Playground's second year

The second year of Playground Dance Project was a hilarious and inspiring success. Last night’s show included five choreographers and 15 dancers who created new works in just eight hours, each of them unique, creative, and playful.

Photos by Todd Collins.

Where Were We by Steven Chodoriwsky was spacious and silly, the repetition of the score created a sense of character without being attached to a linear storyline. Played over the movement was a recording of voices speaking from a rehearsal, adding an additional layer of insight into what the dancers were exploring and investigating. When the dancers on stage began to speak to us, to each other, and to themselves I found myself and the rest of the audience laughing at the narrative that was revealed. In what other scenario would give ourselves the task of pushing through two hugging bodies? In what space other than dance would we drag each other across the floor and call it a train?

¿Y Ahora Qué? by Bianca Calderon featured Latin music and movement motifs that began in a dramatic and curious setting, then developed into something more celebratory by the second section. The dancers frequently brought their palms towards their faces and heads, as if looking in a mirror or pondering a memory. The motif that sticks with me from this work was Masio Sangster’s screaming/shaking moment that repeated in different contexts throughout, sometimes reading as anger, frustration, excitement, or joy. For me, this informed my understanding of the dancers’ relationship to the Latin movement vocabulary as one that changed and shifted over time and could hold many emotions at once.

Blasé Girl(s) by Xochitl Marquez was ridiculous and unexpected. The performers’ commitment really sold the shaking, pumping, sometimes sexual movement that was matched with high energy music. The creative use of clothing drew more laugher from myself and the rest of the audience for an explosively joyful experience.

Lanu O Fa’asinomaga by LaGrande Lolo was a deconstruction of traditional hula movement paired with tense, powerful music and lighting that showed off the musculature of the dancers. The repeating gesture of a hand pulling from the opposite shoulder through the heart and casting down to the side of the body made me wonder if the dancers were trying to take off their traditions, redefining for themselves the kind of women they wanted to be. As the dance concluded, the traditional music returned and each of the dancers responded very differently: one lay collapsed on the floor, one walked off towards the light, and one stood tall with open arms. I got the sense that their relationship to identity was continually changing and deeply personal.

Imagine if the Moon Was Theirs by Constance Anderson created a world of dream-like wonder for the audience that became real through the visceral textures and facial expressions of the dancers. We traveled through the night sky with the moon, we swallowed a dense weight and watched it move through the dancers’ bodies, we kicked and Kicked and kicKed and KICKED and *kicked* and kicked and kICKed. Everything was given just enough time to form a story and then strung together into a beautifully crafted voyage.

I want to congratulate Roxanne Gray for directing a space that was so welcoming and open-ended, we need more spaces like this to create art in Salt Lake. The whole evening was a drop of pure joy.

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.

A dazzling spectacle of art and storytelling

Chitrakaavya’s recent Vasundhara wasn’t just a dance show; it was an electrifying fusion of art forms that left me spellbound and craving more. From the colorful costumes to the resonating jingles of bells on nimble feet, every element was meticulously crafted to enthrall and engage. The theme was a heartfelt ode to Gaia, celebrating the true sources of our wealth, wellbeing, and joy. It revolved around the Sanskrit word "vasundhara" — meaning mother earth — prompting profound reflection on how we honor our natural riches. 

Six captivating pieces made up the performance, each more compelling than the last. The opening number, Alarippu, set the stage with a traditional tribute to nature. Here, the dancers paid homage to rain, rivers, forests, and the vibrant tapestry of flora and fauna. It was a visual feast, and a reminder of the wealth we often overlook. Surya Kauthuvam followed, a spirited praise of the sun god, our ultimate benefactor. This piece began with a blinding spotlight aimed directly at the audience, casting the dancers into striking silhouettes. The vivid costumes in shades of yellow and orange perfectly mirrored the theme, evoking the blazing brilliance of the sun.

Photos by Bagi Chandrakasan.

The third piece, Cauvery, was an exquisite ode to the eponymous river revered in southern India. The dancers depicted the river's sacred journey, nourishing lands and sustaining life. Their hands morphed into birds, and their bodies flowed like water, creating a mesmerizing visual narrative. The emcee’s prelude to each segment enriched the experience, making the intricate choreography both easy to understand and deeply moving.

Next came a poignant dance inspired by a poem highlighting the adverse impacts of urbanization on tribal communities. This piece, stark and somber, contrasted sharply with the earlier celebrations. Dressed in white and blue, the dancers conveyed a narrative of loss and inquiry through expressive faces and evocative movements, compelling the audience to contemplate the costs of modernization.

