present moment with grounding exercises. It was an interactive performance that required shifting the roles of the audience members, who were also the performers. Listening Party pushed the margins of what dance could be. The dance, though not separated by individual pieces, had different elements that were dances in and of themselves. The pedestrians in the park, my own reflection, and the story of a woman named Claudia told by Bahr created a complex weaving of artistic throughlines over the course of the evening.

The story was of a woman coping with thoughts of death, and what I interpreted as dissociation. There came a moment, near the end of the story, that made this performance feel like it was coming full circle. The somatic practices that Bahr had incorporated into the work rooted us in the moment through practices of mindfulness and grounding. In a way, I felt like this work was an allegory not just of the woman in the story, but of my own healing from trauma.

At the end, audience/performers that had participated in-person drew maps of where they’d travelled within the park.

As a child of a deaf adult (CODA), I couldn’t help but think of how this work could become more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing. In the same vein, how does this type of work become accessible to people with movement constraints or other physical conditions that prevent them from participating? What barriers to access does needing a cell phone create in consuming this art? In interviewing Bahr after the show, I was encouraged to hear her speak of her own musings on how this work could become even more accessible to the public.

An even larger question: Is this work really a dance? I believe that it is. Furthermore, I think it paves a path toward a new way of dancing and conceptualizing dance as an art form. With movement of the body and mind, Bahr was able to inspire me as a participant to express something larger and more emotional. Ultimately, I felt more connected to the world around me hours afterward.

The sky just as the performance concluded.

Meredith Wilde (she/her/they/them) is a dance artist based in Salt Lake City, UT. They received a BFA in Modern Dance from University of Utah. In addition to ballet and contemporary, Wilde has trained in Bharatanatyam technique and performed with Chitrakaavya Dance in Salt Lake City, UT. Wilde has been a company member for the Polaris Dance Theatre, Shaun Keylock Company, and Wasatch Contemporary Dance Company. Wilde’s choreographic work has been presented at Snow College, Pacific University, The Fertile Ground Festival of New Work, MADCO2, and OuterSpace. They were also the recipient of the “Audience Choice” award at MADCO2’s “Dare to Dance” Showcase, and is a recipient of the “Barney Creative Prize,” a commissioning award to create work for White Bird in Portland, OR.

Queer Spectra Arts presents third annual festival

I had no clue what to expect when I logged online for the Queer Spectra Arts Festival. Usually, I am not able to fully experience art safely without banishing one or most of my identities to the netherworld of exclusion. To my surprise, Queer Spectra was an explosion of inclusivity and excellence. The 3D virtual gallery could be explored like a real museum exhibit. It was an amalgamation of dance, poetry, song, paint, and sculpture. There was no implied definition of what art should or shouldn’t be. So often, queer and minority art are not allowed to be vague and experimental, nor too political or too gay, nor even too present at all. But here was a welcoming, in the unrefined and imperfect; an allowance for the art to be truly honest and undeniably human at its core. Every piece was significant, and it was all beautiful.

Ivana Steponabitch Presents the Roller Derby was quirky, cute, full of humor and absolutely relatable. Deus Homo Deus, through three lucid photos vividly captures and humanizes transmasculine men in different points of their transitions. As a trans man, it’s not often I see aspects of my transness represented in media. But these photos caused me to reflect and see myself – where I was, where I am now, where I may be. In Burrow, Tousle it felt like I was seeing snippets of life, memories at the periphery that stay planted in your mind as they fade on and off the screen of memory – akin to a dream that wants to last forever but is beginning to change. This calm weaving contrasts nicely with the other works in the gallery that live in warmer colors. Bedroom Stories fills the audience with warmth and happiness as it shares a celebration of the journey towards self-love and womanhood. Olive Juice [below] is lighthearted and wholesome as it takes viewers on a ride, literally and figuratively. (The mystery is whether or not a confession of love was meant for one of the characters, or for a jar of olives.)

