A new playground for dance

On July 22, 2023, I had the pleasure of watching the community come together and showcase a wonderful collection of pieces. True to the show's title name, Playground, I could see the choreographers and dancers playing with their ideas for this project. From the rainbow cloud that transformed to the fabric flowing river, to the dramatic operatic piece, I was kept engaged and excited to see what else these artists had to give the audience.

As stated before the show started, Playground was designed with the intention to start and finish the artistic process in a week. On top of that, choreographers were inclined to choose dancers they haven’t worked with before. While watching the performance, I wouldn’t have guessed some of these folks met for the first time during this process. The amount of trust these dancers have in the process is clear. The performers were free to commit to the dances, while feeling secure that their group has each other. This is truly highlighted for me in Tori Meyer’s piece, Ode to Kenneth. While setting the mood for this piece, the dancers had this “too cool for school” attitude while trying to play a recorder with three people. It was silly and wonderful. Doing silly things on stage can be stressful if you’re not comfortable; however, the attitude and commitment of these dancers had made this piece so much fun to watch.

Photo by Florian Alberge.

Fun – that is the biggest take away I can say about watching this collection as a whole. Exciting moments like those in Tyler Schnese’s piece, Venus in Pink, and Rebekah Guerra’s piece, que vas-tu faire?, kept my senses alive. I thought, “Wow, this is exciting! I need to know what happens next.” While softer, magical moments appeared as well - like how much the tearing of the paper screen added visually and audibly in Lehua Estrada’s piece, O-Six. The show made me excited to see what else these artists can give to our community and inspired me for my own creative projects.

To continue supporting more shows like this, please continue to watch these artists. The creative team of Playground made it easy to access the performer’s and choreographer’s information on their instagram, @playground_danceproject. This is where you can take a deeper dive into the community and support the contribution they give in our Small Lake City.

Edison Corvera (they/them) is currently a queer Filipinx performer living around the SLC area. They attended Southern Utah University and studied theater arts and dance performance. Since moving to the Salt Lake area, Edison has worked with Myriad Dance, Ogden Movement Collective, and SONDERimmersive. Whatever artistry they find, Edison hopes to continue to find ways to implement their art with the community around them.

801 Salon explores a new space

801 Salon continues to grow and evolve. From its humble beginnings at Vis, an eyewear store on 800 East, the event leapt into a new space — Church and State, a converted church across from the Main Library downtown — and announced Saturday, May 20, at its most recent edition, that it had acquired non-profit status. From one non-profit to another, congratulations!

Like many of our past and current programs, 801 has blurred the line between work-in-progress and finished work for a non-traditional setting. This show tipped to the latter, but it benefited from the charm and shape of Church and State, which is a large, homey space full of comfy seating and lit with Christmas lights.

The cast of The Rate We Change.

I had seen Kellie St. Pierre’s piece The Rate We Change before at the MFA show at the University of Utah. The work makes use of a spinning circular platform which the performers keep turning continuously throughout the duration of the action. I liked this piece in its original environment, where the platform disappeared into the black void of the theater, but I was surprised that I liked it even more in this intimate setting where I could see the dancers sweat and struggle to mount and dismount, like a hungry pack of youths sharing a single, spinning skateboard. Jessica Boone, whose presence on and off the disc radiates a warm calm, was particularly striking in this work.

My other favorite of the evening was a solo by Stephanie García, which explored what it means to be homesick, in her case for Mexico City. (Parenthetically, although I can’t claim it as my home, I might be willing to agree with Stephanie that Mexico City is the greatest city in the world.) I am consistently impressed by Stephanie’s range and depth as performer. She began behind us on the balcony, speaker in hand, and took the whole audience out dancing with her in a wave of nostalgia for the metropolis that segued seemly into a monologue, in which she hilariously left her heart (an actual wooden prop, gaudily painted in graphic detail) in the hands of an audience member. Stephanie pulls things off that are hard to explain, let alone imagine someone else succeeding at. There was a long mimetic sequence near the end of this piece in which she seemed to traverse every emotion and (nearly) every absurd encounter she’s experienced since moving here. In the hands of another performer, it might have been a mess. Stephanie made it somehow sublime.

Samuel Hanson is the executive director of loveDANCEmore.

Briefly Noted: Four women making work in SLC

I continue to be struck by the quantity and quality of work being made week-to-week in our community in small spaces and on shoestring budgets. A couple weekends ago I took in Anhad: Beyond Limitations at the Regent Street Black Box. The evening was the latest offering of ChitraKaavya Dance founder Srilatha Singh, who specializes in Bharatanatyam, and Sonali Loomba, who in this production performs Kathak.