The final performance was an exuberant celebration of monsoons, accompanied by a live harp player. The choreography was sheer brilliance, with dancers forming dynamic yet graceful shapes that mimicked the cascading rain. Their synchronized movements and long-held poses were a demonstration of both precision and artistry.

Every aspect of the evening was a testament to the dancers' extraordinary talent and the choreographers’ visionary creativity. The costumes were many colors, enhancing the visual appeal while the bells on the dancers' feet added a delightful auditory dimension to their rhythmic footwork.

Each piece, whether joyous or solemn, wove a narrative that was as engaging as it was profound. The storytelling was subtle yet effective, allowing the audience to follow along while marveling at the intricate, rhythmic movements. The dancers' seamless synchronization, the vivid costumes, the emotive expressions, and the powerful stories all came together to create a performance that was nothing short of spectacular. Chitrakaavya’s work is a masterful example of how art can transcend mere performance to become a medium of profound expression and reflection. 

Shelby Strickler's dance journey began in Baltimore, Maryland. Having graduated with a BFA in Modern Dance from the University of Utah in December 2023, she is a performer and teacher in Salt Lake City, passionately sharing her love for dance.

A sublime performance at a new venue

Moonstone of Memory was performed on May 25th, at 7:30 and 9 pm, at Atelier Mill. Billed as an experience of intimate live performance, mingling, and a dance party, the evening was directed by Tara McArthur in collaboration with her co-performers, and attended by a small but attentive and, I believe, ultimately enchanted crowd. 

The setting of the show at Atelier Mill became nearly as large a character in our experience of the night as the performances themselves. Upon entering, we traveled through a tunnel of metallic silver streamers, past a lobby of low-slung seating and black and white photography, at the back of a long, dark tunnel of cluttered artists’ warehouses. In the barely marked corner of a nondescript office building tucked behind a drive-through, off a quiet street below Capitol Hill, lies the small, spare, and lovely light-filled room that functions as Atelier Mill’s performance space. We arrived here for the 7:30 showing just as the light in the valley began to soften towards evening. Stepping into the room, chapel-like with its crumbling old whitewashed brick, dangling wires and high-ceiling, flooded with dappled light and the green of spring trees waving through tall arched windows, my partner and I gasped with a little twinge of envy. It is a beautiful space for making art in. Soft lights inside large hanging globe lanterns tinged the air with refractions of glowing blue. 

Images by Ryan Ross.

The next immediately noticeable and visually delighting surprise was the presence of the show’s two musicians, Nora Price and Chaz Prymek, somewhat inexplicably stranded aloft with all their instruments and gear on the tiny square of a ten foot platform upstage right. Once the performance began, McArthur led dancers Molly Heller, Efren Corado Garcia, and Andrew Merrell through a winding series of quartets, duets, solos, and trios on the ground floor, while Price and Prymek performed the live score from their perch above, the bending and warping net of sound falling gently over the dancers below. This clever use of space served to highlight both performance modalities individually as well as their interaction, and created an expansive, shifting draw of focus along that vertical line.

The overall patterns of movement and choreography, in the group sections and in the first duet between McArthur and Merrell in particular, transmitted well of the idea of memory, with dancers drifting through space and pushing up against the solid reality of each other, alternately sluggish, tender, or racing. The dancers liberally used the architecture of the room in their choreography, running into the walls, climbing up and down the stairs and onto the windowsills, and once even abruptly disappearing into the strange platform’s closet, to my surprise and delight. All wore short-sleeve button-down shirts in greens, blues, florals, and stripes, plus plaid trousers, blue cloud tie-dye jeans, and summer linen shorts. Everything was chaotically patterned, but together achieved a kind of muted and tonal coherence. 

One particularly mesmerizing image occurred during the duet when Merrell gently scooped McArthur from her seat on the windowsill into a slowly rotating lift, and she arrived at a perfectly horizontal plank overhead by pushing off the wall with her feet and legs as one might do underwater from the wall of a pool, to dive back into another lap. Heller’s solo reflected her signature style, full of surprising and delicate jumps and twitches of the face and body. Price accompanied Heller by following her physical ticks with ethereal gasping vocals run through a telephone microphone that produces a shadowy, disembodied distortion. Following Heller and Price, Garcia (who had been hiding in the closet) emerged with two wooden bowls filled with water, placing them near the feet of the first audience row. During his solo, Garcia periodically returned to each bowl and dipped his fingers in, bringing them up to the temples and down the chest in a washing away or a blessing. McArthur’s final solo formed the crescendo of the piece with a peak of agitated gestural repetition. 

