Fem Dance at the Fringe Festival

New collective Fem Dance Company began exploring their boundaries with a succinct debut, Home Bass, performed this past week at the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival. 

Home Bass was a twenty-minute work featuring five female dancers all of whom shared an expansive, soft movement quality. After consuming so much virtual, separated art, it was refreshing to witness the company members move with such a connection to one another.

As described by company director Alicia Ross, Home Bass was an exploration of humans’ innate attraction to heavy bass music. Ross explained that this comes from our connection to the low frequencies of the heartbeats and voices of our mothers when we are in the womb. While this was quite an interesting concept to have in mind while watching, the show didn’t necessarily explore this thesis.

Courtesy of Alicia Ross/Fem Dance Company

A continuous, captivating twenty minutes

The dancers did indeed feel a deep connection with the beat of the music. They moved with a soft heaviness that felt in line with the low frequency music and warm, moody lighting. 

The first section featured a heavy, constant beat. The dancers began in a pile on the floor and moved together in an amoeba-like state, then began moving in and out of syncopated unison. They moved beautifully as a cast, but some of the unison felt out of place. I found myself longing for a lengthier exploration of the heavy, abstract movement they’d found in the beginning. 

When they seamlessly transitioned into the second section, that’s exactly what they gave. With an extended, tranquil bass sound, they returned to the investigative, slow movement while one dancer drew attention with a more precise, repetitive movement vocabulary. Throughout, each dancer moved in and out of this shared vocabulary. Something clicked choreographically. Transitions felt natural and the brief moments of unison were exciting. What really drew me in here were the moments when the dancers were authentically looking at one another.

The intensity increased immediately at the start of the third section. A stronger bass, stark red lighting and the most powerful movement so far created a distinct shift in energy. This piece featured mostly unison work and dipped further into the world of recognizable shapes and technique. It was beautiful to watch the group move together with such strength, but I would have loved to see motifs from earlier in the show return.   

They went for a bookending approach, finishing in the same pile on the floor that had opened the show. Though perhaps a predictable choice, I found it satisfying visually and conceptually. 

Discovering their edges

Fem Dance Company is a group of well-trained, cohesive, passionate artists. In Home Bass, they began to explore movement and themes beyond what they’re used to. It was an authentic push to find new ways to move and express. In this innately uncomfortable process, they filled some of the gaps with moments of clear and comfortable choices from their technical backgrounds. Sometimes this led to a sense of displacement or abrubtness, but it also demonstrates their eagerness to combine multiple worlds of movement. 

Staying true to their purpose

Ross shared that Fem Dance Company’s central intention is to represent and empower women. Home Bass did just that. The show gave the female company members a space to explore their edges, discover new ways of expressing and create art together. 

I was left inspired by their vulnerability and wanting more. 

Elle Taylor is a BFA candidate at the University of Utah’s School of Dance. This is her first review for loveDANCEmore.

Two tastes of dance at SLC's Fringe Fest

Before I ever saw Dishy Collective’s performance Fine China, I saw their instagram campaign, which was prodigious. I hate social media, but I keep it on my phone because it seems like I need it to keep up with what’s happening. When I started editing this journal (for the second time) I was still living in New York and so I read reviews, looked at Instagram, and talked with friends to keep abreast of the scene I was covering from afar. 

A Dishy Collective press image

Since then, we’ve all been through the great distancing event of the pandemic and we take it for granted, perhaps more than ever, that we need to keep up. So I’ve been keeping up with the women of Dishy Collective, who I’ve never met, for several months now. I’m not sure which set of images will last longer in my memory, the forty or so masked minutes that I spent watching them in one of the abandoned storefronts of the Gateway, or the weeks of pausing over diaphanous images of these four dancers: hair trailing in the foothills, taking tea in pastel colored dress, snatches of phrasework meant to stall a scrolling thumb.

My experience of Cloud Library by the Free Pool Collective, headed by Rae Luebbert and Cece Otto, was altogther different. I wouldn’t have known about Cloud Library at all if I hadn’t recieved a press release, although these two events are part of the same fringe festival. Cloud Library was presented as a website, mediated by the maze-like Mozilla Hubs app, which you might have experienced this last year through Queer Spectra’s virtual offerings. We were meant to enter on our solitary laptops and have some kind of virutal gallery stroll mixed with an embodied set of choose-your-own-adventure instructions that were supposed to dictate the order and context in which you, or your avatar, watched several dance videos. I liked the idea, but I found the experience cluncky, and I’ll admit that about five minutes in, I gave up and resolved to return later to the video compalation filed under the “technical difficulties” tab. 

