Public Dance with Molly Heller

In the first of a series of three audio interviews, Halie Bahr discusses working outside during the pandemic and how it’s changing our values around dance making with choreographer Molly Heller, director of Heartland Collective and a professor at the University of Utah.

Link to our SoundCloud Page to hear the full interview.

January Digest: A Conversation with Hughes and Vecchione

This month we speak with Christina Hughes and Angela Vecchione, who founded Hughes and Vecchione Dance Projects during the first few months of the pandemic. This platform has brought our community and viewers across the country online screenings, classes and other opportunities to stay connected to dance. I wanted to talk with them on behalf of loveDANCEmore to learn a little bit more about what they were up to.

– SBH, editor

Angela Vecchione, left and below, Christina Hughes, right and above (courtesy of the artists).

loveDANCEmore: How did you light on this idea of starting a project like this? Christina, at some point early last year, you were considering a move to Canada, no?

Hughes And Vecchione: Prior to the pandemic, Angela & I had already been discussing ways in which we wished we could still perform together. Angela was living in Chicago and I was still in Salt Lake, so we actually had begun composing some movement together via the online realm. Nothing compared to what we do now, but we had shared google folders where we would deposit solo movement phrases that we were planning to assimilate in some way to submit for future performances. Then the pandemic happened and we just thought, “maybe we should keep this up,” and find a way to involve our community through these screens. From that point, we’ve launched into embracing the experimental nature of what we are creating. We’ve tried developing several pillars of our mission to serve our community, offer classes, performances, and collaborative opportunities. It’s all such a learning curve, but I think what is so wonderful about the way we work together is that we really try all the ideas, no matter how overwhelming or intricate they may seem. We’ve found, there is a lot that can come from creating dance on the screen with others.

In regards to Canada, I didn’t have plans to go there specifically, but somewhere close! I had planned to move to Southeast Alaska last year (which is right on the border of Canada). In about a month, I’ll officially be moving there, and continue to grow and involve the HVDP presence on the West Coast.

Christina, you are here in SLC, but Angela, you’re in North Carolina. What’s it like to navigate that? Which community ends up getting the most of your attention? 

The benefit of how we work together is that our friends, collaborators and audiences are all over. The beauty of Hughes and Vecchione Dance Projects is that every single class, performance and event we host lives online. Every step of the process from planning, to choreographing, rehearsing and presenting live streamed performances can be done from any location with wifi. I am living back home in the small town I grew up in and feel fortunate that my family and friends here support online events like ChoreoFest. The biggest challenge we have faced has been converting time zones to be able to map out our schedule; Christina is great about converting everything to EST so I don’t have to! 

What are you most proud of accomplishing in your first nine months operating this venture?

I think our year-long project Configurations Choreofest is something we both agree is both our most time-consuming and our most rewarding work. The Choreofest involves HVDP combining with a new artist or company each month to create a new work which intersects art and technology. At the end of said month with our artist(s) we put on a performance to showcase the work-in-progress.

We have met and collaborated with so many incredible artists through this project, and it’s really challenged our approaches to choreography. Our first ChoreoFest featured Mexico-based artist Faby Guíllen who I had met at the Bates Dance Festival two summers ago. We had an international audience at our show, which felt very rewarding and exhilarating. 

What are you working on right now?

Right now, we are preparing for our second ChoreoFest performance with the Rhode Island-based TEN31 Metamorphosis Dance Company! In addition, we are gearing up to host our first ever summer dance residency in the Hudson Valley, New York. 

Christina, I know you have been teaching dance in schools during the pandemic, what has that been like?

I’ve been teaching in schools, but solely online. It’s been really challenging due to how small my apartment is. I’ve been teaching online for just shy of a year, so at this point, I’ve become accustomed to it. It’s not as daunting as it was in the beginning. Between the work Angela & I do, along with the classes I’m instructing, I’ve learned so much about how our screens can be used to view movement. The kids have adapted really well in my opinion... but, I can’t wait to get back to in-person classes.   

How do you imagine that this venture will evolve if and when the pandemic ever comes under control, or even as circumstances shift in the next few months?

We have used HVDP as a way to flex our creativity muscle, grow and stay connected to our community and push ourselves to experiment with a new style of working. Whatever large scale change the dance industry faces in the coming years, we will adapt and apply the open-minded creative spirit we have developed over the past months to continue evolving with the inevitable change that will come. We both love reconnecting with College of Charleston alumni to collaborate on video projects and take class together. Hopefully that routine will stick and we can continue to dance with our friends even as we all relocate, change career paths or step into new circumstances over time.  

A Farewell Letter

This letter, from frequent loveDANCEmore contributor Emmett Wilson, is a few weeks old. Emmett left Salt Lake just a little while ago to persue dreams of performance and activism in Baltimore and Philadelphia. I have a feeling that, like most of us who are washed away from SLC and its dance scene, Emmett will eventually be washed back. Still, the things they say here are thoughtful and timely. Farewell.

– SBH, editor

Dear ones,

I’ve been avoiding this. This writing around movement of The Movement is like the experience of trying to lick your own elbow — you never see it head on, and can’t quite touch it with the part of yourself that’s equipped to interpret the flavor, and you might not like how it tastes anyway.

A still from the author’s performance, originally at Moab Pride, later shared via Queer Spectra 2020

I just submitted footage of a piece I made last year to be presented at Queer Spectra this year. The piece is called Samuel Beckett Does Drag and I guess it’s ‘about’ muddled moments of performing gender and forgetting who I am in the act of presentation. In the spirit of Queer Spectra’s theme, risk of representation, I feel compelled (and safe?) to say that I was a so-called woman and ‘queerious’ when I moved to Salt Lake 9 years ago and now I finally know (in words!) that I move through the world as a fluid freak with a girly boy flavor and that most aspects of identity are a construct created to silence and kill some and spare others at the hands of a few. 

I’ve always felt most myself when making a breeze with my body. I’m grossly grateful for spaces, such as the physical and digital pages of this journal, in which I’ve gotten to figure myself out, and to be responsible for what I’ve figured out.

Thank you for reading these thoughts in a muddled moment. Thank you to Ya-Ya and Brook for writing into the known unknown with me and gently holding my heart in your presence. This piece is a parting note (to self, and to y’all) as I prepare to move away from Salt Lake as well as an introduction of writing to come from Ya-Ya Fairley and Brook Neilson, all three of us unpacking the movement of this moment in Salt Lake City. We are treading into an ocean of processing how the past exists in the present, politically, personally, and potently, as local and global performers in so many ways. 

Like Ya-Ya has done regularly to connect audiences here in Salt Lake, whether at a dance party, a post performance Q and A, or in a classroom, I invite you to take deep breaths whenever you have a mind (and body) to do so. Inhale and exhale, for real. I invite you to thoroughly think with your whole body, as Brook does, about your position in space right now and take responsibility for what you come up with, own it with care for yourself and those around you. 

A dear mentor of mine, jhon stronks, recently spoke of speaking in circles and I realized that was why I learned so much from this person, this goddess, because I learn and live in circles. Here are some circles on the movement of this moment.  

I am humbly inspired by Audre Lorde’s writing in The Cancer Journals: 

May these words serve as encouragement for other women to speak and act out of our experiences with cancer and with other threats of death, for silence has never brought us anything of worth.

Silence has never brought us anything of worth. You may not get to everyone in breaking the silence, but there is life in volumes heard by those who listen. 

When the plague became ‘real’ in this valley, I wrote: 

‘What is the half life of touch?’ asks a friend who was previously asked by their friend. The harsh light of that question hadn’t dimmed or been reduced to a half life when it reached my touch-famished ears. What sort of dance and body-based artwork is being made and received these days? Asking for a friend, for myself, for the virtual/proverbial people, in a time when close proximity between loved ones can transmit an often asymptomatic virus and the most recent image in my mind of two bodies touching is terribly familiar and state sanctioned, lasting longer than 5 whole minutes and ending lethally. 

Now we know that Derek Chauvin committed murder by kneeling on George Floyd for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. 

When the times’ change, yet history repeats itself, hearing ‘I can’t breathe’ from the lips of Eric Garner to George Floyd and knowing that Anthony Fauci attempted to advise presidential administrations from Reagan’s during the onset of AIDS, to the current administration in response to the novel coronavirus (yes, the very same epidemiologist advising both administrations during public health crises), it is clear that denial is deadly. We are perhaps all weathering the same storm, but it’s turned into a hurricane, and some folks reside in untouched homes at the eye of the storm while others are jailed in the most severe part of the hurricane: the wall around the eye, and they’re right next to each other, yet with vastly different experiences of the storm. 

That was before Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal was brutally murdered by SLCPD. Before the West Bank was annexed by Israel (reminding me to continually think about the American ‘dance world’s’ obsession with Israeli dance, often eclipsing dance happening in other areas of the Middle East), and before Palestinians in this city organized a march that connected so many struggles, invoking the words of Assata Shakur: 

It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

It is our duty to win.