As I immersed myself in the gallery, I didn’t feel the usual unease of having to leave my queerness, my Asian-ness, or my disabled-ness behind to enjoy the art. I could safely wander and become consumed by emotion, get lost in the immersion of vibrant pinks and blues and murky greens and purples that embodied the queer experiences being exhibited. Instead of feeling like an outsider, I felt like I belonged in this space. I felt like I belonged in this world. The void between the art and the audience grew nonexistent – the festival welcomed a reality of acceptance and visibility for all. I encourage you to visit the gallery as it stays open for a bit after the festival has ended!

Beyond the gallery, various workshops and panels encouraged the audience and artists to further engage in the festival. The first workshop was a dive into queer re-writing of classic fairytales. Before I knew it, I had come to a surprisingly complex reimagining of the Little Mermaid as an LGBT+, sci-fi, dark fantasy wuxia. The second workshop was a guided movement exploration that was stress-free and cultivated excitement and fun. We were encouraged to connect with our bodies and explore the movement, working in togetherness instead of alone.

Panels were held between events that continued to connect and humanize both artists and audience alike. In the phenomenal keynote presentation, Timothy White Eagle spoke of giving thanks and the sacredness of human connection. In an inspirational dialogue, he told us that we belong and that we will transform the world into a better place. White Eagle goes beyond normalizing queerness to proving that it’s divine – both historically and presently.

The Queer Spectra Arts Festival is a radical reimagining of what art has the potential to be. It left me feeling hopeful and at ease. I was free to experience the visceral emotions of the art, whether they be rage, fear, sadness, pain, hope, joy, melancholy, happiness, euphoria or satisfaction. Rarely have I ever felt so safe to indulge in these emotions without a dissociation of my identities. There is a deep harmony between the art, the artists, and the audience, and it fosters a world where everyone has a place to be themselves. 

Daniel Cohen (he/him) is a ballet student at the University of Utah who is transgender, biracial and lives with an incurable invisible disability. He strives to create a more inclusive world through his art and journey in dance.

You can still experience much of this year’s festival at Queer Spectra’s website.

loveDANCEmore presents a spring sampler of new work

Below are critical takes on our very own Only the Lonely series from writers Emily Snow and Sofia Sant’Anna-Skites. You can still watch most the work produced for the series here.

Only the Lonely, evening one 

Evening one of Only the Lonely showcased two highly collaborative works landing at polar ends of an emotional spectrum. Nora Lang’s TV Dinners on the Farm was a giggly, gamified take on modern dance construction hosted by sock puppets, while Dimitri Peskov and Jung Ah Yoon’s complementary films – This Blinding Light and Companion – formed a ghostly, mournful pair. 

Lang’s piece was an extension of an ongoing project she facilitates that “lovingly frames modern dance within the format of trivia game shows,” previous iterations of which had been presented at 12 Min Max pre-pandemic. This virtual version took several of the same concepts and applied the interactive features of Zoom to invite audience participation. The four dancers, Rachel Luebbert, Aileen Norris, Arin Lynn, and Tori Meyer, appeared in four separate windows, each accompanied by a sock puppet alter ego. They take turns dancing and posing different questions to us and each other. 

In one section of the piece the audience was shown pairs of completely absurd and whimsical prompts. We were then tasked with guessing which one the dancers were using to direct their movement. This was a fun take on the sometimes equally goofy and eyebrow-raising prompts dancers and choreographers use to make new material in the studio, although some technical issues and system limitations in zoom made the performance a little clunky at times as a viewer. 

Peskov and Yoon’s films were as serious as Lang’s performance was silly. Both films used the same imagery – a man in a grotesque mask distorting his face in apparent agony, another person in a less frightening but equally strange three-faced mask on sweeping hillside; escalators and train yards, crowded subways; Yoon dancing among autumn-leaves trees in a park, then walking through a shopping center in Seoul, and dancing in a dark room lit backlit around the edges by a blindingly bright light; another dancer (Warren Hess of Utah) moving in a desert landscape. These images are reformulated and rearranged in each film while cinematic, melancholy violins swell quietly in the background. Each artist performs a whispered, hollow-voiced monologue over the music for the length of their respective film, the language of both full of muted regret and longing with little hope. 

