Ririe-Woodbury's autumn return to the stage

Ririe-Woodbury premiered two new works this past weekend, On Being by artistic director Daniel Charon, and Two Hearted by Keerati Jinakunwiphat. Jinakunwiphat is a New York-based dancer and choreographer, and recently graced the cover of Dance Magazine as the one of their “twenty-five to watch” in 2021. Both works reverberated as a reflections of the pandemic, creations made after living, dancing and coming-into-close-proximity were suspended and theatened. What exactly was it about dance that initially drew us in? What did we really miss? What will we rediscover when we come back together?

The answer for these choreographers seems to be relishing in the simple act of sharing space. Both of these works were paired down; bodies sweeping, lifting and carrying. The sensation of touch and partner work, trusting another enough to let them propel you through space… really is and was enough.

On Being begins with dancers running, one by one, and eventually all together. I’m transported back to the early days of the pandemic, the treadmill-like monotony, the seeming endlessness of it all. In that monotony there is a comforting beauty, not unlike hearing a clock tick and being reminded that time exists. The piece will end with a nod to this beginning, but instead of running, the dancers are grouped together, touching, swaying in a reduced slow dance. A dancer is then carried off the stage, spinning round and round. I half expected this duo to circle backstage and reappear — the work continuing on indefinitely — but instead the lights went dark.

More notable elements of the piece are costumes by Melissa Younker, a former RW dancer. Each ensemble was unique in line and shape, and the color palette of sky blues, mustard yellows, and olive greens created a striking ensemble. Lighting by William Peterson progressively gets darker throughout the piece, potentially offering metaphor, or at minimum providing a linear structure. Megan McCarthy and Fausto Rivera have a beautiful duet; Megan has the extension of a ballet dancer, but the “organic everything can shift at any moment” energy of a modern dancer. She forces nothing, is well partnered by Rivera, and they walk off the stage holding hands.  

RW performing in Charon’s new work, photo by Sharon Kain

Charon’s work is satisfying in its clarity and quiet restraint, and unfortunately Jinakunwiphat’s work suffers by following it. They are similar in structure, and although on the surface look very different, they employ similar choreographic strategies, and Charon’s is the stronger of the two. Two Hearted did have its own beauty; the R&B music broken up with text delivered by Miche’ Smith, who at one point stands atop her peers shoulders in a silver sequined dress. She speaks clearly to the audience, “Mirror, mirror on the wall… who is even there at all?” Peter Farrow performs a fully embodied solo, his body breaking, undulating and finding stillness in interesting ways. I struggled to find the underbelly of this work, but after such a hiatus from seeing live dance, I was also content to sit back and let the movement wash over me.

A moment from Raja Feather Kelly’s Pantheon, photo by Sharon Kain

The last work of the night, Pantheon, is a dance theatre work by Raja Feather Kelly and it originally premiered in 2017. Nothing escapes this pandemic lens, and when the lights came to reveal the dancers in white underwear, white socks, white shoes, and white wigs, my first thought was, “Oh yeah, before the pandemic we made pieces like this.” This is an ambitious, often outrageous hyperbolic work, with the program note detailing that it draws on celebrity culture, reality TV, The Rite of Spring, the work of Andy Warhol, and his (in)famous fifteen minutes of fame. I could see all these references, and while none of them were painstakingly investigated, they often did combine to form striking visuals, which maybe is enough. If a still life is enough in visual art, can moving still lives be enough in dance? I think Andy Warhol might yell Yes! Considering Kelly lauds Warhol as one of his biggest influences, perhaps that is the key into this work.

The dancers spread their legs, torso hanging over, pelvis suggestively pulsing up and down. It was performative sex, devoid of any pleasure or organic impulse, ritualized and hinting at the driving groupthink we often see in The Rite of Spring. There was also a fair amount of running in this work, and while the running in Charon’s piece hinted at monotony and melancholy, these runs felt saturated in futility. We run because we run. The final image of the night was red rose petals falling from the rafters, bodies sprawled on the stage as if dead, suggesting that perhaps beauty will exist in destruction, but only if it is framed that way.

Erica Womack is a Salt Lake based choreographer. She teaches at Weber State and SLCC and regularly contributes to loveDANCEmore.

A showcase of screendance at TWIG Media Lab

Opening with Interstice by Indigo Cook, Noori, a showcase at TWIG Media Lab, set the tone for what they called “a gathering for light and screendance”. Throughout the opening piece, it was already apparent that we would be getting up close and personal with each dancer on the screen in front of us. The use of shadows in the opening scene created an ominous feeling as we got closer and closer to the dancer. Filling the screen with twenty or so squares sequentially, Interstice had camera and editing work that I had never seen before. It slowly transitioned from ominous to colorful and captured the attention of all watchers in the building. Each body part was highlighted per square and felt was the weight of how powerful our own bodies are. Overall, Indigo and her team captured the essence of light and it was a beautiful opening to such a wonderful show. Applause and cheers came from all parts of the audience and would continue on through the night.