We must love each other and support each other.

We have nothing to lose but our chains. 

Now I think of ‘Being Queer in America’ (and in Utah, specifically!) and David Wojnarowicz’s words are what I would try to say if I hadn’t just read Close to the Knives:

I think my life sometimes has a nightmarish quality about it because of the society in which I live and that society’s almost total inability to deal with this disease with anything other than a conservative agenda…

This is not to co-opt the processing of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but to connect that struggle to that of COVID-19, with Black and Indigenous populations bearing the brunt of the political response to this virus, and to also point out that conservatism exists beyond the republican party. This feels pertinent in the state of Utah whose police forces kill the most Black people in relation to population size (1% of people in Utah are Black, yet 10% of police murder victims are Black). All while liberal city officials commission a mural saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ under the condition that ‘Black lives’ and comrades are peaceful and in the minority. Also while initiating a fundraiser* to ‘help city residents most affected by COVID-19’ as if medical racism and classism were just popping up for the first time because of the virus. 

I think about stories of friends pursuing dance master’s degrees while Black, and of online interactions with past professors in academia, and the beautiful insistence of a peer of mine to ask me to help write a letter to our alma mater dance department confronting how utterly colonized it is. 

We’ll only pivot back to violence if we continue starting every day with ballet and slipping in ‘African Dance’, generally speaking, whenever it makes the institution look ‘diverse’ and ‘healthy’ with a ‘well-balanced’ dance diet. And making queer art without confronting whiteness only erases queer people of color. 

Attending a discussion group to confront anti-Blackness made me realize I rarely encounter the phrase, pro-Black. There it is: PROBLACK. With that I hear what Harlem bookstore owner and civil rights activist, Lewis H. Michaux, said:

Black is beautiful, but Black isn’t power; knowledge is power!

Black is beautiful; knowledge is power; and there is knowledge I have no idea about in Blackness and blackness and in being Black. 

I haven’t seen it yet, but jhon recently put this out there- watch: Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance. One part of decolonizing dance is filling in the plot holes of the stories we were told. 

There is also a film called Quiet Heroes that I have yet to see, but feel like I should reference here because it tells the story of care during crisis. Dr. Kristen Ries and her assistant, Maggie Snyder were the only people ‘In the entire state and intermountain region...serving all HIV/AIDS patients.’ The film is ‘the story of her fight to save the lives of a maligned population everyone else seemed willing to just let die.’ It includes an interview with Ballet West’s Peter Christie, an AIDS survivor. 

A YouTube still of Ballet West dancers performing at a protest in Salt Lake City

I think of the two Ballet West dancers who performed at one of the weekly protests against police brutality called #dancedanceforrevolution. There is something about using the dance of a colonizer to disrupt the norm. The message is clear: ballet can be a useful tool, but what else? I was inspired to witness an unpacking of some of these issues at A Shedding, organized by Dominica Greene. 

This is all to say: keep unpacking and breaking down oppressive institutions, but keep going with the art forms that happen to exist within them. There is so much more to say. Keep moving through this movement, making breezes with your bodies that blow minds and hearts and dusty ideas away. 

With love,

Emmett

Emmett makes performances and is moving away from Salt Lake, so they are now one of those tri-city-dwellers (Houston-Salt Lake-Baltimore). 

Augury, Ancestors, and Apocalypse, UtahPresents brings Dancing Earth

This month, we bring you a look at Dancing Earth’s new digital performance, BTW US CYBERSPACE, from Kathryn Machi, an independent dance writer who has followed the company’s work for a long time. To buy tickets to the UtahPresents presentation, November 20, click here. This performance also includes five preliminary episodes before the final presentation — THEY ARE AVAILABLE STARTING NOVEMBER 10! All photos are courtesy of Dancing Earth and Paulo J. da Rocha-Tavares.

–SBH, editor

The cast of BTW US CYBERSPACE, courtesy of the company and Paulo T.

“For Native peoples around the globe, the Apocalypse arrived centuries ago. Climate Change is the symptom of something many Indigenous people have been experiencing for 500 years.”

– Rulan Tangen

All great artists are visionaries. Rulan Tangen, the artistic director of Contemporary Indigenous theater company, Dancing Earth, and a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, proves the rule in BTW US CYBERSPACE, a virtual dance miniseries created in partnership with the Global Change & Sustainability Center at the University of Utah, in response to colonization, commodification, and climate crisis. Driven by the dynamic visions of young Indigenous leaders and respected Native elders, the ritual performance piece explodes antiquated stereotypes of Natives as relics of the past, fusing tradition with technology as it explores themes of repetition and renewal, genocide and healing, and ancestral knowledge and youthful activism.

In early 2019, Tangen invited Dancing Earth’s extensive Indigenous community into discussions centered on renewing collective ancestral wisdom to address and, hopefully, to avert or ameliorate the impending environmental/social apocalypse. That discussion resulted in BETWEEN UNDERGROUND AND SKYWORLD, the futuristic stage performance which was perfected first as a work-in-progress in January 2020 and set to premiere September 2020 at the newly transformed Presidio Theatre in San Francisco’s historic Presidio.

The COVID-19 lockdown disrupted that trajectory. By spring 2020, all of Dancing Earth’s slated performances had been canceled and core performers were sheltering in place across the Western United States. But with their signature innovation and flexibility, Dancing Earth quickly pivoted from devastation about what they had lost to concern for their communities and how best to serve them; what they, as artists, had to offer their people.

Photo by Paulo T.

For Tangen, “This was, and is, movement.” She, with Dancing Earth’s Social Impact Producer and Bay Area intertribal activist Tísina Ta-till-ium Parker, realized the only way to address the catastrophe of the pandemic, to keep the performers intact, and to expand their vision would be by taking a huge leap into cyberspace. Tangen and Parker met with recent University of Austin computer/dance graduate and virtual reality designer, Azteca Sirias, founder of the Brown Collective, a transdisciplinary platform that researches Indigenous truths and experiences and, especially, the “distinctively revolutionary intersection of dance and computers.” Director, performers, and designers focus on connecting the past with the present and future, with an emphasis on resilience and self-sustainability. As Parker said about the marriage of dance and cyberspace: “The possibilities are endless.”

“We are living in the storyline of this piece. ‘Post-Apocalypse’ or maybe, right in the heart of it. My creative process has been engaging with this reality. As I film, I pray. I pray for an end to the violence against Indigenous life. I pray for a re-balancing of the human’s relationship with all of Creation.”

– Dakota Camacho, dancer, Urban Arts and Hip Hop Scholar

As an antidote to apocalyptic injustices, BTW US CYBERSPACE goes to the source to create new rituals that integrate and connect the community and others to a more balanced and mutually respectful way of living within the cosmos. The dancers, designers, and editors expand the narrative in weekly virtual group rehearsals, inhabiting, digesting, and responding to dramatic, traumatic weather patterns and social injustice events. The dancers celebrate Indigenous sustainability technology -- the power of the sun, moon, constellations, and other energy sources -- which designer Sirias, using avant-garde media technology, artfully and passionately weaves with current urgencies around renewable energy and resource depletion.

Photo by Paulo T.

Improvising in their own homelands with the natural world around them, six core dancers -- Dakota Camacho, Natalie Benally, Lumhe Sampson, Kayla Banks, and Raven Bright -- film themselves as they enact a journey quest for ancestral wisdom, discovering the physical, social, and spiritual survival tactics of pre- and post-apocalypse. After learning and sharing their individual gifts, each quester “dreams into being” a reimagined realm of connection, integration, interdependence, and balance. Viewers of BTW US are treated to a brave new future as mesas and canyons, oil pumps and waterways, constellations and the sunrise prayers of a Havasupai elder meld with the DIY dancer-filmmakers’ embodied visions of a livable, compassionate, and redemptive future. The virtual reality miniseries BTW US CYBERSPACE begins streaming four episodes on November 5, culminating in a live, virtual performance and “Reflection Pool” with the artists on November 20. Online content, including behind-the-scenes videos for early ticket buyers, will be available through November 30.

Award-winning screenwriter and San Francisco native Kathryn Machi, MFA, writes upbeat, feminist, and culturally diverse stories for international audiences ages 10 to 110. Her feature screenplays and TV series have been developed and optioned through Sundance Co//ab; the Community of Screenwriters at Squaw Valley; the California Film Institute; Mar Vista Entertainment in Los Angeles, and Nuit Blanche Productions in Montreal.

A master holistic arts practitioner, nurturing touch instructor, and erstwhile modern and Carnaval dancer, Kathryn’s stories are grounded in the arts, spirit, food, family, community, and social justice. An enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and a dual U.S./French citizen, Kathryn has two grown children and lives with her chef husband on the foggy western edge of the City.