What worked and what didn’t work (for me) about these two experiences seemed to turn on the technology. Fine China was full of images of its dancers playing — I almost want to say “playing house” — in a series of self-consciously childish scenes: the fake tea, dress up games, a headress of fruit on Jorji Diaz Fadel. The most interesting of these involved a cryptic nursury rhyme, which devolved for one performer into a kind of manic episode from which her three comrades had to bring her down. 

The problem throughout was that I didn’t know how to recieve any of this. The images on instagram felt designed to allure. “We are beautiful and young and doing things that hint at an inner strangeness without compromising the visual appeal,” they seemed to say. I have a feeling there was much more to these images, each of which I saw fleshed out on stage. I had the feeling that they had been carefully researched. But in the end they didn’t quite unfold into three dimensions to include the live audience.

There was one moment near the end of Fine China when Bailey Sill was losing control in the middle of a solo. It’s hard to describe, but there was something compelling about the struggle, legs buckling under her, somewhat desperately but without drama, as if they were following a different set of rules than her upper body and both were under some real if invisable stress. I realized as I was watching it that it was the first image I’d seen throughout the experience that didn’t look like it would work as a photograph. Consequently, it’s the one I remember the best, and days later, it’s the one I am still pondering. 

Once I resigned myself to the fact that I was just going to watch Cloud Library straight through  — the screendance version is called 11 Walls in 7 Days — I quite enjoyed its seven vingettes. The play here revolved more around sensation than image. In Cece Otto’s section, we were locked in a car on a hot day, lost in an interminable commute somewhere along the Wasatch Front. In another, two performers shared the kinsethetic experiment of filling an apartment with maroon balloons. 

Faryn Kelly of Free Pool Collective

In my favorite, performer Faryn Kelly mixed explosive dancing with images of herself seeming to brood — dressed in red pajamas, reading a newspaper, eating pomagranites with chopsticks. Here was a confounding set of signifiers and one woman falling through them. They invited you to decode them even as they imploded on themselves in generative, metaphorically-suggestive play.

Sadly, as of August 7, the rest of the live events at the Fringe Festival have been cancelled due to a coronavirus infection amon. You can support the remaining virtual events here. 

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

A DIY mixed bill at the Marmalade's Missio Dei

I am so grateful that FOR YOU: a works in progress showing occurred last weekend. I didn’t realize how badly I’d been craving live performance and it seemed the rest of the audience felt similarly. Everyone who entered the space appeared genuinely ecstatic to be there – eyes were shimmering, hugs were tight and long, those who were unmasked sustained huge grins throughout the evening (and those who were masked probably did too, it’s just hard to tell!). 

Following a long tradition of works-in-progress showings held in churches, the DIY, low-stakes event took place at Missio Dei Community Church. The presenting dance artists introduced themselves by sharing the event’s mission, “a humble attempt towards re-capturing and re-enlivening the sense of community and mutual creative spaces that might have been lost during the ever-persisting Covid-19 pandemic,” and by acknowledging the local artists who created similar platforms before them, particularly Dominica Greene and Courtney Mazeika for last summer’s A Shedding and loveDANCEmore’s Mudson series, which I hear may be returning this fall. Along with the land acknowledgement, the artists shared that 50% of the night’s profit would be donated to the Missing & Murdered Indigenous People Mutual Aid Fund, led by the efforts of Denae Shanindiin. I was absolutely thrilled to hear this, as I’m often frustrated by the fact that all presenters acknowledge the indigenous lands they’re occupying, but infrequently state any actions they’re taking to redress the atrocities that indigenous populations continue to face. The Geraldine King Women’s Resource Center received the remaining 50% of the proceeds.

Courtesy of Megan O’Brien.

Corinne Lohner’s Untitled opened the show and began with projected video of landscapes (mostly sand) and bodies (mostly closeups of freckles, birthmarks, and moles) in silence. Lohner began dancing a few minutes in, creating a soundscore that I hadn’t heard in far too long – the skin of bare feet squeaking on marley. Jon Kim’s Process and Material followed, an improvisational score he’s been working on for seven years. He was invisibly tethered to a desk and chair that he sinuously spun and crawled upon and next to. Both Lohner’s and Kim’s works were serene and meditative. 