At the end of the half-hour performance, the dancer group coalesced together again. They performed the strange rituals of removing McArthur’s outer shirt layer and spraying her down with water, before eventually reaching a final tableau — Heller facing away from the audience and holding a light machine that created a glowing oval of rosy light on the white wall, by now turned deep gray and blue by the sinking sun outside. Flanked by Merrell and Garcia, with McArthur slightly behind and off to the side, all four gazed up at their artificial moon. 

After the show, a rickety ladder appeared to allow the musicians down and the cast mingled about with us, receiving copious praise from all. Drinks were provided out in the hallway. We left before the dance party, and, I have to admit, I think the added effect from the diaphanous play of light and shadow as the sun set after the earlier show was secretly the better deal. 

Atelier Mill is a relatively newly activated venue in the Salt Lake arts scene, although the studio appears to have been in use by its lucky tenants for some time. Cultivating an aura of cool, winking towards in-the-know exclusivity definitely seems to be important here, even while community is also carefully cultivated. A flurry of vague and heavily curated posts began online at the start of this year, followed by a series of buzzy, ambient-heavy shows highlighting both local and eclectic touring musicians. Most of these shows have been curated by the also-new project “Yardwork Presents,” with which Prymek is also involved. A little bit of diligent online digging led me to identify Ryan Tanner, a local photographer whose work was presented at the only other non-music-centric Atelier Mill show to date, and Matthew Baird as two of the tenants of the space and producers of the Atelier series along with Prymek and others. Moonstone of Memory (not directly curated by Yardwork) was the first foray into dance performance for the series. The next show, titled Cake Face and set for June 15, is a visual art show and vinyl set, presumably with a dance party included. 

Emily Snow has written about dance and art in Salt Lake City for loveDANCEmore since 2016. Her writing has also appeared in 15Bytes. She currently works for Salt Lake City on issues related to public space activation, and is pursuing a graduate degree in City & Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah.

Reducer worked on me

Last night was the inaugural performance of The Woods Dance Project as part of Repertory Dance Theatre’s LINK Series. The show featured three works by Nichele Woods that gave us a sense of her choreographic taste, artistic voice, and aesthetic values, each in unique and clearly defined ways. 

The first work Clear… as a burnt-out match in a dark room was performed by UVU dance students and demonstrated masterful group dynamics, impressive technique, and satisfying changes in texture. The dancers watched each other with an impartial gaze for most of the piece, only really seeing each other towards the end as they returned to their staged places with warm, human qualities and facial expressions. For me, everything in this piece ended right before it was complete and left me wishing for more development of the community relationships.

Photo by Becca Webb.

The second work, Volcano, with music by Michael Wall, was my personal favorite. I got lost in the feeling of unrequited longing and savored the moments that pull was reciprocated even if it wasn’t constant. Natalie Border showed incredibly subtle but poignant emotion in her physicality and her partnering with Jon Kim was a beautiful mix of accent and intimacy. Their close attention to the music slowed down time and turned the work into a trio, with the piano as another partner in the dance. As Jon followed Natalie off stage, I found myself wanting to join them and see the other half of the piece that was surely about the unfold in the wings.

The final work, For Scylla began in the familiar fluid shifts of energy and long lines and arcs that we saw in the previous two pieces but was interrupted by quick percussive strength. As the piece evolved, a sensuous, cautious, brave, animal energy emerged from the group. I enjoyed how the dancers changed characters but still offered the same images of hero and creature, challenge and loss, individual and whole.

Nichele did a great job of introducing herself to the community with this show. Her work has been in Salt Lake for a while, but it was really nice to experience a whole evening in her voice. I learned that she likes to structure her work in vignettes and reprises, she tends toward softness in partnering, and involves the gaze in every movement. While I started to recognize her choreographic patterns by the last piece, they were all used very effectively and contributed to a sense of what Bebe Miller calls “storyness” – where none of the movement expressed specific characterization, but I could sense an underlying narrative in the impressions and interplay of the group. William Peterson’s lighting design added to the sense of theatre, creating a set out of the architecture of the light.

Photo by Becca Webb.

Following the show, my friend and I talked about everything we liked and didn’t like and eventually found ourselves in a conversation about how movement reveals the most core aspects of our humanness, how it strips away all of the frills of our societal characters and reduces us to just what we are: a human in a body. Nichele’s program note states “We are reducing to see more clearly. Lessening… to expand” and ultimately, that process worked on me last night. I would highly recommend catching this show tonight or Saturday (no show on Friday) because it might just do the same for you.