A Shedding Conversation

Almost two months ago, an incredible performance took place in a backyard on the west side of Salt Lake City. Dominica Greene (who you may know from Ririe-Woodbury) and Courtney Mazeika (who you may know from SALT) created A Shedding as “a donation-based, socially-distanced, outdoor evening of live performance created by and for Black, LGBTQIA+, Artists of Color, and allies in the Salt Lake community.” It took place behind Courtney’s house in Salt Lake’s Glendale neighborhood. A list of local antiracist resources which accompanied the program can be found here.

The gathering “offer[ed] up the space for those involved to mourn, address, discuss, and celebrate our experiences both individually and collectively, including offerings by local movement artists, a guided post-performance conversation, and a collection of resources for actionable steps towards supporting antiracist principles and BIPOC rights.”

I think this performance and the conversations it started about race, queerness and art making in our current moment are important. (Full disclosure: I had a bit part in one of the pieces, Alex Barbier’s Sometimes Dance is Bullshit.) As loveDANCEmore editor, I didn’t want A Shedding to go unremarked. So I invited a few people over to my backyard, which luckily has ample space for social distance, to continue the conversation. What follows is a transcribed discussion between two brilliant artists who saw the evening: Gabby Huggins (a teaching artist with SpyHop) and Daniel Do (also an RDT dancer). The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. The photos below are courtesy of Tori Duhaime, who, along with Jo Blake, moderated the post-performance talkbacks at Courtney’s home.

– SBH, editor

A press image from the A Shedding online program by Dominique Greco

loveDANCEmore: Can you start by telling us what brought you to see A Shedding?

Daniel Do: I came to A Shedding through Dominica [Greene]. She had been talking about wanting to bring dance to a non-traditional proscenium stage. We were actually in Courtney’s backyard and we thought, “this place is beautiful, we should create a show here.” It had to have been before coronavirus. We weren’t wearing masks. [Daniel was a volunteer for one of the performances, mopping the stage down between acts.]

Gabby Huggins: I came to A Shedding because a friend of mine, who is a dancer as well, sent me the RSVP. It was really wonderful to see the content of that work in that space, and in that neighborhood. It was a very meaningful place for me to be, personally, and the work just made that experience deeper. 

A Shedding happened in Glendale and I grew up in Rose Park. It’s weird to be in a place in my life where I want to be able to afford housing in that neighborhood. Given all the conversation about gentrification, it’s interesting to be at a white person’s house in Glendale. At the same time, a lot of the gentrifiers that I know are people who are young artists, who I think have some sort of awareness of their impact on that space. In that sense, it was cool to see white space relinquished to POC and queer performance. 

Growing up here, I was really lucky to have a dance community at West High School, where Hilary Carrier taught. It was very clear when we would go to the annual UDEO conference: no company is like ours. We had a diverse company and even the kids who were white in our company were weird, white, queer kids. “Alt” children in this sea of white, Mormon, drill team and contemporary dancer companies. In general, I don’t think that the arts community here in Salt Lake feels like a space for POC or queer people. That exclusionary nature made this event, which centered POC and queer bodies, feel really empowering and reflective.

Daniel: I actually grew up in Glendale, so, the venue was really close to my childhood home, though I don’t really go to that area anymore. My family moved out to West Valley when I was in sixth grade. I also feel very lucky that I went to a really diverse high school and was on the dance company there and, yeah, you’d go to these conferences and see the stark differences between companies. And I feel that most of the people who were on my dance company either started dancing in high school or in junior high through the public education system and there were very few of us that actually went to a studio growing up. I feel very grateful to have found dance by taking it as an elective. It felt like home, being in that space. There’s a lack of events like this happening in the Salt Lake community, and I had been blind to that.

Gabby: There’s something unique about seeing other people of color dancing, even if I’m not going to become friends with them. It’s important to find that they’re real, especially here. It’s sad to think that there is a community of POC, queers, dancers, artists here and that we’re just not organized. We’re not around each other.

That’s why I appreciated A Shedding. It was an intentional organizing of POC queer artists together. Existimos does this too — they take the different silos that we exist within and bring us together so that we can have a coalition of POC queer artists.

I think a lot of people watch dance and ask themselves, “What the fuck is this? I don’t understand,” because dance is often built to be exclusive. A Shedding was accessible to a broader swath of the community. It was a powerful evening, I started crying. 

loveDANCEmore: Which piece made you cry?

Gabby: Dominica [Greene’s piece Fitting/Standing] really fucked me up — the repetitive motions. It was about cooning and shucking and jiving. I felt it so deeply. It was so indicative of what the entire show is about and why we’re all here watching this work. But also, as a Black person in this place, all the time, I feel like that’s a performance. A really shitty fucked up performance that’s exhausting.

Dominica Greene’s work Fitting/Standing, made satirical use of steps from Grease, and featured music from the film as well as "Tezeta (Nostalgia)" by Ethiopian jazz great Mulatu Astatke.

Daniel: Trying to please the white man, essentially. Or thinking, “tell me that I’m worth it, or I’m just like you.” Why am I trying so hard to be like you? I think it’s reflective of growing up in a community that’s so predominately white. You feel like you are the odd man out and instead of owning that, for me personally, I felt myself wanting to blend in and do whatever it took to fit in. I sensed that in Dom’s solo. She was doing these moves, trying to execute them perfectly to get some kind of validation.

Gabby: Right, while the work and the moves themselves are reinforcing ideas about you as a POC inherently, anyway. You’re doing these moves, you’re shucking and jiving, it’s reinforcing that you’re different. It was very simple, but there was so much pain in it. 

Daniel: Laja’s piece really resonated with me as well because I see myself in her shoes, having that conversation and seeing how far that conversation can escalate was really interesting. Whenever I’ve been asked “where are you from, or, where are you from from?” I just politely answer and move on. But no — what if I actually challenge you and ask you why you’re phrasing the question that way? Obviously, I know what you’re trying to get at. I feel like now, I’m gonna make them work. If they want to know more, they have to tell me why they want to know more. 

Laja Fields’ solo We’ve All Seen It unfolded both sides of an uncomfortable conversation between a self-righteous (white) homeowner and a (racially-ambiguous) newcomer to the neighborhood. Fields deftly portrayed both roles.

Gabby: I’ve known Laja for a long time. It was funny to realize that she is racially ambiguous to some people — to me Laja is white. It was interesting to watch someone that I know is white processing that “otherness.” I’ve never thought of her having to deal with that question, “Where do I belong?”

Daniel: I’m one-hundred-percent Vietnamese and I fully lean into that identity. Entering the Salt Lake City queer scene has been an interesting journey. I meet a lot of biracial gay men who are totally leaning into their whiteness, to the point where I feel like they’re trying to erase their “otherness.” It’s been an interesting world to navigate. I think Masio Sangster’s piece, F@@GT!, touched on that a bit too. He pushed himself in his solo to talk about what being a queer man is like and what that journey has been like for him, and being fetishized.

I just loved all of the queerness he was exploring — there was some drag in there. It felt very personal. I felt very honored to be able to witness him exploring his faggotry.

Masio Sangster explores identity in F@@GT!

Gabby: I loved this piece. I thought it was a great way to come back from intermission. It made me think of a friend of mine. A very specific experience of gay maleness. Mase talked the whole time, so, it was almost a monologue. He very directly addressed race and queerness. It relates to what you talked about earlier, Daniel, your experience of being a gay man here, and watching other brown or biracial men not be brown because they’re gay. He really addressed that. “Am I too brown, do they not like me?” It was very straightforward but super celebratory. It was a really lovely cap to the second half, in contrast to Mar [Undag}’s much quieter opening.

Daniel: I’ve known and loved Mar for a long time, and I was left feeling so proud. He’s a beautiful singer and he rarely shares his voice with anyone. The fact that he sang a song in Tagalog was just, like, wow! He really inspires me because he’s so proud to be Filipino. 

Mar Undag in midnight musings (work in progress).

Gabby: It felt celebratory, but not in a showy way. A celebratory exploration of self, like I had a window into a part of this person – his ethnicity, his heritage – that seems really important to him. It was a nice opener, very grounding. It was also very sweet, very tender. 

What about Sometimes Dance is Bullshit [choreographed by Alex Barbier]? I love the “sometimes.” I love this piece. I just have so many questions, why the suit? Louisiana [where Alex grew up]? The camouflage? 

Daniel: I loved the fun that was made of classic dance moves. It still hits me, when [they] prepped for the pirouette and just did the clapping and the fouettés — that shit — it’s so clear in my head. I almost fell out of my chair, you can just relate to that so hard. 