Free Pool continued on to show how screendance can create an intimate and close environment with each performer. 11 Walls in 7 Days was the combination of seven individual solos that came together to sum up a week in the life of each dancer. Transitioning color from light into the form of costumes and props, Free Pool stepped out to allow the audience to see how versatile screendance can be. “Friday” was especially intriguing, with the use of an eighties style TV center screen and the male performer laid over as though he was in the movie we were watching. With small clips of pop culture movies such as The Breakfast Club in between sections of movement, there was a sense of comfort and relatabiity. Audience members have once been this teenager dancing to classic eightes rock in their bedroom. It was a great moment of fun and creativity woven within other movements that embraced the sound of silence.

Just like Indigo Cook, Free Pool showed their ability to use colorful lights and shadows in a successful way. Pop Culture plays a large part in society and it was such a pleasure seeing it in combination with dance. Sadly, once “Saturday” and “Sunday” came around, I was starting to lose interest in the concept as a whole. For the length of this piece, I feel as though Free Pool would have been just as successful having their own premiere to show just how much work was put into this almost-thirty minute piece.

A still from the pool scene in Deliquesce

After Primary Colors by Arin Lynn, was my favorite piece of the night — And Artists had me hooked the entire time I spent watching Deliquesce. Seeing multiple familiar faces from the local dance community, it felt as though I was walking into a film that consisted of happy summer memories. Each dancer’s level of commitment astounded me as I watched them perform. We slowly zoomed in to see firecracker popsicles dripping down the arms and legs of the performers, without any fidgets or moves out of character. This was represented equally as well with each “swimmer” dancing in the empty pool. With summer feeling as though it was taken away from us during The Pandemic, And Artists, in collaboration with film production company Blank Space, found a way to still have fun without a pool full of water. Dressed in neon yellow swimsuits, swim caps and goggles, the dancers rolled and traveled across this rough stage without a twitch. For me, Deliquesce had the perfect combination of pedestrian movement and movement we would see in any staged dance performance. Tying it all together in the end, we saw each dancer one last time. They beautifully performed solos which led to the end and a roar of applause. Noori was a beautiful and quaint gathering for locals and art admirers to share a night of beautiful screendance and the organizers did a fabulous job. They succeeded in choosing “a gathering of light and screendance” as an overall representation of the show and it was a joy to watch.

Alexis Guerrero is a Salt Lake City born and raised dancer and choreographer. Creating and performing for the majority of her life, she is continuing her training at University of Utah where she will graduate with a BFA in Modern Dance in 2022. As both a dancer and a mental health advocate, she integrates healthy practices into both her day to day life and movement practice. Finding inspiration from being outside and the people closest to her, her choreography is inspired by what is important to her, with day-to-day changes welcomed. A goal of hers is to create a sense of home and safe space for all.

Cat + Fish presents an evening at Missio Dei

Last Saturday evening, Cat + Fish Dances showcased a night of calm strength despite the abrupt storm outside. Held in the quiet space of the Missio Dei Church, the concert was a traditional, black box-style dance performance of three works-in-progress. After running across the parking lot through the downpour of a thunderstorm, the quiet hum of the audience was warm and welcoming. To open the night, Cat Kamrath and Daniel Do shared with the audience some of their goals and values as a company, including providing the artists with fair compensation and acknowledging the Indigenous peoples who came before us. The directors also expressed that, as they are all people of color, it’s important that the company work alongside others in the fight against racism in both the Salt Lake community and beyond. In alignment with this goal, they planned to give a portion of the funds raised to Melanin Squad, an organization committed to providing opportunities and resources for women of color in business. 

The program opened with a trio titled Recount, choreographed by assistant director Daniel Do. The dancers started with a walking pattern and took turns featuring each dancer performing a personalized gesture-based phrase. Those phrases combined spatially and rhythmically to become foundations for the rest of the work. As the performers layered their phrases on top of each other and blended their solos, the piano music intensified to match the dancers’ pace of rising tension and strength. Suddenly the dancers huddled in a tight triangle and performed their phrase work with a new sharpness and repetition until it came to a surprising end that left me wanting more. 

