An evening of reflection at an intimate house show

The traditional presentation of dance has grown increasingly inaccessible in these times, and often the staging of a performance is an artistic expression all its own. On the evening of June 17, in the basement and backyard of a suburban home in Draper, I attended one such act of performance. At its heart, An Evening of Reflection was an informal gathering of friends and family for the purpose of appreciating the creation of art, celebrated over champagne and casual conversation. A small gallery of paintings by Tarynn Kerr paired beautifully with the sunset and queer themes of the concert.

The show opened with Geeses Pieces, a cheeky reflection on the absurdity of aphorisms in the "Live, Laugh, Love" school of thought. Performed and choreographed by Victoria Raider and Hunter Hazard, the dancers paraded a series of quaint home-decor platitudes before the audience, each met with increasingly manic positivity and laughter. Flighty dance embraced the inherent silliness of the mantras before rising into an acknowledgement of the sometimes uncomfortable truths at their center.

In the next piece, Finite Moments, Franky DeMartino’s emotional floorwork was accompanied by an electronic poetry reading, robotically musing on love and loss. Hunter Hazard’s winding and reversing choreography cast long shadows behind dramatic red, painting the despairing movements in an almost alien light.

Photo by Taj Reynolds.

The third number, Safe Unsafe, choreographed by Franky DeMartino, featured two duets: the first a gay romance full of sultry lifts and intertwining limbs performed by Nathaniel Woolley and Hunter Hazard; the second a series of retreating embraces where lovers Franky DeMartino and Victoria Rader grasped at dwindling intimacy. The duets starkly contrasted the duality of relationships—masculine and feminine, joy and grief, growing together and breaking apart.

Photo by Taj Reynolds.

The final piece, Our Right Hearts, choreographed and performed by Eliza Kitchens, Becca Speechley, and Hunter Hazard, began with an exercise in self-hype set to an extatically shouted I Have Confidence. Then, wearing billowing dresses against mirror ball mood lighting, the scene became like an intimate sleepover, where queer friends examined their own reflections and their relationships to each other. A spot-lit duet unwound into the dancers rhythmically worshipping at an altar of Christmas lights and childhood toys, singing it heartfelt songs while cradling their shared feelings. Scattered lights from a disco ball, swung like a partner, illuminated a final bittersweet solo. 

Nolan Williams is a professional and creative writer that is passionate about local art, despite being new to dance in Salt Lake City. He feels grateful to have learned so much about movement and expression already, and looks forward to experiencing more of what this welcoming community has to offer.

NOW ID returns to Salt Lake for a wrestling match

Firstly, Ally Up was a fantastic opportunity for people watching. During the pre-show hour or so of hotdog eating and mingling, I saw the highest number of mustaches in one place than any other event I’d been at and at least four feminist t-shirts in the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision, including one of a uterus giving the middle finger. The show took place in the parking lot behind the shops in the Mavin district, with different murals on the back of each building. Chairs were set up across from each other; like we were on the home and away bleachers of a high school football game and we were gearing up to fight the other side of the audience.

The dancer's entrance was the best entrance I’ve ever seen. As the music grew louder and louder building anticipation, they rode in on the back of two massive motorcycles. As they stared each other down and the bikers revved their engines, I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. 

Photos by Tori Meyer.

The motorcycles, the deeply saturated makeup, the hair piled high, and the sound reverberating created the sense of something incredibly huge about to happen. Ally Up was partly inspired by “all-female wrestling match witnessed in Mexico” and everything up to this point felt like it was leading up to a real match about to happen. Throughout the three rounds of dance, this tension kept building then ebbing. The two dancers circled, convincingly looking like two people who wanted to beat each other up. Their high jumps on the pavement and stare downs with audience members were intimidating. The moments of physical contact, one dancer’s fingers prodding the other’s torso, stuck out in the stretches of unison. Sometimes the music would ramp up to an intensity that the choreography didn’t quite match, either a speed or some sense of bigness that was missing. In between rounds, assistants brought the fighters water and hairspray. Instead of a ring girl, a ring boy walked through carrying signs that said “winning cares” and “eat them all.”  Rather than ending in victory for one dancer, the dance seemed to end in a draw, resolving the threat of physical violence.

What I kept thinking of while watching was if I was supposed to be reading this as queer. Maybe it’s just my own bias or seeing so much queer art during pride month, but the tension between the dancers seemed less violent and more homoerotic. I felt guilty at first at this conclusion that my brain jumped to. Because female sports are so often sexualized, is reading a relationship on the dancers a part of that sexualization? No, is my answer to that question. The show incorporated queer aesthetics. The hyper exaggerated makeup on the cheekbones and the massive hairstyles coming from drag culture’s play with femininity. The gender role reversal of the Ring Boy. The butch women driving the bikes. Two days later, I’m still thinking about reading art as queer even if it wasn’t intended that way.