Gabby: I guess I want to also put this piece in the context of the evening. I think it’s so interesting that Alex chose to critique dance as an art form, as a queer POC person, the thing [she was] lampooning was the art form [she’s] using. Dance is also everything. Amazing. Important. Beautiful. Fun. And so there are so many moments where — the grooving, again so funny to me —it’s cutting, but hilarious…

Daniel: I’m glad it was explored. 

Gabby: The lampooning isn’t about the art form, it’s about the people and structures around it! I appreciate the critique.

Alexandra Barbier’s duet entitled Sometimes Dance is Bullshit.

Daniel: I’ve been talking to my therapist about this. Because we’re starting to categorize what is essential. And I am wondering? Is dance essential? I’ve been grappling with that idea. My job was not seen as essential. I was on unemployment for sometime before I was able to go back with RDT. It just makes me question if it is this thing to be fun and explored, but also, there is a lot of importance and value people gain from dance. With every thing there are two sides, or more…

Gabby: Sometimes there are seventeen sides.

Daniel: It was refreshing to see the other side. Sometimes I think wow, I can’t believe there are so many people right now who don’t have a job and I do. It’s me going in to dance and to rehearse something I don’t even know if will get to perform.

I was impressed with the vulnerability that the younger artists in A Shedding decided to embark on. It made me reflect on myself and what I was creating at that age. It felt like there were a lot of things that Harlie [Heiserman] was trying to explore [in their work excerpts from Tuesday], and it reminded me of myself at that age — of wanting to say so much in my work. I felt the same about Mase’s piece. I saw youthfulness. 

Harlie Heiserman in their solo excerpts from Tuesday.

Gabby: I found myself laughing out loud with them. They were laughing on stage, and my friends and I all started laughing too. Harlie’s piece exemplifies the idea of A Shedding being a showing and not a performance, because you’re right, they were exploring so many different aspects of their personality. The costume changes were really interesting. The movement felt like a morning routine. I was thinking about tropes and motifs: rinse and repeat. This routine of exploration, back and forth across the stage. It was expressive and intimate…

Then there was Courtney Mazeika’s piece, Not One Thing.

Daniel: Her body is insane — what it can do. The physicality of her solo was what really resonated with me. I was like, “Ow. Why are you putting yourself through that?” In a way, it’s similar to what Dom was exploring and putting herself through. I was just on the edge of my seat that whole solo. Wow, what are you going to do next?

Gabby: I would be so interested to know what people were thinking and feeling — how they would describe their own work. I think there’s so much discomfort in Courtney’s piece and then she kept going — why are you doing this? — oh, that looks so uncomfortable! There were points where it’s clear she doesn’t want to. 

To me, it resonated as the constant process of making consolations. You’re not doing it for yourself, you’re doing it for someone else. I think you’re really spot on, Daniel, in connecting it to Dominica’s piece. 

Daniel: That’s interesting, because they’re the curators, too. You point out the moments when you saw her discomfort. Maybe that’s a commentary on the discomfort of the subjects that are being talked about right now. In a way, connecting to an earlier conversation we had — doing the work.

Gabby: The context of the show was about centering QTPOC people, however those things intersect. When I think about Courtney’s piece specifically, the recognition of the conciliations — I think it’s interesting that your bring up doing the work.

Not One Thing (work always in process), a solo by Courtney Mazeika, who co-organized and hosted A Shedding.

Dominica’s piece made me cry, and it seems like Courtney’s piece was sort of about the same sort of idea, but I didn’t cry, because she’s white? And, so, then I was thinking, but there’s queerness here, and womanhood here, so there are points of access for me, and then still somehow it feels very localized to her experience. I’m glad that there’s recognition there, that it can somehow cross-pollinate, but I do think you making the connection between those two pieces is interesting. It goes to show we see other people and see ourselves in other people. It’s interesting that you’re an openly queer person — queer in a way that I’m not — and yet we’re both attaching it to her whiteness, maybe because we’re both POC?

Maybe something I was thinking was, “this is about queerness.” But even talking to you about it, that something that’s still not quite a lynchpin for you. 

Daniel: I was definitely thinking that and I’m glad you said it out loud. 

Gabby: I also want to say, one thing I really appreciated about this showing was that it started with a queer POC person. And I appreciate the way it was laid out. There’s a weird “Olympics” situation happening — and the context of George Floyd and COVID made it more relevant — but there’s something about it being queer folks, then queer POC folks and then queer Black women, and then — and I don’t think Ursula [Perry] identifies as a queer person, I don’t know — but, the structure was interesting to me, the way people were centered and the things you were left with closer to the end. Even Ursula being last as a dark-skinned Black woman was super important and powerful to me. 

Ursula’s [work-in-progress, to matter] was, from my perspective, the most classical, it felt like something you could watch in an auditorium. I think the themes I took away were also straightforward — striving, falling, gaining — a lot of struggle present in her work. 

I really do think watching a dark-skinned Black woman dancing in that way was a powerful way to end A Shedding. It goes back to what I said about the intention of the show. 

The show felt like it was supposed to be about queer and POC people but it actually felt like a show about Black people to me. I just feel like the blackness in those pieces — something about the context of what’s happening is related to blackness. 

In some ways, maybe the queerness gets lost, across the board. Not that Ursula’s experience has to reflect that. Her being the last piece was important to me, and it sort of erases this queerness that was happening. Does that make sense at all, what I am trying to say?

It’s not a critique, even. It’s just an observation. But I think it’s interesting, the choice to frame a showing in queer and POC contexts. But there weren’t a lot of moments where blackness and queerness coalesced together. And that’s not a problem. Alex [Barbier] is queer. Dominica {Greene} is a queer person.

The ending with Ursula did feel very powerful and important, but I also think that it leans the entire show — and maybe I’m wrong to view it cohesively — but it leaves me with a specific attention to a specific identity.

Daniel: I am curious if it’s because of what’s happening in the world. I wonder if A Shedding had happened after the Pulse shooting in Florida, how that would have framed the conversation and our viewing of A Shedding. 

Having worked with Ursula, knowing her intimately, a lot of her recent work falls under an umbrella of healing — from trauma in the past. I think I’m seeing that as a recurring theme. Hearing her talk about moments in the solo reflected the challenges she overcomes at work. I’ve seen her face some of that, so It was fascinating for me to watch. 

A Shedding should happen again. Period. 

Ursula Perry in her solo to matter which closed the evening.

Trung “Daniel” Do was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah and received his BFA in Modern Dance from the University of Utah. He relocated to Portland, Oregon where he collaborated and performed with various project based companies before being offered a contract with Repertory Dance Theatre. He is now on his third season with the company and also serves as Assistant Director to project-based company, Cat + Fish Dances. 

Gabriella Huggins, multi-media arts producer and former modern dancer, works as Community Programs Mentor at Spy Hop Productions. A Salt Lake City native, Gabriella is pursuing an undergraduate BSW degree and hopes to apply her education to working on issues of food justice, environmental racism, and trauma-informed therapy. Gabriella enjoys long naps, cold beers, and working with young people in her community.

One Artist's View of the Pandemic

This month we hear from dancer and arts administrator Efren Corado. Many readers will  remember Efren from his six seasons as a performer with Repertory Dance Theater or his independent work as choreographer (including several appearances in loveDANCEmore events). Efren now works for Salt Lake County. This spring, his job in arts administration shifted to the role of a front-line health worker. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

— Samuel Hanson, editor

loveDANCEmore: You contacted me after reading an email I sent to past contributors. I was  looking for writers to cover some upcoming performances — both in-person and digital — planned for the next few weeks here in Salt Lake, Ogden and elsewhere around the state. 

Efren Corado: Yes, looking at artists in the community presenting work in the middle of a pandemic — I perceive it as a concerning trend — as concerning period. I don’t see how it’s different than those trying to expedite the reopening of schools and those looking to expedite the reopening of other community resources, that, ultimately push for larger group gatherings when there are simply greater needs at this point — the need to contain the virus. 

When I think about supporting performances right now, I think about one question: is this necessary right now?

And then I follow that up with a second question: what are you trying to say in the middle of a pandemic? 

And I know that there are so many other social factors — the political climate and the social change. But, when we really focus on the idea that artists in the community are investing in providing live shows, who is it for? It’s for their friends — because let’s be real —when you’re looking at young artists or artists in general right now — as has always been the case — you always perform for your friends or for people who are like-minded. You hardly ever see opportunities for these shows to be disseminated to underserved communities aside from arts-outreach programs. 

So, having been in the front lines of this COVID-effort, I wonder if that really is the best option right now for us as a community. And, do you really want to be a part of a system that begins to normalize the situation we are in right now? I would say, right now, maybe your show is not the best option. 

Efren dancing before the pandemic, photo by Sharon Cain.