Megan O’Brien (the evening’s organizer) and Natalie Border shared that they began the process for their offering, Foxhole, only five days before the event. Working together for four hours each day, they devised a movement study inspired by songs they like, which resulted in a motley soundtrack of Post Malone, Nine Inch Nails, Leonard Cohen, and Francisco Tárrega. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something more behind this piece that they didn’t vocalize, perhaps because their long, crimped hair and below-the-knee dresses reminded me of the young LDS women who circle the Temple daily. This event did take place on Pioneer Day, afterall…

The next two works were creations of Mar Undag’s. A Study was a group piece that, for the majority of the time, juxtaposed a duet (performed by Maddie Maravillas and Kellie St. Pierre) with a trio (performed by Conner Erickson, Emma Sargent, and Alicia Trump). This work featured clear motifs and attention to the energetic arc, and can be seen again in an upcoming performance with Cat + Fish Dances. Mar was then joined by Elliott Keller for a duet that they collaborated on, 8.10, which was incredibly intimate and tender. The two melted into each other, sweetly entwined their limbs, and moved with such ease that I felt comforted and swathed in love from my seat in the audience.

Kellie St. Pierre closed the evening with a screendance titled Alpine Waves II. St. Pierre produced minimal yet powerful movements, in turns working with and against gravity as her weight shifted between ropes that were anchored on either side of her body. Colorful, animated dots and stripes were layered over the moving image, sometimes so much so that St. Pierre disappeared. It was at times overwhelming (intentionally, I believe) and mesmerizing, and was a refreshing respite from the predictable formula that so many screendances have adopted as of late.

In addition to the dance artists, painter Halley Bruno created a live painting that began as the audience entered and was presumably completed by the event’s end – unfortunately I forgot to return to the space where Halley was painting before I left the venue. FOR YOU’s facebook page stated, “We want to continue this work in SLC by perpetuating these spaces and letting them be available for anyone who wishes to be involved,” leading me to believe that this platform intends to bring our community together again in the future. Stay tuned…

Alexandra Barbier is a performance maker. She’s recently presented work through 12 Minutes Max, Great Salt Lake Fringe and the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival. She’s also currently a Raymond Morales fellow in the University of Utah School of Dance and a co-organizer of Queer Spectra Arts Festival. And she fucking hates bios. abarbier.com.

Salt Lake Film Society brings a new film about Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

If you’re looking for an at-home dance experience this week, the Salt Lake Film Society is screening Can You Bring It, a new film about Bill T. Jones’ 1989 dance D-Man in the Waters.

The film tells two parallel stories. The first is the tale of Jones’ early career, his romantic and artistic partnership with Arnie Zane that birthed their company, and the making of D-Man in the Waters in the wake of Zane’s death from AIDS and the illness of company member Damian Acquavella (D-man himself), who died shortly after the dance was premiered. The second is the contemporary story of a restaging of D-man at Loyola Marymount College in Los Angelos by professor and former company dancer Rosalynde LeBlanc, who is also a co-director of the film. Both are stories worth telling and their juxtaposition brings up some interesting questions about dance’s relationship to time, generational identity, cultural memory and academia.

Still of Jones winning a Bessie Award in New York, 1989.

Even though I was already familiar with the chronology of Jones’ early career, it was still quite moving to hear from dancers, family, and Jones himself. Sean Curran and Jones’ sister Johari Briggs in particular stood out, narrating in surprising, moving detail the illness and deaths of Zane and Acquavella and how the company mourned and survived.

Equally surprising are the questions that emerge from the restaging. LeBlanc and her cast wrestle with what it means for a group of college students to recreate a dance that was made by artists at the height of their powers confronting so much day-to-day mortality in nation that seemed at turns indifferent and hostile to their survival. What does it mean to pass a dance like this from one generation to the next? Can academia contain the knowledge that the original cast embodied? What’s preserved and what’s lost, and, perhaps most importantly, why?

Rosalynde LeBlanc demonstrating a moment of partnering with her students.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

A June weekend of dance in Salt Lake City

This past weekend seems to have included plenty of dance here in Salt Lake City. On Friday, June 18, I headed to the lawn outside of UMOCA to see a performance by poet-artist Alex Caldiero, who is currently being honored with a retrospective at that institution.

Traveler Dances: a transperformance might not have qualified as a “dance event” to everyone in attendance. Still, I think it’s worth discussing briefly because the musicians collaborating with Caldiero – Steve Ricks, Christian Asplund and the Utah County-based Theta Naught – are part of a music scene that has some crossover with dance in this city. Much of their work has been seen in showcases like 12 Minutes Max and honestly, I wonder why more dance artists don’t reach out and collaborate with them. They are excellent at what they do on their own, and on Friday they were excellent at listening in the moment to the improvising Sonosopher, as Caldiero sometimes calls himself. Watching this collaboration, especially as Caldiero romped around the concrete square that served as the stage in a self-styled head dress, reminded me a little of New York choreographer Jennifer Monson’s ongoing collaboration with experimental harpist Zeena Parkins.