On another note, I enjoyed their event organizing decisions. There were tiers of seating from the front row, second row, bring your own barstool, to the standing room. I chose “BYO barstool” which I think is a fun viewing option for any outdoor dance event. The show also featured the artwork of Jamie Clyde, including a large banner reading “I AM DEAD” in yellow letters that marked the event entrance. The hotdogs–both meat and veggie–and the drinks encouraged socializing both before and after the show. The show’s curation was thoughtful and intentional; they succeeded in combining the atmosphere of a wrestling match, a tailgate, and a ballet.

Tori Meyer is a performer, choreographer, and dance educator based in Salt Lake City. She received her Honors Bachelor of Fine Arts in Modern Dance from the University of Utah in 2021. Her choreographic work has been shown at loveDANCEmore’s Sunday Series, Deseret Experimental Opera, Queer Spectra Arts Festival, Damn These Heels Film Festival, Salty Showcase, Finch Lane Flash Projects, Salt Lake Unity Festival, and Red Butte Gardens.

Jamal Jackson’s Rite of Spring at the Arts Festival

The Utah Arts Festival has long hosted local and touring companies. This weekend I jumped on the opportunity to watch the Jamal Jackson Dance Company, a New York City-based company that works to raise awareness of the connections between African and American cultures. Their piece, 846, is Jackson’s take on The Rite of Spring, the well-known Stravinsky score that was originally used to tell the story of a pagan ritual that ended with the sacrifice of a young girl. 846 was choreographed in 2021 and produced as a film during the pandemic, but has taken to the stage on tour.

The dancers moved fluidly through West African, European, Modern, and street dance techniques, demonstrating how beautifully they can coexist in one body and making me question why we tend to draw such sharp distinctions between them. They wove together grooving, polyrhythmic steps and Krump gestures with Graham contractions and striking ballet attitudes. Their impressive use of these vocabularies clearly demonstrated how Eurocentric and Afrocentric techniques are in no way mutually exclusive. Moments of vague unison in unclear group forms and solos weaving throughout connected them to expectations of community dance more than codified performance structures. It felt more like a conversation than a speech. Their collective energy expressed how the impending sacrifice affects everyone in a community, not just the person who is killed, and – on the flip side of that coin – how everyone is also complicit in the act of the sacrifice.

Jamal Jackson Dance Company.

The richness of this choreography resonated throughout the gestures and technique of the dancers, referencing the stories of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Andre Hill, Trayvon Martin, and other Black victims of police violence from the last few years. As with many Rite of Spring performances, there was a red cloth, this time a red hoodie. It began on top of a male dancer on the ground as we heard the story of his death and was passed through the group as the Stravinsky score began, building fear and tension in their bodies. Despite the many hands it passed through, eventually it made its way back to him, pooled beneath his head in the final image of death. As Jackson mentioned after the performance, we might describe many incidents of police violence as random tragedies, but in fact the violence is quite directed.

Stravinsky’s score was extremely loud and agitating, making the movement at first appear underwhelming in comparison, but over time I became drawn into the nuance of the gestures and tone. The dancers flowed through images of hands-up in innocence, taking a knee in solidarity, reaching to the sky in prayer, and hiding the face to block out the incessant reports of death. The red cloth at one point became like an umbilical cord, falling from the center of a dancer’s body between her legs as she slowly wrapped it back up as if in mourning for her lost child. Toward the end of the piece the group gathered behind the identified sacrifice, pounding their fists into their hands like a gavel, but at the same time like a stabbing motion creating a sense of inherent violence in the judgement being made. I could feel the last two years of police reports and protests washing over me.

Juxtaposed with the fear, violence, and drama of the music, were the voices of those who had lost someone to police violence, telling stories of their life, what they loved, and how they lived during a pause in the music. Jackson expanded on this moment after the show saying that he wanted to disrupt the trauma and be intentional about who tells these stories. He wanted to avoid only knowing victims as a hashtag and find more connection to who they were in life. There was a moment where the dancer who was chosen to be sacrificed walked through the group with the hoodie over his head, revealed his face and erupted in an energetic and powerful solo, expressing his fear and joy before he went towards his death. This moment in particular rang out with the love for Black life that we heard in the stories from victims’ families and that Jackson clearly strives to share with this work.

I really resonated with Jackson’s statement during the Q & A that, “If you’re not talking to me about something [with your art], I don’t want to hear it.” There is a certain enjoyment in aesthetics, but at the end of the day, art has the potential to support real change. It is clear that Jackson fully embraces this potential with his work and 846 provided ample material for starting conversations, moving mindsets, and shifting cultural attitudes about police violence in America.