Maybe the best option is to reach out to those organizations that are serving the communities that are impoverished, that are distributing food to families on a daily basis, who are looking at providing health care resources like COVID-19 hotspot testing to underserved communities. I think that if we were looking at artists wanting to participate in public health, for the time being, a show is the most pretentious thing to undertake. Especially when you’re looking at live performances where you’re asking people to gather. You see other organizations that are trying to do a digital component where performances are live-streamed and I feel like that is a better outlet than trying to have people come in and perform live. 

I just don’t see the need for it right now.

Do you want to take a little about what you’ve been doing since the pandemic began and what you were doing before? The last time loveDANCEmore spoke to you, you were finishing your last season with RDT.

Towards the end of March, I was concluding my hours as a program coordinator for the county. I was redeployed to work with the Health Department to support a first responders’ program for homeless community members who needed to quarantine, either because they were COVID-positive or as their results were pending. I’ve been doing that for the last four or five months now. It hasn’t been one of the best choices that I’ve ever made. It has informed me so much about the job I was doing before, which was to reach underserved communities and give them tickets to go see shows for free. 

Now, I am looking at all of these individuals eye-to-eye and it has become more apparent to me as an arts advocate that in order for the community-at-large to see the arts as a part of public health, that artists need to be at the front line. Artists need to see and hear the stories themselves, especially if they are creating work claiming that it’s “for the community.” Right now, the community has much greater needs. 

And I understand that there’s always the argument that the arts help lift spirits and make you feel that there’s hope in the world. There’s also hope when you see people out there volunteering and lending a helping hand. 

Do you think this will change your work as an artist or an administrator even after the pandemic?

Yes, I am making a shift from being an active artist and creative to doing more arts administration. For me, it has provided the opportunity to see that when I am speaking to administrators around the county, or city council members, or anybody else who has any authority over the programs I run, there is a different system we can use to integrate live performance into public health.

I am no longer interested in seeing the arts as just “arts and culture.” How can we see the arts as a part of the public health system? Art is not just about individual personality or creative processes or teaching adults, or teaching children. 

How can we look at the organizations that are currently running in Salt Lake City — including those that have been going for as much as fifty years — and find a way of incorporating live performance as a part of social rehabilitation and social integration for communities that — I wouldn’t identify them as “vulnerable,” any more, but rather “excluded” — you know, rehabilitations services to those with addiction, mental health disorders etcetera.

So, for me, I am trying to connect the two. It’s no longer enough to say that “I am offering somebody a master class.” It’s no longer enough to offer a ticket to a free show. It’s about how to listen to the mission of these aid organizations and see how they could be supported by the work I do while still also centering the arts. It’s drawing a different connection. 

Lauren Curley and Efren Corado Garcia, in Gotheiner's Dabke for RDT. Photo by Ismael Arrieta.

What would you like to see your peers doing besides the trend toward performances that seems to concern you?

I work with all these public health professionals and all of these students that are using COVID-response as a way of finishing their studies. We have other employees coming from public library programs, parks and rec, arts and culture — together we’re serving this larger community that is often neglected as a part of public health services. We are now making much greater connections about how all these things intertwine. Presenting yourself is vital — I would recommend spending the twenty or thirty hours you’d spend making these dance pieces that are being performed now volunteering serving the larger community instead. 

Even institutions like Repertory Dance Theater, Ririe-Woodbury, the Symphony, they’re not out there creating performances right now. [Editor’s note: This information was correct on the date this interview was conducted. Since then, Utah Symphony and Opera, RDT and Ririe-Woodbury have all announced in-person seasons for the fall.] They’re kind of at a standstill because they see the need for a hold. So, I know that there is probably a need for younger artists to feel that they have a voice in the social changes that are going on, and it’s not that there shouldn’t be room for that — just maybe not right now. I think that it matters that we see artists be a part of this public heath effort — a part of trying to make the situation better — distributing meals or trying to figure out how community members are being unfairly treated. 

We’re about to see a wave of evictions and even greater levels of poverty rising around the community. I don’t know if putting on a show in the backyard for two hundred of your closest friends is one of the things that is going to make community members feel like there is a better tomorrow. 

Of course, many artists themselves might be at risk for eviction. Do you think there are ways for artists to get paid to do some of that work right now? Is that even the right question to be asking?

There are opportunities for that to take place. There are a lot of county resources. There are a lot of minority-advocacy groups that are looking for public health employees, looking to reach out to diverse communities — whether we’re talking about ethnicity or another way of identifying differently than the norm. Artists should reach out and see how they can be a part of that. A lot of the students that are a part of this right now, some of them started because they needed volunteer hours and now they’re hired — newly employed in the midst of the pandemic. 

So even though we have these needs for artists too — because they may also be at risk for being booted out of their homes — how can we be a part of a system of support? You know, and it’s obviously complicated, but you can reach out to those public health organizations. They need our help. Even if it’s a matter of starting off as a volunteer, you’re still fighting for your own cause — not being booted from your home, figuring out how to make systemic change. Maybe people are already doing it. But I just see all these shows popping up and I just say, why? What do you have to say right now? 

I post on my social media whenever I volunteer for hotspot testing. Nobody’s replying. Nobody’s saying, “yeah, I’ll help the community I am trying to represent as an artist.” It’s not just because they don’t like me! Its because they don’t want to do it. 

Repertory Dance Theatre's Efren Corado in Zvi Gotheiner's Dabke. Photo by Sharon Kain.

Who would you call first, if you were a dancer looking to volunteer?

Neighborhood Partners, Communidades Unidas… The County Health department is working with the Asian-Pacific Coalition, the African American Caucus — all of these different organizations are playing a role. The list goes on.

Can we do more that just giving a “like” or a “share”? Can we step up and actually volunteer, even if it’s just one day? These people are working fifty to ninety hours a week! Fifty to ninety hours a week is a lot for any individual. They’re struggling because no one is stepping up to help. And if we have all of these artists in the community that are saying “Let me help change in the community” This is an opportunity to say, “I was a part of the change and I continue to be a part of the change” — even as an artist, even if you’re not a social worker or a public health administrator.

Thank you for your work and for taking the time to share your story and your perspective. 

Queer Spectra in 2020

This spring, I asked our then-intern Cameron Mertz, an undergraduate dance student at the University of Utah, to conduct an interview with someone making work in our community. She chose to talk to some of the founders of Queer Spectra, an annual festival here in Salt Lake that will celebrate its second iteration this September 5-6 —- all online due to the pandemic. The founders of Queer Spectra are: Dat Nguyen (now in Vietnam), Emma Sargent, Aileen Norris and Max Barnewitz. The interview has been condensed for clarity.

— Samuel Hanson, editor

Cameron Mertz: In your words could you briefly describe what Queer Spectra is?

Aileen Norris: Yeah, so Queer Spectra started in January 2019, and the initial idea was to have a festival that encompasses all mediums of art through the lens of queer artists. So, you know regardless of race, age, background, ethnicity, practice of arts, we just wanted a place where all of those different perspectives could commune and come together.

Emma Sargent: I agree with that. Another major goal of Queer Spectra is that… I feel like I personally have tended to stay within my own smaller arts community, a very insular world of dance. And I wanted — we wanted — to meet new people from other arts communities, like painters and photographers, people doing different types of performance, people who might not normally show work within the same space. We wanted to create a space to show different types of work in the same venue for the purpose of seeing how certain types of art inform other types of art. We can get a better picture of queer peoples’ artistic practices if we put different types of art in the same room and all become part of the same conversation.

Aileen: So then, the festival, coming in with zero background, takes place over a day and last year we had two performance slots, lots of gallery space, a couple workshops and some Q & A sessions. So, just a way to engage with the work in a lot of different ways, I guess.

Alex Barbier delivers the keynote at last year’s festival

Cameron: I was wondering how Queer Spectra was born? Where the idea and inspiration came from and how it all came together.

Emma: I was in a rehearsal with Dat Nguyen, who is one of our original founders. We were just chatting and Dat said to me, “Hey, we should make a queer dance festival. We should get a lot of our fellow queer dance makers together to show work together.” I was excited about that premise because I find that the field of dance is sometimes perceived as being really heteronormative. We don’t get to see a lot of queer stories, at least in dance that gets a lot of attention and funding. This is perhaps informed by my experience growing up in Salt Lake City, specifically, because I don’t know what it’s like so much in other cities. We were just talking about this and Dat eventually said, “Why are we limiting this to dance? We should involve people from lots of different art forms.” Dat just brought it up to me in a rehearsal...

Queer Spectra press image

Aileen: And then it came up in a dinner conversation as well.

Emma: Yeah, we were all there, the four of us: Dat, Aileen, and I, and Max Barnewitz, who is the fourth founding member. So we were all just hanging out together, having dinner or something, and Dat asked all of us to help support this festival. So it was sort of Dat’s initial idea, and then Dat invited the other three of us to organize it with him.