As I alluded to above, lots seems to be happening in our community and we don’t always manage to get writers to all of the events. If you’re an independent choreographer who’s working on something, please, send a press release or a brief note to sam@lovedancemore.org and we’ll do our best to get a writer to your show. I’ve heard that there was some dance at some of the Juneteenth events this weekend as well as a backyard show produced by, among others, Hunter Rowe. If you made it to anything that we haven’t covered, get in touch. If you showed up, there’s still time and space to write about it.

Without further ado, here’s a review of another show this weekend that Max Barnewitz made it to at the Art Barn…

–SBH, editor

Tori Meyer & Arin Lynn invite audiences to experience the every-day in Finch Lane Flash Project: Quotidien/Quotidian 

This past weekend, Tori Meyer and Arin Lynn invited Salt Lake City to their “housewarming” party, an evening-length, multidisciplinary Flash Project at Finch Lane Gallery that playfully engaged audiences in disrupting the border between public and private spaces, and that explored the absurdly, sweetly repetitive nature of the everyday. 

Quotidien/Quotidian as Meyer explained, was meant to let audiences “get bored” and to discover what might emerge from that feeling. While the point is well taken, it was hard to feel bored in the busy environment crafted by Meyer and Lynn. The artists make good use of Finch Lane Gallery as dancers and curators of their own lives. Meyer and Lynn open the show by positioning themselves outside on the balcony – framing themselves through two large sliding glass doors, sometimes in opposition to each other, sometimes moving in sync. The gallery itself was filled with objects from Meyer and Lynn's home – objects of creative and sentimental value such as a collection of ceramic ducks, a shelf of baseball caps, a handmade "crooked house" by eighth grade Lynn, and pieces of art made by friends in the community, including a beautiful illustration by local artist Nora Lang that couldn't help but stand out even though it was hiding in a corner. These pleasant surprises are frequent throughout the piece. Colorful clutter that might fill up a house becomes somewhat dispassionate in the space of a gallery, forcing us to question the nature of performance and what our material world reflects, not on the aesthetics of the object, but rather about who we are. 

The two performers, who are partners and who have recently moved in together, wanted to share "a collage of art we made during COVID," said Lynn. This collage includes the object world, as well as recorded clips of dance made by Meyer and Lynn over the past year. Their choreography, which elegantly balances humor and technical skill, relied on subtle movements emphasizing hands and gesture. Repetition, a theme unto itself, and a sense of duality, felt especially important to the work, with Lynn and Meyer often returning to synchronous movement and symmetry. Lynn in particular emphasized a certain weightiness of (e)motion that grounded the choreography that might otherwise have floated away into the breezy use of lighthearted covers of ABBA's song "Fernando.”

What may be most striking about the work was the range of emotions explored. Quotidien/Quotidian lets audiences oscillate between the curiosity felt when you visit a friend's house for the first time, to the gratifying slap-happiness of a dance party (which was enjoyed by all in an advanced-hokey-pokey-style dance circle), to the intimate anxiety felt by partners when hosting people in your home. The piece reaches an apex when Lynn and Meyer have a mock argument about hosting friends. While the conceit of the argument was superficial, there was an edge, the edge of everyday repetition that comes from quotidien life, and pandemic life. Lynn and Meyer took this moment to create two poignant duets, not with each other, but with projections of themselves. Lynn in a rocking chair, and Meyer at a dining table, each paired with footage of the same scene filmed at home. These intimate duets, putting bodies into conversation with themselves, used repeated, contemplative gestures once again, creating a bittersweet beat.

Of course, audiences were not left to dwell in this melancholy for too long, as Meyer and Lynn joined each other for a delightful pas de deux across the gallery floor. The charismatic duo ostentatiously exaggerated their role as performers, delighting audiences with a vaudeville-esque ending. Far from the dullness that the name suggests, Quotidien/Quotidian reminds us to find pleasure in the performance of our day-to-day lives.

Max Barnewitz is a writer, comics enthusiast, and outdoor nerd based in Salt Lake City. Max holds an M.A. in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Utah and is currently pursuing and MFA in comics at the California College of Art. Max wrote the libretto for DEXO’s recent production One Hundred Years Hence. They also serve on the organizing committees for Salt Lake’s Grid Zine Fest and for Queer Spectra Arts Festival.