Kara Komarnitsky grew up in Salt Lake City and recently graduated with a BFA in Dance from Ohio State University with minors in Environmental Science and Business. Her work approaches the complexity of human interconnection with the planet, pulling inspiration from the natural world and environmental research. While her primary medium is dance, Kara regularly uses projections, film, sound, and interactive technology to create immersive performance experiences. Her piece Tales of the Deep (2018) recently won third place in the Midwest Climate Summit’s Climate Stories Competition and her thesis, Interconnect (2022), received an Honorable Mention at the OSU Denman Research Forum 2022. Other places her work has been presented includes the OSU Student Concert, OSU BFA Showcase, and the Ohio Dance Festival Professional Concert.

Hip hop and parkour at the Arts Festival

1520 Arts drew a large crowd to their in-the-round performance space at the Utah Arts Festival at Library Square. Their time was part demonstration and part workshop. First, Joshua “Text” Perkins, one of the founders of 1520 Arts, presented a brief history of hip hop culture with help from dancers and their DJ. Then, they invited audience members up to learn some of the moves and participate in a cypher (a circle where the dancers each go in one at a time). Perkins was a fantastic presenter and covered a lot of hip hop culture while keeping the energy really high. The b-boys and b-girls, Sam Heng, Katie Hall, Tonga Lavulo, and Ben Ukoh-eke, showed off top-rocking, footwork, power moves, and freezes while Perkins walked the audience through what all of these elements mean in breaking. After demonstrating this vocabulary, the dancers showed us a battle, which was the most exciting thing I saw at the Arts Festival. What was a quiet audience at the start got much louder as the dancing became more explosive. 

Photo by Tori Meyer.

For their workshop, they invited audience members to the stage to try out breaking. Although Perkins was encouraging the adults to join in too, most of the takers were young kids. There were a lot of kids eager to get in the middle of a cypher and the dancers were really friendly and encouraging. This performance is one piece of 1520 Arts’s mission to introduce breaking and hip hop culture to wider audiences in Utah. Utah Arts Festival had a lot of areas and activities geared towards getting children involved with art. Especially since youth twelve and under get in free, the whole festival was very family friendly. During the workshop portion of 1520 Art’s performance, I felt a little odd as one of the only adults who wasn’t there to watch kids dance. However, 1520 Arts performed all four days of the festival, with a youth, adult, and open styles battle on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday respectively, so each of these events would likely draw in different crowds.

Earlier that day, I got to see Salt Lake Dance and Parkour, one of the festivals designated “Emerging Artists,” perform in the same space. Their presentation was also educational, starting by involving the audience in their warm-up and ending with inviting everyone to try some basic vaults and jumps on the stage. In the middle, they showed their work Sixes which blended parkour elements with modern dance composition sensibilities. It began very subtly different from their warm up, all four of them traveling in a circle, jumping over and over their wooden vault structures. The music faded underneath the quiet sound of their sneakers absorbing impact. The loudest sound was the rattle of their tallest wooden vaults when landed on. It made me wonder what they would do performing with more space to gather momentum or more solid structures like the series of concrete steps we were sitting on. Throughout, it felt casual and intentional: a dancer would take a break for some gatorade then set their sights on getting to the top of a concrete wall. Salt Lake Dance and Parkour was also performing for many families and by the end, the kids and a few adults were ready to try out what they had just seen. I’m excited about how excited all of the kids were to dance and I hope that 1520 Arts and Salt Lake Dance and Parkour have created some future dance lovers.

Tori Meyer is a performer, choreographer, and dance educator based in Salt Lake City. She received her Honors Bachelor of Fine Arts in Modern Dance from the University of Utah in 2021. Her choreographic work has been shown at loveDANCEmore’s Sunday Series, Deseret Experimental Opera, Queer Spectra Arts Festival, Damn These Heels Film Festival, Salty Showcase, Finch Lane Flash Projects, Salt Lake Unity Festival, and Red Butte Gardens.

Another view of Queer Spectra Arts Fest

I. The Festival

When I left Mexico City and arrived at Salt Lake City in 2020, everything was closed there and here. No restaurants to go to, no museums to visit, no shows to attend. The virtual events were the only option; though none were as fulfilling as experiencing things live. I knew about Queer Spectra Festival and was curious to have the opportunity to go, but life happens… I missed the 2020 and 2021 editions. So, in 2022 I obligated myself to attend, and writing a review was the perfect pretext to do so.

Photo by Rogelio Peña.

On May 21, I had the chance to attend the first of two performance showcases at Sunset Studios. This festival is more than shows, exhibitions, panels, and workshops. It is an experience built for everyone. From the very first moment I stepped into the building, I realized that this organization has meticulously taken care of its mission. They had created a space where everyone felt welcome: a happy, bright vibe floating around the room, with many smiles and a feeling of belonging.