Aileen: And the great thing about Dat is that he’s a big dreamer, but then he backs that up by doing it. So he was like, “Let’s do this,” as soon as we were all like “Yeah we’re in it,” he’s like “Okay X, Y, and Z need to happen within a week,” and it happened. We were planning and we got everything lined up pretty fast and it was really magnificent to have him because I feel like, as artists, we have grand hopes and ideas that come up pretty frequently but we don’t always execute them, but Dat kind of held us accountable in that way and that was really wonderful.

Jordan Simmons and Elisa Tappan performing in 2019

Emma: We were trying to figure out when to host the festival and we were like, “Oh it’d be really fun to do it around the pride season,” but that was so soon; it was only about three months away. Then we were like, “Let’s do it anyway!” So we just threw together this call for submissions and tried to get it out as quickly as we could, to as many sources as we could, and then we started working on the logistical needs of a festival.

Cameron: So, what do you and the team look for in works that are accepted? What aspects are most important to you? Aileen: I mean, the only qualifying thing is that the artist is queer. But we’re not going to research them and be like, “Ah, you’re not queer enough,” so, we kind of ask that people self-select in that regard. But then beyond that, I think we’re really interested in whether there’s a theme that fits with our theme and, if it doesn’t, what is compelling about it?

Emma: So this year our theme is “the risk of representation.” In our application, we are asking our artists questions like, “What are the risks that you take when you explicitly represent someone’s identity in your art, and what are the risks if you don’t represent identity in your art?” — like if someone’s art is a little more abstract, and not explicitly evoking ideas of identity. The theme is pretty loose-ended, sort of intentionally. We don’t want to be prescriptive with a theme; we want artists to think about how the theme might relate to what they’re already creating.

Aileen: I think as a team we are also very interested in works that challenge us or that we might not immediately resonate with because we do want to create discourse and discussion. So, obviously we don’t want anything that’s hate speech or anything like that, but we do want a diversity of perspectives and applicants and forms as well. We talk about how ya know, we have a lot of connections to the dance world, we don’t want it to only be dance, so that’s kind of the more holistic look at how we try and approach submissions. But honestly, we’re just sort of art geeks, so we want to see whatever is out there.

Cameron: The next question I have for you two is, how have your goals and intentions for the festival evolved since the inaugural year?

Aileen: I think our second year, our expectations have gotten a lot higher because our first year it was really just, “is this going to be just us and five other people in this large space?” But, ya know, we got an overwhelming amount of applicants and a ton of audience members participated, so now we’re looking at how we can be effective, not only through the festival but through our participation in our communities throughout the year.

Emma: We just recently went and did a small presentation at UMOCA for “Out Loud,” a program that they have for LGBTQ teenagers who make art.

Attendees participate in a workshop at last year’s festival

Aileen: We participated in the Salt Lake Unity Fest back in December, so that’s definitely one of our goals. We are also working towards becoming a non-profit this year, which is a huge administrative goal. It’s more technical and legal and isn’t necessarily like, this abstract art thing that maybe we like to live in a little bit more, but it opens a lot of doors as far as funding goes. We are trying to find that while still maintaining the integrity of the festival which really is to protect this art and show the value in it and not detract from that with all of these legal things; still finding that support.

Emma: I think the goal for this year’s festival is actually quite similar to that of last year’s, to me. I think it was really cool to go in with this experimental attitude of, “What happens when we put different artists with different approaches in the same room?” And I think that for this year I am still interested in asking that question and seeing what happens. Because I know that the result is going to be different.

Aileen: It’s exciting to think about. Obviously, our submissions haven’t closed yet so we don’t know the lineup. But even getting to think about it, makes me buzzy. [At this point submissions have in fact closed — click here to see a list of 2020 artists.]

Emma: I think one goal that I have, that was initially Max’s idea, is having more of a collective type of format for the festival, so that year-round we could provide spaces for people to show things on a smaller scale, or even have events for artists from different mediums to come into the same room and be making art in the same room. And opportunities to set up collaborations. So that is a future goal for me.

Cameron: Well, my next question kind of goes along with becoming a non-profit and this interdisciplinary collaborative work, I was going to ask, do you have any other hopes for the festival in the future?

Aileen: Just finding new ways to support our artists. We don’t want to be the type of festival — not that this isn’t a valid model but — we don’t want our artists to come in, show their work for a day and then never have any communication with us again or any opportunity for us to provide any sort of support system. So we are also working towards, in the future, having more financial support for our artists. We’re announcing that we are going to be opening up two $75 scholarships for artists for travel or paying dancers or material costs. So growing that kind of accessibility because the reality of art is that it can sometimes be a very privileged place to be in so we are trying to find ways to break down those boundaries.

Emma: This year we are doing a one-day festival again, but I think it would be cool to do a two-day or three-day festival in the future or to just see how we could grow the festival programming in that way.

Aileen: We definitely struggle because we loved the intimacy of the first festival even though there was a lot of people and a lot of artwork, it still felt very communal and special in that way. So, we’re trying to figure out how we could grow, make it a two-day or three-day festival, support more audience membership while still creating that safe space where everyone feels like they’re involved and they’re a part of it. But yeah, that’s definitely us dreaming big.

Cameron: I have one last question. If you could choose one word to describe the essence of Queer Spectra what would it be and why?

Aileen: I would say magical. You know there are all these technical, logistical aspects that we work on as a committee but there’s something that’s pretty indescribable about seeing it all come to fruition. Just seeing people wanting to participate whether it’s artists or donors — you know, we have this workshop coming up where someone is generously donating their time and expertise to us as a fundraiser. It’s really inspiring to see all of that in a way that almost doesn’t feel real.

Emma: I would say my word is joyous. I think that in queer communities or LGBTQ communities there is a really understandable tendency to focus on struggle, or to have to rally around the hardship and oppression and discrimination and trauma that some LGBTQ people face, especially in our current political climate nationally. I think that often in queer spaces, there’s a lot of processing of hard things that happens. I think that it’s equally important to recognize that silliness and joy and laughter are also qualities that take a specific form in the queer community, and that there’s a lot of playfulness that is inherent to the identity of queerness. Queer people are really good at supporting each other — in our full versions of ourselves that are complicated. We get to work on hard things together and then we get to celebrate and be open and carefree. It’s not that all the art at the last festival was revolving around those themes of positivity or joy, because we definitely had some art that focused on darker or more complex themes. As queer artists, we get to cathartically work through the darkness and then emerge out of the darkness into the light.

Cameron Mertz, in addition to being the loveDANCEmore Spring 2020 intern, was named a University of Utah College of Fine Arts Outstanding Senior for the 2020-21 year. You can read more about her fantastic accomplishments here.

Remembering Kay Clark

On May 28, Repertory Dance Theater announced that “Kay Clark passed away on Wednesday, May 27, 2020.”

The announcement continues:

Kay Clark was one of the founding members of Repertory Dance Theatre. In 1966, Kay and seven other dancers were invited by the Rockefeller Foundation to embark on a “bold experiment” to develop the first successful modern dance repertory company. As an impeccable dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director, Kay helped create an organization that became acclaimed nationally and internationally and developed into a resource center for contemporary dancers, choreographers, visual artists, writers, and composers. 

In 1976, Kay became Co-Artistic Director of RDT, a position she held until 1983. Her dedication to dance, her strong work ethic, organizational skills, and enormous talent left a legacy that continues to inspire the RDT organization. Audience members will remember Kay’s beautiful long blonde hair and her dazzling technique. [RDT Artistic Director] Linda C. Smith will remember Kay’s strength and determination. “Kay set high standards for RDT and believed in its mission with all her heart and soul. She influenced thousands of dancers. I was just one of the people whose life was changed by our beautiful Artistic Princess.”

A statement about the (arts) economy

The past couple weeks have seen a flurry of virtual activity in response to what has happened physically in streets. Arts organizations — like businesses, religious organizations and elected bodies — have made declarations on race and equity, critiqued their own past and present wrongs, and have made efforts to amplify the voices of artists and critics of color.

These are important activities — and obviously none of them are sufficient. I hope to be held accountable by my peers to do all of the above and more. As editor of loveDANCEmore (and coordinator of digest posts) I feel some peer pressure to post some kind of response to current events. But I wonder, what could I put into the world (through my own writing or even through curating writers of color) that would ultimately be more than a disingenuous performance of solidarity — without any real risk — the like of which is happening on the internet 24/7? 

A related question: What do we do about the fact that arts organizations, including this one, take money from people and organizations that represent the white supremacy, violence and injustice we are all so busy decrying?

Take us for example. Ashley Anderson Dances and loveDANCEmore celebrate ten years this month. Everything we’ve done — Ashley’s body of work, dozens of Mudsons and other group shows, fifteen journals, dozens of fiscally-sponsored productions — we’ve mostly done with public money and small private donations. 