The show moved on to A Study, the second work in progress by choreographer and project director Mar Undag. This was an ensemble piece featuring five dancers. The dance followed the theme of strength and began with a steady, composed duet. I found myself intrigued by the subtle hand gestures that would return as a motif throughout the dance. The immediate hook was established by a static trio, standing to the side and staring back at the audience as if waiting quietly to begin. As the duet came to a calm resolution, the trio took over with their heart thumping beat. The dance revelled in the spiraling movements of the dancers, the costumes and even the loose hair of the performers. They moved through the space with each other, creating light moments of duets, trios, and solos. The dancers found a moment of stillness and unison as the music shifted. The storm could be heard pounding on the roof while the dancers quietly lived in a slow gestural moment. The work found a final exhale in an emphatic solo.  

The show closed with another trio choreographed by the artistic director Cat Kamrath: Gathering I. This was a tremendous feat of lifting and falling, and continued the exploration of calmness, strength, and flowing circular movements. Kamrath said that some of the choreographic process was based on sensations in relation to the self, such as the feeling of stretching skin. The dancers began with a simple rhythm of posed geometric shapes. The dance’s rising action grew exponentially as the performers began sharing weight and lifting one another. The piece transitioned to a duet of stunning physical partnering. I was most impressed and inspired by one of the performers who was at least a foot shorter than the others, of a lean build, yet lifting and falling with just as much control and care as the other. It was so exciting to watch truly genderless choreography, as well as nostalgic to see technical movement executed so well. In some moments the partnering was tender, other times it was purely functional, and it was always breathtaking. The dance shifted as a lo-fi beat came on, which contrasted the previous works of piano and ambient sound. With this shift the dance ended on a climax as one of the dancers boiled in a whirlpool of movements that threw them around the space, then stood and slowly motioned to cover their eyes. 

Overall Cat + Fish Dances delivered an evening that offered themes of finding new in the old and exploring the steadiness of strength. The show was also a way for the whole company to process togetherness again. When I asked the choreographers what dancing with others was like after such a long time of contactless art making, they all expressed a desire to re-learn what togetherness meant for them as individuals and a group. Mar Undag elaborated, “It has been an immense gift to not only create art with these talented and deeply passionate humans, but also to reach outside of ourselves and be able to provide substantive support to others around us as well.” The night was a breath of fresh air for many as the audience buzzed with comments that this was many folks’  first dance performance since the beginning of covid. It was refreshing to see such virtuosic movement in a space with a history of bringing communities together. 

Arin Lynn is a movement artist, multimedia artist, and hoosier based in Salt Lake City. They have recently had the pleasure of working with local organizations such as Finch Lane Flash Projects, 12 Minutes Max, and Queer Spectra Arts Festival. Outside of art, Arin enjoys fried food and collecting vinyls.

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Interdisciplinary Art Collective in a show that was forced to move

I went to see Interdisciplinary Art Collective’s operetta titled, Unidentified Subject. The show was rescheduled and at a new venue due to Covid. When the cast entered the stage all masked it was clear that they are boldly adapting to our current situation.

I thought I was going to a dance performance but it was an operetta. A form that lends itself to brevity and light heartedness. The program gives clues to what the operetta is about. Textual and musical excerpts are given — referring to others who have investigated the Ancient Greek myth of Electra.

When studying Greek mythology, it becomes apparent that these stories give insight to a different era and culture — one that cannot be understood in the present mindset. Perhaps we need a cultural paradigm shift to understand our present state. The story of Electra is so far from our reality that it becomes a conceptual piece.

Photo by Sara Caldiero.

The chorus is dressed in draped white dresses. The two main characters in suits of paper pieces. The chorus forms human hallways that the soloists walk through. The main characters skip through like children. When they find each other they begin a dance of following one another. Divided then dispersed into a modern hoedown they commence some funny line dancing.

All the lines are lost.

The soloist jams out and the chorus gathers around, creating form from the chaos. They enter a new realm — rising and falling — catching each other as they drop down. A whole body is lifted and carried as duets begin to form.

The stage is taped with a long corridor with a door on one end and an octagon on the other end. The soloist crawls backwards and backstrokes as they move creating a flow back and forth across the stage. The two main characters meet at the door. What appears as a door is a mirror where they reflect each other’s movement.

A new duet forms.

There are brown rectangular pieces of butcher paper hung in the wall. The first one is taken off and laid on the floor. The soloist lies and their body is traced with white chalk. The chorus manipulates their body and props up their limbs with little boxes. Little boxes in various sizes help accomplish the held position. They are picked up and carried away to a new piece of butcher paper. The first piece of butcher paper with the body outline is displayed in front of the stage.

The chorus enchants operatic tones — as if each position is making a sound.