Interestingly, Queer Spectra has been one of the most diverse cultural/art events I have had the chance to attend. Based on past experiences, not even institutional spaces like UMFA, UMOCA or Finch Lane Gallery, have achieved such a gathering of BIPOC people, white people, LGBTQIA+, visually or/and audition impaired, and other identities together in the term of a full day of activities, excited to share, talk, witness, create belonging — to listen and be listened to. This is remarkable.

II. Videoart/Videodance

G Y P S U M by Jessy Christ was a beautifully poetic and elegant videodance; unfortunately, the light filtrating in the space killed the sublime visual experience this work was offering. For the rest of the videos, the organizers did magic to cancel some of the extra light affecting the projection, but this first work was the victim of a show happening in the middle of the afternoon.

Bits and Parts by arin lynn is a cute, fun, and magical work that shows the video skills of the artist through a feeling of joy and cheerfulness that so many times goes missing in contemporary art. (I say that especially for myself, acknowledging this lighter tone does not come naturally to me.) Having the artist as the video's protagonist, interacting with animated forest animals and traveling to space in an animated rocket, stole laughs and smiles from the audience. While watching, I questioned how extreme art (and more specifically, the art market) has defined what fine art is. What is contemporary art? Is it defined by the solemn colonial standards of the art world. Is this art? Is it not? Who says so? I loved this work for making these questions bursting into my mind

Is Collector’s Box by Ali Lorenz and Mia Martelli a dance film? Multimedia film? Performance video? For some reason, the video brought me a feeling of nostalgia. The images took my mind to the eighties and nineties video aesthetics. I believe this work was edited digitally, but the effects, the pop sound, and low-tech image references threw me back to those lost decades. Though a little long for my taste, the work’s interesting visual effects and artistic choices left me wondering how the collaboration worked between these two unique and different minds.

III. Performances

Sunshine, All the While by Nick Weaver is not foreign to me. I’ve watched it in the past in its online version. Weaver’s piece presented a duet with a ladder, a very attractive element to me. A space inhabited by two bodies collaborating with physics to build the illusion of partnering work. Transparent, straightforward, and honest, this short work uses elements like video, sound, and objects to catch the viewer’s attention to the internal feelings of the performer. There is no doubt that Nick is quite a performing arts creature. He’s a fascinating mover, and I am very curious to know more about the evolution of Nick’s work in the future.

Nick Weaver with his ladder. Photo by Rogelio Peña.

Finally, the last piece, Our Right Hearts by Eliza Kitchens, Hunter Hazard, and Becca Speechley, is a bizarre work. And I use this word with no disrespectful. I adored the odd feeling it caused me; we need to feel uncomfortable more often. The three performers wear dresses and carry a robot toy and Christmas lights wrapped around a pole that, further along in the piece, will hold a glass disco ball. Sound starts. Julie Andrews’ voice caused a flashback to my early teen years. (Yes, this cultural reference colonized a portion of the urban middle class in Mexico.) I got to know Andrews’ films because my lesbian friend (that had not yet accepted her own sexual preferences then) introduced them to me. What I experienced through the singing, dancing, manipulation of portable LED lights and a song by Taylor Swift was una ofrenda de amor — a loving offering building community. The performers made a community of three, but also built a community with us, the viewers. This was the perfect piece to end the program. This festival is doing fundamental work in for Salt Lake City.

Our Right Hearts featured Eliza Kitchens, Hunter Hazard, and Becca Speechley. Photo by Rogelio Peña.

Originally from Mexico City. Stephanie García holds a Contemporary Dance AA and BA from the National Classical and Contemporary Dance School of the National Fine Arts Institute (INBA), studies in Cultural Management from Universidad de Guadalajara, and a Cultural Management and Cultural Policies Diploma from the National Arts Center (CENART), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) in Mexico. She is a performer, choreographer, performing arts director, cultural manager, producer, and Co-founder and Co-Director of Punto de Inflexión Dance Company and PROArtes México. Stephanie has danced with several of the most important choreographers and venues in Mexico, performed in eleven countries of America, Europe, and Africa, and choreographed more than twenty original dance/multi-/inter- disciplinary pieces. She was co-founder and co-director of Sur Oeste Arte Escénico for ten years. A beneficiary of programs like IBERESCENA grant (Iberoamerican Performing Arts Fund), Prince Claus Fund (Netherlands), and seven times awarded by Mexico's National Culture and Arts Fund grants from 2006-2019. With seventeen years of dance and arts administration experience, Stephanie has been considered by the press to be one of the most prominent dancers in Mexico. Garcia is currently an MFA candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Modern Dance program at the University of Utah.

loveDANCEmore was thrilled to present Stephanie’s work in last October’s Sunday Series, curated by Jorge Rojas.