Though these two projects couldn’t be more different in tone, the spirit of inventive collaboration across distance became an unlikely point of connection between them. 

Only the Lonely, evening two 

Emma Sargent and Max Barnewitz’s collaboration in Duet for Non-Things and Forsaken Objects unfolds in their home and out at Antelope Island in a series of duets and solos, plus an ensemble of stop-motion animated figurines and rocks. Nine movements intercut scenes of homey clutter with sweeping arid expanse. These videos exist individually on Barnewitz's website, a 3x3 grid meant to be watched in any order, viewer’s choice. For Only The Lonely evening two, they were presented in a single continuous stream. 

Duet is described, in part, as a study of contrasts and the experience of being confined to one space for a long time “with one person, even if it’s a person you love.” Sargent and Barnewitz are partners, who self-describe creatively as a formally trained dancer and a nondancer/“outsider artist” of 2D comics and zines. This project was their first collaboration, launched by questions of what would happen if they put those different approaches to art together, what movement would result from that dancer/nondancer dichotomy. The most interesting thing about this study of contrasts, to me, was the indelible sameness in the result. Sargent is a versatile dancer, but her movement has a specific, identifiable sensibility I associate with her, and I was fascinated to find that Barnewitz moves the same way, the absence of the formally installed ‘grammar’ that underlies Sargent’s dancing is totally imperceptible. It appears that, in a kind of mimetic transference, they’ve developed a shared kinetic sensibility from the proximity and time they’ve spent just living their life together. 

The two spoke to their newness to the format of “screendance” on social media before the show, touching on both the excitement and self-conscious nerves of preparing to present this work alongside other screendance artists. Duet was obviously a pretty lo-fi endeavor, I’d guess most of it was filmed via phone or laptop, with minimal editing beyond the stop motion. Charmingly, the two left in bookending moments from their recordings –– walking in and out of frame to start and stop the camera, little comments, giggles, and appraising compliments shared between them. These moments are small and lie at the edges of the work’s focus, but they feel absolutely critical. They wrap this performance of sequestered intimacy in the *actual* intimacy of Max and Emma, these two people, together in their home. 

The stop-motion too, brings the camera in close, drawing attention also to their records, their furniture, the carpet texture, the dishes in their kitchen, letting us take a good long look at the quotidian background clutter we’ve been hyper-conciously taking inventory of through the Zoom windows of friends, strangers and ourselves throughout the past year. The simple muted choreography in the midst of all this leaves me with the impression of “home video” –– a kind of pandemic-inflected analog to the old tapes that archived the personally intense mundanity of other eras we felt compelled to preserve. 

“Vintage pop music” generally and Roy Orbison specifically were cited by Sargent during the Q&A as a source of inspiration for the project and solace during the pandemic. The individual songs don’t feel particularly attached to any specific movement, instead functioning more as a kind of background soundtrack to fill out the silence and create contrast with field-recorded sounds from the wind, birds, and brushing grasses on Antelope Island. 

Roxanne Gray’s Tableau was created in collaboration with Jasmine Stack, Benjamin Swisher and Ashley Isenhour, who came together from different parts of the country to bring Gray’s colorful vision to life. The film is beautiful, polished in its aesthetics and seamless. Tableau utilizes precise editing to achieve a sense of play with timing, it’s the clear product of professional film know-how and equipment. Gray co-stars with a medley of fruit (and eggs) at a table with an orange tablecloth and a chair, in front of a bright teal background. At first the table is empty, and Gray sits there, clearly bored and frustrated, drumming her fingers and spinning out until the cornucopia of mystery fruits materializes. In five successive movements dedicated each to one type of round-ish food item, Gray dances among them, around and on the table and chair with increasing freedom and joy. 

Like the work as a whole, each movement is titled in French –– we have la papaye, l’oeuf, le pomelo, le pamplemousse, et le cantaloupe. There’s mention of French New Wave influences thrown out in the discussion, but it’s not super clear whether there was further intention underlying the aesthetic face value of that choice, in much the same way, it’s both unclear and doesn’t matter much what all these melons are doing here. 