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.

Queer Spectra rides again

The first night of the Queer Spectra Arts Festival began on a high note with DoubleTake by Meagan Bertelsen and Haileigh Larmer. This piece explored tactile movement, with dancers engaging in floor work and touching their bodies. The music by Scott Lippitt and thandii added an upbeat, celebratory, and light-hearted atmosphere to the performance, making it feel like a joyous celebration.

The highlight of the evening was The Marthaodyssey, an embodied dialogue between Martha Graham and Madonna. Far from a parody, this piece cleverly integrated Graham's iconic cupped hands with a Madonna song, creating a performance that was both humorous and thought-provoking. The solo dancer, dressed in a cape and tightie-whities, lip-synced to recordings of Graham discussing dance technique and what makes a good dancer. This creative blend of humor and homage provided a delightful end to the show. 

The Marthaodyssey, photo by Essie Shaw (@essiedolly).

Among the performances, Cael Crosby's poetry readings stood out for their emotional depth and resonance. Another memorable work was the short film Dusk by Khol Avalos Bybee, which impressed with its well-crafted dialogue, striking visuals, and effective use of blue tones, adding a layer of visual poetry to the narrative.

Saturday's performances were equally compelling, starting with One Day I Will Be on Time by Charlotte Stemeyer. The dancers wore eye-catching, sexy Victorian-era costumes adorned with lace, pearls, and corsets. Some sections of the dance were performed without music, with the dancers creating rhythms through clapping and footwork in a group locomotive shape. This innovative approach was visually and auditorily captivating, making the performance stand out.

Creator Destroyer by Chloe Barry was a mesmerizing screendance in which the performers embodied the power and beauty of volcanoes and lava. As a volcanologist, Chloe's deep appreciation for the subject was evident in her performance. The screendance featured video of spewing lava paired with Chloe dancing with a bundle of red string lights, symbolizing lava. The film's editing, which overlaid erupting volcanoes with Chloe's dance, created a stunning visual effect, making it appear as if she was dancing on the volcano itself. Chloe's use of red string lights wrapped around her body added to the mesmerizing imagery, making it look as if she was in direct contact with the flowing lava.

Another standout was Undefinable / Fabrication Together / We Experience by Milo Ono, Edison Corvera, Jordan Reynosa, and Hunter Hazard. This short but impactful dance featured well-executed lifts and choreography. Hunter's music composition complemented the dance beautifully, enhancing the overall performance. A particularly intriguing element was watching the dancers put on clothes from a pile on the ground, adding a layer of spontaneity and creativity to the piece.

Rae Luebbert's screendance Greenware: My Queer Clay Body was another highlight. The film began with text explaining that greenware is clay that has been shaped but not yet fired, setting the stage for the visual and thematic exploration that followed. I felt like I could hear Rae’s voice in the written text, it was very concise and effective. The film featured scattered images and videos of the clay-shaping process, displayed in small squares, which allowed viewers to follow different stages of the process simultaneously. The middle section of the screen was filled with video clips resembling the curved and rounded shapes of the clay, creating a visually cohesive effect. The ending, which combined the sounds of the pottery wheel, the slapping clay, and Rae’s hands shaping the clay, formed a satisfying auditory experience that left a wonderful sensory impression.

The festival concluded with the whimsical and joyful I Feel All Right by Severin Sargent-Catterton and Sophia Heiner. This dance explored the multifaceted nature of love and collective joy without the need for explicit explanation. The joy on the dancers' faces and the playfulness in the choreography were palpable. Set to ABBA’s "Super Trouper," the music choice was perfect, adding to the happy and upbeat atmosphere of the performance. The symmetry of the dance and the dancers’ beautiful technique provided a visually pleasing and emotionally uplifting finale to the festival.

Overall, the Queer Spectra Arts Festival showcased a rich tapestry of performances and artworks that celebrated queer identity through innovative and diverse artistic expressions. Each piece, whether it was dance, film, or poetry, contributed to a vibrant and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be queer in today's world. The festival not only entertained but also challenged and inspired, making it a memorable and significant cultural event.

Shelby Strickler's dance journey began in Baltimore, Maryland. Having graduated with a BFA in Modern Dance from the University of Utah in December 2023, she is a performer and teacher in Salt Lake City, passionately sharing her love for dance.