I am consistently impressed by the savvy with which these two performers bring these genres to the general public. I’m not an expert in either of these forms, but I feel that I learn a little more each time I see one of their performances, which are always stunningly well-rehearsed and executed with a deft sense of musicality. I’ve seen less of Loompa’s work, and this presentation offered her ample opportunities as a performer to wow the audience with spectacular turns, punctuated by twists of wrists and fingers that seemed to gouge new cardinal directions into the very air in which she revolved.

That same weekend, I’d also caught another 801 Salon at the Vis eyeglasses studio, produced by local choreographer Roxanne Gray. The evening featured short pieces by five choreographers. I was particularly impressed by a solo by Rebekah Guerra and a duet but Sam Stone. Stone and her partner seemed to be exploring a charged space somewhere between contact improvisation and choreographed stillness, somewhat reminiscent of the recent trend toward using sculpture and figurative monuments as inspiration or provocation. Guerra’s study, One Step in Time, which mostly consisted of her crawling slowly on her elbows and knees, was physically discomfiting to watch, but also mesmerizingly beautiful.

I hope to see more from all four of these talented women here in Salt Lake City in the years to come.

Samuel Hanson is the executive director of loveDANCEmore.

Here and now with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s show HERE TODAY played January 12-14 at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in downtown Salt Lake. The performance featured an engaging, diverse program of work from three choreographers – Raja Feather Kelly, Molly Heller, and Charles O. Anderson.

The evening opened with a premiere by local choreographer Molly Heller. Her group Heartland Collective collaborated with Ririe-Woodbury in 2020 on the screendance Full View, and her new piece for this concert, Long View, was a reengagement with the same visual language (made distinctive by the film’s setting in a room painted entirely, delightfully green). Heller’s work likes to play with bright colors, bodies pulsing through ostinatos, and a studiously blank affect interrupted by moments when these colorful fractals suddenly kaleidoscope open to reveal something expansive and emotional before spinning and fracturing back again. Her willingness to wait for that opening, to keep us in the pulse for long enough before finally letting the beat drop, was what gave this work its strength. Long View’s first movement, an extended sequence with a cluster of bodies rocking under the light of a glowing cloud, was delicious to sit inside of for as long as we did. When the dancers finally asked us to sit with them again at the end of the piece, the green furniture from Full View had appeared onstage and they took their places among it with that same sense of patience mixed with wonder as the beginning. It wasn’t a return to the past, but something more fluid and recursive. Full View was a strict container of a piece, the camera recording a single room that filled with bodies like a microscope filling with a single slide. Long View was a telescope, less interested in the container of space than the channel of time.

The second piece of the evening was a restaging of Charles O. Anderson’s Rites: Come As You Are, featuring a strong showing by dancers from Westminster College. It was a spell cast for future equity and freedom, and it was an elegy for past and present injustices. The white costumes, gentle haze, and video projection (a favorite element of mine in the way it moved from swirls of mist to strident lines of text) set a simple stage for highlighting the work. Anderson’s movement was grounded in African Diasporic vocabulary, and his choreography swayed between long, lithe cascades of movement and sharp syncopations in large groups, illuminated by bright individual moments of stillness. It was a dance performed in circles: structural, rhythmic, kinesthetic, and thematic. A particularly evocative moment came when a circle formation returned about two-thirds of the way through the piece, this time as a half-circle that now required the audience to complete it. Anderson, in his exploration of racial justice and his own experiences as a Black artist, made a piece about synecdoche – how the whole can stand for the part and a part for the whole, and how these processes of identity and unity are manifestations of power. The rites and rituals in this dance took many forms – incantatory, celebratory, lamentory, oratory. It asked us to consider the ways in which solidarity too can take many forms: as witness, as action, as unison, as polyrhythm.