A “study of play and micro-gestural movement in a contained space,” Tableau is child-like, tactile and imaginative, a mood and method of interacting with the world probably influenced by Gray’s life with her own young son, who appears in the last frames of the film. The music is bouncy and the movement is quirky –– Gray wiggles her fingers and eyebrows at us, employing the full arsenal of goofy faces of a parent with a young kid. She presses the fruits to her cheek and rolls them into each other and under her hands and off the table. Her clothes have a similar vibe to the bright whimsy of a cable sitcom’s idea of a schoolteacher –– cardigans and cutesy puffy sleeved dresses and skirts, then a polka-dotted jumpsuit, and she beams a sunny smile and sunnier attitude at us unflinchingly. 

The whole thing has the breezy, blissful look and feel of both children’s television and extremely millennial ad copy, a Venn diagram that has a lot more overlap than I realized. Tableau hits every hallmark of the eye-pleasing design that can sell us anything and everything; high contrast colors that are both saturated and muted, rounded edges and rolling shapes, infinite smoothness complemented by pleasing mildly textures, and those gratuitous, mouth-watering, aesthetically-scattered fruits everywhere everywhere everywhere. In a world collapsing more and more towards primarily digital interfaces, our individual linguistic and visual tastes converge and flatten too. Everyone’s an influencer and everything’s an ad, and things begin to look the same everywhere you go. Playful, humble produce in the company of all that winking, soothing sleekness? It’s a kryptonite lure. It says “look at this abundance. This imperfect, carefree, casual mess, how dreamy. How sensual and earthy. How real.” As lovely as Tableau is on its own merits, while I’m watching it I keep seeing the mirage of this influencer puzzle company I’ve been getting ads for, and my dumb internet-broken brain just can’t accept it’s perfect polish isn’t trying to sell me something. 

Ya-Ya Fairley zeroes in on a singular, concentrated ache in their close-up meditation on touch deprivation, Skin Hunger: A Performative Perspective on touch starvation during this pandemic. Only about two minutes long, it wastes nothing – inviting us into the too-familiar fever of Fairley’s unanswered desires with intensity and immediacy. We’re microdosing thirst. 

Saturated light filters the spare apartment in red, blue, yellow, purple and orange. The pulsing carousel of colors circles Fairley’s lone form as they wrap their body around a wire dress form, tangle in a string of christmas lights, and roll around the space of their small apartment. Watching them press the softness of the body into these unresponsive inorganic things, I wonder about the temperatures. Is that rigid wire frame cold? Are those lights the kind that get hot when you leave them on for a long time? I wonder about the pressure too –– what’s going to the surface of the skin, what to muscle, what to the level where you become aware of your bones. The helpful yet unhelpful advice on haptic self-soothing techniques I encountered a lot of in the early pandemic days floats to the surface. 

Like Duet for Non-Things, the recording is a casual and grainy affair. The use of the technology on hand again confers additional depth and intimacy that higher production values wouldn’t have. It sends me back into the feeling of filming solitary dances on my phone this year. Improvisations, attempts to “make a thing,” classes at the kitchen counter. And not just the dances, the selfies too – wfh outfits, record-keeping of creeping worry-lines and grey hairs and new tattoos, wearing a mask, crying in a mask, crying at work, smiling in nature, a lot of joint portraits with my dog, a screen capture of a zoom with my grandma, my own hands holding things, thirst traps I never sent, thirst traps I did send, photos I took just for myself, to remember I’m here and I have a body. Documentation of the subject available, documentation of desire without an outlet. It brings to mind questions raised by my and Fairley’s mutual friend Emmett Wilson last April – how do you deal with the numbness of not just being thirsty but parched? How useful is the documentation and exchange of digitized hotness stripped of its in-person parallels? What does it mean to be feeling yourself when you are the only one who can feel yourself? Holy shit why do I cease to exist in the physical realm when I can’t hug my friends?? I'm definitely paraphrasing. 