That said, through personal contributions, through our board, and through partnerships with larger organizations, we’ve taken money that originated in the hands of the private prison industry and weapons manufacturers. The public money we collect comes (albeit indirectly) from the NEA and the city — from the same federal and local governments responding violently to ongoing protests against police murders. We’ve taken money from Amazon — through Amazon Smile — a company known to be uninterested in fair labor practices, employee safety or much of anything besides the bottom line. 

This is true to an even greater degree for larger, more established organizations in our city, our state and across the country. To grow what we could offer in our city, the obvious thing for loveDANCEmore to do would be to acquire more foundation money — most, if not all, of which has been plundered (often violently) from vulnerable human beings, across existing racial and socioeconomic divides. We’d need that money to match what we currently receive from the city and the state and to move up through the tiers of public funding for the arts. The cycle continues and we don’t escape it, even by remaining small. 

Where do you draw the line? 

Is it okay to take money from rich Americans who themselves had no control over the fact that their ancestors invented machine guns, for example? If artists take money, from current robber barons, or their descendants, how does that change the art we are obligated to make? Is there any point in eschewing the money when we know other artists will take it anyway? Is it possible to do better than being the launderers of rich people’s cash?

Arts organizations are particularly vulnerable to this critique, but we are not alone in the conundrum of what to do about evil money. Perhaps we can learn from how K-12 educators, universities and non-arts non-profits succeed or fail in answering these questions. There is hope in seeing colleges divest from oil companies, private prisons and the like. There’s reason for despair in considering that schools depend on contributions from the refineries that pollute the air they breathe at recess. I don’t think we can stop making art, anymore than we can stop educating our children or raising money to put the right people in public office. 

Samuel Hanson edits print and online content for loveDANCEmore and assists with other programming.

Interview with SONDERimmersive’s Graham Brown

Graham Brown’s audience interactive dance works have become something of a staple in the Salt Lake City arts community. I first encountered his immersive theater when attending the 2017 production of SONDER at the Historic Eagle’s Hall in Downtown SLC. The atmospheric piece draws audiences into a winding drama delivered tantalizingly piecemeal. The work redefined dance theater, and demanded the audience’s attention and direct engagement.

Immersive art challenges audiences to confront their relationship with art, and their role in live performances. Gone are the days of sitting placidly in proscenium seating – SONDER announced the dawning of immersive storytelling that hybridizes dance, theater, song, and narrative. 

Beginning with SONDER, Brown has cowritten his work with dramaturge Rick Curtiss. The two joined forces to produce the delicious Thank You Theobromine, which has evolved into The Chocolatier, a darkly enticing adventure through the duplicitous nature of chocolate and identity. Set to premier on March 13, 2020, the arrival of COVID-19 and social distancing requirements put a hard stop to SONDERimmersive’s chocolatey concoction. 

However, no strangers to innovation, SONDERimmersive has set about redefining immersive art once again. In two weeks, the company is set to produce a show of Shakespearean proportions. Through Yonder Window, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, will engage audiences in the tale of star-crossed lovers – from the safety of their own vehicles in a drive-through theater format. 

I had the pleasure of talking with Brown about his upcoming work, as well as the old and new challenges of creating immersive art. Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity.

—Molly Barnewitz

Molly Barnewitz: Thanks for taking the time to chat with me, Graham! SONDERimmersive has become well known for its site-specific, "choose your own adventure" style dance and theater works. I wonder if you could give us some insight into what "Immersive" art looks like? What draws you to immersive art? Why is it important for you?

Graham Brown: There are a few things that draw me to immersive art. One simple reason is that I think dance specifically is best seen at close proximity. In class, in rehearsal, we are often not more than 20 feet away from the action where we can see; feel the motion. On a big stage I feel that some of that visceral experience is reduced.

I have always been drawn to space as an inspiration for performance. I love taking inspiration from a building, a room, a structure, or in [the case of Through Yonder Window] a gigantic parking garage. This work is always a partnership with unusual spaces.

dancers rehearsing for Through Yonder Window

When so much of our lives are digital, I am consistently drawn to live experiences. The challenge, the danger, the risk, the thrill, the intimacy, the connection made within physical, emotional performance in real time between performer and audience.

There is an empowered nature of experience for the audience in immersive work in that they have choice, and therefore everyone has their own unique experience. It becomes more than just a single show, but an entire world to experience, share stories, and revisit. There is also an intrinsic blurring between performance and audience.

As an artist it provides the opportunity/obligation to create not a single narrative/storyline/experience, but a whole world of characters, experiences, and perspectives.

To build on that – by design the work neutralizes "lead" characters, and elevates "supporting" characters. All characters live a full existence within the world of the show, and as per real life, everyone has a full story. So for example in this show, Romeo isn't any more important or compelling a character than Juliet's Nurse (who Shakespeare never even gave a name). By the way, that's the definition of the word 'sonder.'

Finally, I love the intense and broad collaborations involved: building/business owners, producers, arts administrators, carpenters, set designers, visual artists, writers, composers, actors, dancers; and then there are the collaborators specific to each show such as chocolatiers and zoo administrators to mention a couple of recent ones.

Have you always been interested in this kind of dance/performance art? 

I've always been drawn to non-traditional styles of creating and presenting performance: improvisation, site-specific work, dancetheatre, physical theatre, abstract choreography for straight plays (pretty much in that chronological order). What I love about this immersive work is that it combines all of the above.

How has COVID-19 altered – or maybe expanded – your definition of immersive art? 

More than anything it has challenged us in creative problem solving. When COVID went down we had to halt our show The Chocolatier (which will re-open as soon as it is safe) and go back to the drawing board. It was my creative partner Rick Curtiss' idea to do a drive-in show. That way we can bring audience into an environment, without having to leave a physical safe space.

Another result of COVID is that we've found ways to partner with organizations to actually make their offering to the community more COVID friendly. Specifically, we are creating immersive theatre works at the Hogle Zoo and the Dreamscapes immersive art gallery where we will control the audience's motion throughout the exhibits as an intrinsic part of the show. Audiences will see the full exhibit, have a unique immersive theatre experience, and remain within safe social distancing parameters.

courtesy of Graham Brown

Can you tell us a little about your upcoming show, Through Yonder Window? 

The storylines are really Rick Curtiss at his best. He's taken the familiar and flipped it on its head in a way that is entirely unexpected, but makes complete sense. We have made big creative decisions regarding filling in all of the other characters, who exist in Shakespeare’s script largely to support Romeo and Juliet's stories.

As for the audience experience, they will be guided into a specific spot within the parking garage, transformed into the town of Fair Verona, where they will park, turn off their engine, and view the full experience. Depending on your spot, and where your eye is drawn, each person will have a different experience. The environment is large and open so whereas in our work audience's usually need to decide which character to follow into which room, this is more like a big fishbowl experience. That said, the cars are integrated into the performance in a way that creates very intimate and unique experiences.

Rebooting Romeo and Juliet in a garage setting gives me some West Side Story vibes. Do you feel like musical theater, which relies on the skills of dancers and actors, has had an impact on your aesthetic? 

Not really, to be honest. But I will say that the work does toggle between realism and abstraction in a way that may be structurally similar to musical theatre. I think the aesthetic comparison would be that the acting is more filmic, and the movement is more post-modern, dancetheatre, or physical theatre based. And the motion between realism and abstraction is more fluid throughout rather than breaking out into a dance number.

In a similar vein, how did you and writer Rick Curtiss settle on a Shakespearean classic as the basis for your latest work?

When we decided on the drive-in idea, we also decided we wanted to get it up quickly in order to offer something to the public in this tricky time, so using a recognizable story seemed like a good idea. I jokingly suggested "something like... Romeo and Juliet" thinking that would be too obvious. Everyone actually really liked it though – it's super familiar, there is a lot of physicality, it is intrinsically quite dark and layered, and there is a lot of room to play with all of the characters. Rick particularly liked the idea because for years he has had ideas about different ways he wanted the story of Romeo and Juliet to play out... so little spoiler – while all of the familiar events do take place, the why's and the how's are quite altered from the original.

Prior to COVID-19, you were reworking your show The Chocolatier. I was lucky enough to get to go on one of the preview evenings, and I am so sad that a full audience wasn't able to experience the show.  Are there any plans in the works for reopening the show? 

Yes definitely. We are currently scheduled to re-open on July 31. Our audience has been so great to stay with us. The run was about one-third sold out when we had to pause, and most of them have stayed with us as we've had to delay and delay the opening. It's really hard to know if we'll have to delay again, but regardless, the show will definitely be happening whenever things are safe. In the meantime feel free to check out www.TheChocolatier.org, and you can experience the chocolate any time at www.EatChocolateConspiracy.com.

Through Yonder Window premieres June 4, 2020. Showtimes and tickets are available at ThroughYonderWindow.com. You can stay up to date with Graham Brown and SONDERimmersive by following them on Facebook and Instagram @SONDERimmersiveSLC. 