Repeatedly they are moved, traced and repositioned. They hold each position uttering melodic songs full of emotion. The chorus voices join to harmonize. One person whispers in the mic and the ambient singing mixes together.

They all become objects.

They build a half wall around the soloist and sing, “Ring the bones coins in her hand.” It becomes dark and small dots of light turn on as an angelic chorus begins. They are the creatures trying to figure it out — what is the unidentifiable subject? 

In all this human brilliance little lights shine.

Sara Caldiero is a writer, book artist, folk dancer, and creative arts instructor. Her proximity to wilderness has inspired her to teach, write, and perform. She enjoys bringing poetry to people in classrooms, on desert adventures, and to drifters on the street. She is in a MFA program for creative writing and completed a BA in English from the University of Utah. She is the creator and director of Hunger for the Arts, an art program that provides workshops and food for homeless teens in Salt Lake City. 

Her work has been made public through chapbooks, a broadside by Dreamgarden Press, literary anthologies, and performance. Book art publications include: Hotels, Snatch ‘N’ Sniff, and The Headless Housewife: A book of Anarchy and Imaginary Solutions. Some notable performances as a featured poet are: Utah Arts Festival, Utah Humanities Great Salt Lake Book Festival, and the City Art poetry series.

Ballet West at the Red Butte Garden Amphitheater

There was a pleasant pervasive hum throughout Ballet West in the Garden at Red Butte Garden Amphitheater last Friday evening. Not from the bees that earlier menaced their onstage mark-through, but rather the audience sprawled across the lawn, emboldened in commentary and conversational asides by the open air.  This performance venue provided the sight lines, sound, and lighting production of a theater experience, with the liberating addition of the free-form gathering of general seating, food and drink, and personal mobility familiar to musical concert-goers. There were more families with children present than typically attend a triple-bill mixed repertory evening; the many kids roaming and twirling around heightened the communal feeling. 

Ballet West soloists Chelsea Keefer and Jordan Veit.

This social/communal experience was reflected in the first work, Piece of My Heart by BW resident choreographer Nicolo Fonte. The piece was earlier set on Ballet West II in 2019 at a Beer and Ballet event, and is well-suited to these more casual and explicitly fun performances.  Piece of My Heart was high-energy and not overshadowed by the prominent and powerful delivery of the Janis Joplin songs to which it is set. The crowd was drawn into the evening by the dancers’ exuberance and sharp execution within the shifting ensemble formations. The seven-member cast circling up to foreground solo moments was a very familiar device for echoing social dance conventions. It did however showcase their true virtuosity, especially after such a protracted pause in regular training during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

In contrast to the individuated casual seventies attire of Piece of My Heart, Soloist Chelsea Keefer’s entrance in the rich red costume of The Solo Year was instantly arresting.  The modern fit bodysuits coupled with the elaborate patterned embellishment and wind-catching back-panel skirts captured the quality of this contemporary piece set to Baroque concertos. Keefer’s signature attack and sustain, especially in partnership with Jordan Veit, is well-matched to choreographer Matthew Neenan’s movement. This movement was characterized by a classically-inflected elegance interpolated by exaggerated gestures intended to jar and surprise, ranging from sensual to silly. Duets and quartets dominated the eight-person piece, each playing out fully before its structured ceding to the next.  When they eventually arrived, the regal stature and bearing of Katlyn Addison and Emily Adams was thrilling. I’m eagerly awaiting Addison’s first full season as a Principal dancer.

The evening was capped with excerpts of the classical Romantic ballet Paquita, choreographed by Elena Kunikova after Marius Petipa, first ballet master of the Saint Petersburg Imperial Theatres. Which is to say- really, really classical. The piece began with corps lines of many mazurka steps, a kind of chugging brush, and heel-clicking cabrioles, and would continue in that vein of exciting, but exacting.  The dancing in this ballet really finishes, fully completing before the next step commences, which is challenging but technically rewarding to watch. The dancers of Ballet West carried it off remarkably, especially without a full dress rehearsal on the unfamiliar stage, and the presence of some unexpected flora and fauna. With its pancake tutus, neck and headpieces, and lace, and its traditional compositional elements of variation like grand pas classique and finale, Paquita felt like a subsequent context for the referents of The Solo Year. It was a nice complement to the anteceding works.

The sequencing of the pieces drew us deeper into a classical ballet experience, as the night deepened and our glasses emptied.  With the night-blooming flowers fronting the stage, crescent moon overhead, and the susurrus of appreciative murmurs, Red Butte provided a comfy and human gathering place for taking in a performance on a less-smoky, rather lovely evening. I hope they repeat this program in future summers.

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. Check out Nora’s performances from this spring’s artist-in-residence program.