I also noted while watching, that this was the only Only The Lonely performance representing someone who is actually, alone. I very much enjoyed the new collaborations between real-life partners who brought their disparate creative practices together, and friends who found inventive ways to collaborate from afar, but this one struck a nerve for me in this specific way. Of course, we’re all lonely, we’re all craving the touch of our former lives, from friends, from far-away family, from strangers. But still the differences in the effects of social distancing over the last year between those living with a partner, with family, roommates, pets, with no one, those who had a ‘safe bubble’ within which to date or see loved ones, the people who were left without a safe bubble, those who never felt safe at their in-person job, and those who had someone and then suddenly didn’t – are massive. Like a lot of people, I belonged to different categories at different times. There are wide gulfs between them. To be clear, I don’t know the matrices of social connection in Ya-Ya the person’s irl life, and it wasn’t a requirement for Only the Lonely that performances respond to artists’ pandemic experiences at all (although most did), but I found it noteworthy that this performance dealt directly with what it means to be alone and feel lonely during this time, to work creatively in isolation, and to desire connection with more than objects and be denied it fully. 

In reflecting on how and why I am especially drawn to this piece, I am cognizant of the fact that it’s not my experience, actually. We are all together in feeling starved, but Fairley makes a point in their artist statement to recognize and center their identity –– this is an inexorably personal representation of their lived experience in their “Black Trans Dancing Body,” as the title reminds us. That site is the provenance of this hunger, the specific appetite of their perspective enveloping mine in its abstraction, through the pinpoint lens of those two minutes. These converging intersections of universality, specificity, and the snarled dynamics of power and truth in both naming and not naming the distinctions in hand – all bring back to mind a piece I’ve chewed over and over in the last few years since it was published in Bomb Magazine in 2018 – Miguel Gutierrez’ fantastic Does Abstraction Belong to White People? I’ve tried (and obviously failed) to keep these reviews brief – so just please, please go read that and then get back to me. I’d love to chat about it all, and hear how you feel. 

Emily Snow lives in Salt Lake City. She is a dancer, writer, artist, musician, she just wants to hang out and make things together. 

Only the Lonely, evening three 

I live streamed Only the Lonely, not really knowing what to expect, but feeling pleasantly surprised by two thoughtful and exquisitely performed pieces. This evening was the third and final part of a performance series featuring artists who had created virtual works.

Evening three opened with an excerpt from Ashley Anderson’s dear old familiar, restaged on the Great Salt Lake and performed by Alex Barbier and Samuel Hanson. The excerpt was simultaneously simple and nuanced; natural and mechanical. I heard an oceanic or wind-like noise as Barbier and Hanson stood side-by-side facing away from the camera and the wind played with Barbier’s yellow floral dress. After several beats, the two began to move calmly and in unison. Without much auditory stimulation, and with the natural landscapes shot in the excerpt, the piece conveyed a sense of ease. Although Barbier and Hanson moved effortlessly, they used many arm gestures and often remained upright, which added a contrasting sense of automation.

After Hanson briefly introduced Nora Price’s piece, small mal, her collaboration with Koty Lopez followed as the main event. The piece opened with several shots of Price playing various instruments and singing ethereally. Price’s lower body began performing on a makeshift miniature stage with red curtains. The casual indoor setting and theatrical props combined with Price’s wondrous voice and soft movements reminded me of a child’s imaginative passtime, filling a room with creativity and purpose.

The camera then cut to Price sitting in front of her laptop and listening to a female-sounding voice providing breathing cues. Bizarre and distorted sound effects accompanied this voice and projected an anxiety reminiscent of days spent inside during quarantine. As Price followed the cues and stared down at the computer screen impatiently, I felt myself holding my breath with her. Finally Price picked up a tiny harmonica, and the piece transitioned into a wild ride in which Price blew into the instrument and allowed her increased breathing pace to inform the speed and tension of her movements. One spectator dubbed this part as “genius” in the comments, and I had to agree. The musical and physical manifestations of familiar feelings captivated me.