HERE TODAY ended with a premiere by Brooklyn-based choreographer Raja Feather Kelly. Scenes for an Ending was a maximalist delight – full of stormy weather, thick smoke, pulsing pop music, and flickering lights. Kelly assured us in the program notes that “whatever you see is real – it’s actually happening.” The piece tessellated whip fast through moments of tenderness, violence, play, fantasy, and tragedy. It was so successful because it was able to hold that kind of multiplicity, to channel its fluidity in an evocation of gender, power, relationships, and perception. An early duet between Peter Farrow and Fausto Rivera was a dizzying collision of bodies that at turns wrestled and caressed each other – a scene that was so absolutely stunning it threatened to overwhelm the rest of the piece. It found its necessary counterpoint near the end of the piece, when Alexander Pham twice took a surreal, slow descent to the floor, face uplifted and fingers curling inward in a sort of rushing stillness that felt exactly like love. There was a taste of the mythic in each of HERE TODAY’s dances: time-travel, incantation, and transfiguration. But each were grounded in a very human connection to the body, the way it moves and touches, and what it owes and is owed by the world around it. Where the show might have faltered, it did so by an unfortunate confluence of programming. Sitting through three long, multi-movement pieces (two of them scored by the same composer) that each featured slow walking and some sort of individual moving against the backdrop of a group unison proved difficult at times. But where the show excelled, and it did, it was with startling grace – a trust in the next moment to get us where we needed to go and a kindness towards the past moment, faults and all. It was an evening that wasn’t afraid to sit and wait when it needed to, and it also wasn’t afraid to throw itself headlong into whatever came next.

Indigo Cook is a multi-disciplinary artist in Salt Lake City.

Reflections on Marilyn Arsen's Summer Workshop

Back in July, I had the opportunity to take a workshop led by Marilyn Arsen, a performance artist that has been creating live performance work since 1975. Marilyn’s work focuses on minimal durational work. Her work seems simple when her actions are summarized, but Marilyn is able to find depth and nuances in the tasks she brings to the audience. Marilyn also understands the audience is intelligent enough and empathetic enough to search for mystery themselves. My personal goal going to Marilyn’s workshop was to combat that urge. I wanted to feel like I was bringing genuine creativity, and stay compelling to my audience. I wasn’t alone in my worries, and Marilyn had a way for us to challenge those thoughts by creating mystery.

During this workshop, Marilyn had the participants be prepared with daily tasks, props to complete those tasks, and unconnected unwritten stories. She first had us tell our stories in a short duration. After we told it once, we had to tell them again in a shorter form. Then the workshop switched agendas, and we explored how much detail it takes to complete our daily tasks. Marilyn would have us tear that task apart and slow down our movement just to see how much nuance is actually in there. Once we were able to explore as much as we needed, the workshop was prompted with combining the tasks with the unconnected stories. We did this twice, once with a familiar narration of storytelling and once with broken sentences that lacked action. As we were watching each other perform these prompts, mystery was already there. These were simple actions that we were doing, there wasn’t an exaggerated movement or forced attitude to our actions. Plus, the words and sentences that came from the artist help guide the mystery without elaborating. We were not performing, but we were entertaining. Now, more than a month later, I think back to the workshop and I know I have more to offer than just shocking the audience. As an artist, I feel like we forget the impact we have on our audience just creating. Watching all of us in the workshop create from this mystery allowed me to recognize that artists have that impact. I learned to not only trust myself, my technique, my practice, but to trust the audience. That trust also extends to me, the artist. As the artist it’s up to me to place the boundary for the audience. Using this trust allows for simplicity to be entertaining.

Trust. Trust is a necessity in many aspects of life and various relationships. As an artist, bringing trust into our own art should be a no brainer. That thought should be natural when an artist is curating work, right? One would think, however I find myself working against this natural thought. As stated earlier, I noticed myself focused on what would keep my audience entertained. I felt compelled to wow the audience with athletic dance tricks, or shocking moments. On the other hand, I felt myself thinking about how the audience would read these moments. Does this make sense or have I pushed my audience to a jarring uncomfortable state that we can’t come back from? These anxieties would come into my movements and I would be so focused on the impact my work has on the observers. The anxieties would cloud my intentions and decisions, and my art would show my distrust. Trust. It’s the key element when addressing these anxieties. Trusting myself, my work, my skills is an ongoing process I’m going to have to deal with as an artist. But what if I tricked my brain to make this process easier? I trust my audience is capable of watching my work without my need to hold their hand through it. My responsibility as an artist is to create, not take away the mystery of my work. I trust the mystery of my work will keep the audience focused and curious. I trust the mystery to help my work so I don’t have to use athletic dance tricks and shocking moments. Trust with mystery is a tool I can use to benefit my art.

Edison Corvera (they/them) is a queer Filipinx performer currently based around the SLC area. They attended Southern Utah University and studied theater arts and dance performance. Since moving to the Salt Lake area, Edison has worked with Myriad Dance, Ogden Movement Collective, and SONDERimmersive. Whether through dance, acting, or modeling, Edison hopes to continue to find ways to implement their art with the community around them.