In the section that followed, Price accepted the voice’s tantalizing request to “just shake it all out.” She had donned a black fringe skirt and the slow-motion shaking that ensued felt lengthy and unvaried but allowed me the time to process what I had seen thus far. In the final moments of small mal, Price had taken another one of the voice’s requests to heart and had literally become “a part of the floor.” This was yet another brilliant moment, as Price twisted the gentle commands of a virtual instructor into a sense of entrapment.

Price’s movements throughout looked reactive and organic. This improvisational quality served Price’s work well and created relatability during a time when many of us feel as though we are simply existing and reacting to the greater events around us. She isolated various parts of her body in these strings of movements, yet her entire being was deeply and fully engaged in its own world. Even her eyes danced.

Although Price’s dancing was intriguing in and of itself, what stuck with me were the concepts behind her creative process. Time and time again, I felt myself thinking, “she’s releasing the emotions and thoughts I’ve often felt over the past year.” Watching Price perform was a thought-provoking experience.

Sofia Sant’Anna-Skites was born and raised in Chicago, but has been living in Salt Lake City for the past four years. She will be graduating from the University of Utah in the fall with a BFA in modern dance and a BA in English. Sofia is passionate about writing, artmaking, learning, teaching, and embracing outdoor experiences in the Salt Lake area and beyond.

Myriad brings dance to the Dreamscapes space at Gateway

It was a surreal experience walking into Dreamscapes at the Gateway to view live performance indoors – Myriad Dance’s new Overslept. Just surpassing two weeks since I had received my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, I was itching to see live art again. After a brief introduction, the audience was ushered into a waiting area filled with a hodgepodge of ramshackle furniture overgrown with dense foliage. Faint audio of a male voice lingered in the air. I couldn’t quite understand the text. It felt like hints of what was to come, planted deep in my subconscious mind. Once the speaking was complete, the dancers emerged from behind a large painting of a moon and beckoned us forward.

Whimsical landscapes changed dramatically from room to room, ranging from a dark space with abstract mountainous projections to underwater ruins adorned with floating jellyfish, which were only to be glimpsed for a moment before being whisked away briskly by the performers, deeper and deeper into this alien world. There was hardly enough time to take in the intricate details of the rooms and halls. As the dancers gently, but firmly pushed us on, I was left with only slivers of a story that was unfolding. I tried to read the long passages written on some of the walls, but only retained words like “Eva,” “clouds,” “falling,” and “moon.” As soon as my mind began to latch onto meaning, it was ripped away by the next cacophonous scene. The experience was overwhelming, and I wished I had more time to digest the minor details. The pace felt too rapid to fully comprehend the idiosyncrasies of the world I was exploring.

Myriad press photo

At times, I felt like the performers were an integral part of the world, and at others, it felt like one work of art superimposed on another. In a few scenes, the performers felt distinctly separate from the landscapes. The first room was a poignant example of artistic integration. Smooth movements with angular shapes seemed to emerge from the jagged, mountainous outlines projected on the walls. The dance was made for that space. In another room, psychedelic neon designs adorned variously sized boxes that appeared to move in shifting light. These severe flashing colors overshadowed the dancers who were gently moving on and around the boxes. The juxtaposition made the performers appear unassuming, and as though they were stuck in a world that swallowed them whole.

Throughout the work, I tried to understand what role the dancers were playing in this dream. Were they fairies urgently guiding us through an unknown world? Were they friends exploring alongside me? Did they possess knowledge that I was being guided towards? What role as an audience member was I playing in this experience? I left the performance with many questions, and I hungered for answers. I could easily attend this performance many times, hoping to get a clearer picture. There were infinite nooks and crannies to uncover. I found myself saddened that the dancers would only be performing this work for a week. I wished that as a limited-time performance, I would have had more time to take in the beautiful story that had been created. There was so much detail in not only the installations and the dancing, but also in the storyline, of which I only glimpsed hints. I think this would be a more effective show if it could be extended for multiple weekends or seasons.

I was grateful to be able to attend the post-performance discussion, where some of my questions were answered. The roles of the dancers, of the audience, and the pacing of the work were addressed there. What I thought was particularly engaging was the discussion of the artistic possibility of immersive performance. Would the work be more effective if it were a self-guided performance? Would the audience have absorbed more detail? Would it have been better if guided at a slower pace? Ultimately, their choice of having a fast-paced performance served a purpose: I left grasping at details of a dream; piecing together the memories that remained.

Meredith Wilde (she/her/they/them) is a dance artist based in Salt Lake City, UT. They received a BFA in Modern Dance from University of Utah. In addition to ballet and contemporary, Wilde has trained in Bharatanatyam technique and performed with Chitrakaavya Dance in Salt Lake City, UT. Wilde has been a company member for the Polaris Dance Theatre, Shaun Keylock Company, and Wasatch Contemporary Dance Company. Wilde’s choreographic work has been presented at Snow College, Pacific University, The Fertile Ground Festival of New Work, MADCO2, and OuterSpace. They were also the recipient of the “Audience Choice” award at MADCO2’s “Dare to Dance” Showcase, and a recipient of the “Barney Creative Prize,” a commissioning award to create work for White Bird in Portland, OR.

RDT highlights emerging voices

The title of Emerge, I assume, is a way to alert the audience that the choreographers on this concert are emerging into the role of choreographer. That is a fair and useful distinction to make — after all it takes time, focus, and practice to become a professional performer. But it is no less true that it takes time, focus, and practice to become a professional choreographer. I would agree with this title in my experience with this concert. With some small exceptions, my experience was one of witnessing a collection of largely lovely, very well-danced, and ultimately experienced-in-the-moment works that won’t stay with me for long but were mostly enjoyed in the moment.

This sense of emerging was illustrated in the interviews with the choreographers that were used as introductions for their pieces. The interviews were stacked with buzzwords like: community, relationship, connection, graciousness, problem-solving, gratitude, openness, and creative process. These are great words that I appreciate as a dance artist as they reflect some of the things that I also find important in my work. However, they don’t really tell me anything specific about the piece I am about to see, and can also be used as a way to hide the fact that a choreographer is not really able to identify the intent of a work. As emerging choreographers, this is understandable. Dancers often correctly work from a point of physical intuition, but it is also important to articulate what you personally bring to a work. I wish that someone had taken time to coach these emerging choreographers more (or perhaps change the questions that were being asked) so that some specificity could be reached.

Overall this concert pleasantly washed over you and then dissipated quickly. Many pieces had similar fluidity, dynamics, emotional tone, costuming, and music. The brightest spots occurred when they shifted from these similarities. Rebecca Aneloski’s piece Odes had some sparkling complexity and personal oddities. Daniel Do’s dancing, in a work by Jaclyn Brown, had complicated pelvic shifting and foot work that he performed with ease and exactness. Lauren Curley’s solo communicated a sense of collaboration and connection with the live musician, Nate Anderson, that was very satisfying to witness. Nicholas Cendese’s suite of works, Another Day in Quarantine, did have a significant shift in tone and texture that I think speaks to Cendese’s personal artistry. Even though beyond the first section I was not certain how the works really connected specifically with quarantine experiences, I appreciated the variety and light-heartedness that it brought to the concert.

Beyond the idea of emerging as choreographers, we all are emerging (or at least hoping to emerge), from a time period of decreased social engagement and heightened social turmoil that has left many of us voluntarily pulling away from putting ourselves out into the world. Many of us are seeing our communities differently and thus our places and voices in our communities have shifted. I have felt this as an artist, and it causes a bit of cautiousness in coming out of this backspace, wanting to be gentle with others, being timid about what I am sharing with the world, and even wondering if I should be putting anything out into the world right now. I saw gentleness and timidness in this concert, but also in so much dance I have seen recently on a national and even international level (the one nice thing about live-streaming). It is hard to emerge for all of us. I do look forward to a time when we will emerge with more ferocity and dynamics, as we find our footing and claim the goodness and importance of change reflected in the work that we create.

Kate Monson can be found teaching at BYU and presenting her own choreographic work, specifically through the On Site Mobile Dance Series, a loveDANCEmore program she created alongside Kori Wakamatsu.