Molly Barnewitz is a writer, comics enthusiast, and outdoor nerd based in Salt Lake City. Molly graduated with an M.A. in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Utah in 2016. Their thesis, “The Animal As Queer Act in Comics: Queer Iterations in On Loving Women and Nimona” underscores the potential for comics to portray LGBTQ+ identities. Molly works at Salt Lake City’s Sustainability Department as an outreach coordinator. They also serve on the organizing committees for Queer Spectra and Salt Lake’s Grid Zine Fest.

Goodbyes and Dancer Diaries

Dear readers, this month we have two reflections on the daily lives of dancers in our new normal. But first I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge some losses in our community. Tonight we learned of the death of Nancy Stark Smith, one of the founding mothers of contact improvisation and beloved teacher and artist. She inspired many events, including this one that took place here in Salt Lake just less than two years ago.

Our city’s own Laja Field wrote on instagram, she was the “epitome of a strong, bold, passionate woman. I’ll never forget the first time I met her at Bates Dance Festival in 2011. Basking in her presence was enough, but goin g to her contact jams and actually being able to move with her was a dream. She was a serene force, deeply rooted, nimble, extraordinary.”

On the NYTimes website, I also learned about the death of an artist I wasn’t aware of, Don Campbell, inventor of the Campbellock, better known as “locking”. As NYTimes staffer Daniel Slotnick writes, “Campbell invented locking, a style that eventually permeated hip-hop dance, because he had a hard time doing the robot.”

“He was practicing the robot with friends in his college cafeteria in 1970 when he forgot the next step. He locked his joints and froze for an instant, dramatically accentuating the dance and captivating his spectators.”

Reading about these deaths reminded me that I have been looking for a way to acknowledge another recent passing closer to home. Stefanie Slade, dancer and longtime production manager at the Rose Wagner, died earlier this year in February. I didn’t have the privilege of knowing her well, but I always enjoyed her energy and wit when we interacted at the Rose. Her obituary can be found here. I noticed today that Melanie Maar, a choreographer in New York, posted this radio documentary about Stefanie Slade. It’s worth listening to.

Below are reflections on life in the last few weeks by Hannah Fischer and Kendall Fischer. I don’t believe they are related. In fact, I don’t think they know each other, but their pieces on the strangeness of recent times exist nicely side by side.

—Samuel Hanson, editor

Insert profound title here: the view of one grad student…

In early March 2020, when I read that Duke, Harvard, UCLA, and the University of Notre Dame had moved all of their classes online, I knew it was just a matter of time until I received the same news from the University of Utah. I made it back to Salt Lake City from a trip in time to visit Weller Book Works before all non-essential businesses closed. I had been off-campus at an artist residency for three weeks in Florida, one of the first states to declare a state-wide emergency. Within five days of returning home, the University and downtown had become ghost towns. 

Dance students and faculty have been rolling with the punches since the announcement to cancel the rest of the semester. Despite fear and uncertainty looming in the background, I've been continually inspired by the dance community's commitment to connection. There are so many options to move 'together' virtually, I cannot keep up. 

In the last few weeks, I've seen a new set of values running parallel to the 'let's keep dancing' discourse. The 'you don't have to do all this' conversation around toxic positivity and permission to rest is an essential counterpart to the onslaught of screen time. Alexandra Beller's essay ISOLATION, OBSTACLES, TOXIC POSITIVITY, AND MAKING ART IN A CRISIS came at a crucial moment in my personal process two weeks ago. "If you are feeling optimistic and positive, enjoy yourself. If you are feeling rage, apathy, grief, frustration, and resentment, live in them fully. There are no good or bad feelings. There is no hierarchy or goal for how we should feel (not ever, and especially not now)". 

As our hyper-productive world tries to smash itself into our homes and our most protected spaces, I ask myself how much of that outcome-driven perspective is useful for me at this time. Like anything else, it's not only wrong, and it's not only right. Sometimes I need to sit down at this computer and crank some shit out. Sometimes I need to let the university to-do list wait. It is an ongoing navigation. 

Working from home 100% of the time can blur our boundaries of attention and productivity in a way that keeps us in fight or flight mode all the time. Add financial instability, career unknowns, and weeks of earthquakes to the equation; Salt Lake City is ripe for anxiety. 

My students have told me repeatedly that they feel they are working 10+ hours a day every day, still never denting their to-do list. Even with faculty pairing down their course requirements and extending deadlines, the mountain of work feels insurmountable. I, too, have felt overwhelmed by a sense of endless, impossible tasks. And then I often immediately feel bad for feeling that way because I am fortunate in so many ways; I have a place to shelter in, a partner to shelter with, income for another four weeks. However, this cocktail of misplaced guilt, overwhelm, and fear does not help anyone. It freezes the nervous system, holding me in place with a heightened heart rate, immobilized. 

Perhaps the new baseline of immobilization explains why online movement classes have been well attended for over a month now. Moving the body is one way to move through fear, moving the juicy guts to rearrange ourselves. In movement, we can feel more of ourselves than the primary passion drives of frenetic doing, trepidation, stagnation. Emilie Conrad writes in Life on Land, "The encompassing fluid movement of love is where fear and vigilance can soften" (27). I certainly need fear and vigilance to soften, I can feel their presence in my thoracic spine. In movement, we can recover ourselves and recuperate from the contained state of staying home with our screens. Dance class, however, is only one way to recuperate. 

In the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System (LBMS), we talk about rhythms of exertion and recuperation, often framed by the Effort category of the system. Rhythms of exertion and recuperation allow us to change approaches, both from a strictly movement analysis perspective, and also by allowing different parts of ourselves to make choices. For example, writing this post requires a different part of my creative and analytical mind than grading papers, and therefore alters my attention. Shifting attention allows me to adapt, to stay malleable and porous, which are attributes I desperately need right now. 

In the time of COVID-19, exertion and recuperation have changed forms dramatically. What might have been exertion before, a dance class, might now be a recuperation from sitting in Zoom calls. How do YOU feel after four hours of Zoom calls? I find myself increasingly attracted to short, discreet tasks like making lunch or watering my plants as a way of recuperating from managing the classes I facilitate and the ones I attend. Walking uphill to 11th Avenue has become a great recuperation, letting my heel bones swing forward, fully advancing my torso as I push and rise up the hill. As I walk, I can allow my eyes to scan the streets and sky, taking many things in without searching or comprehending. An experience of expansive focus is significant after hours and hours of direct attention on a screen, a book, or even one of my little recuperations in my home. 

In How to do Nothing, Jenny Odell writes about the attention economy, making a case for doing 'nothing.' In it, she does not propose that we all abandon our responsibilities and sit around unthinkingly. Instead, she writes about a sort of recuperation that I have found personally and politically relevant, even before COVID-19. Now, it is much more so. ”…what I'm suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human - including the alliances that sustain and surprise us. I'm suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I'm suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit". 

How then, do we protect our spaces and time while remaining contributors to our communities? I don't have a 5 step plan, but I have a few things that have been working for me: 

• My 'routine' could barely be called a routine. I'm not giving myself more than 1-2 structural responsibilities (calls/classes) each day. I need to be able to change my attention and reset my course at any moment. Some days this allows me to move more quickly through my tasks, and some days it does not. However, it does allow me to stay 'in-the-zone' when I become obsessed and hyper-focused. 

• After I complete big energetic academic tasks, I make something. Or I lay down for a long time. It is harder to acknowledge the significant accomplishments while we are sheltering in place, so it has been essential to actively choose how to recuperate or celebrate. 

• Hard copy books. If you live in Salt Lake City, you can still get books from Weller Book Works. If not, you might be able to find a local bookstore that still does curbside pick up. 

• Avoiding all synchronous classes. I'm not expecting my students to attend synchronous Zoom meetings, and if I offer them as an option, I keep them short. I have attended a few synchronous classes by Barbara Mahler for stretch and placement, but otherwise, I am responsible for my own practice. 

• Not taking myself, or my academic work, too seriously. Okay, full disclosure, I've been working on this one for a while. As my dad would say, 'lighten up!'

• My first sourdough starter sort of died, and I've decided it's okay to start over. 

I leave you with a final quote from Jenny Odell and a bunch of links below. "When the pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world." 

Though we are staying home ('we are all indoor cats now, as my partner would say'), we are also still three-dimensional beings MOVING through our worlds. Nothing can replace a room full of dancers radiating energy, and nothing can prevent you from taking a moment to sense into your sense of width, length, and depth. Even as you sit and read this post, you have both a profound quiet and a current of movement inside your skin. 

Hannah Fischer is a dance maker from the Midwest currently based in Salt Lake City, UT. She is a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst and a 2020-21 Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Utah.

Kendall Fischer on replanning Myriad’s season…

Late one night last fall, I sat eating sweet potato fries at a favorite pub with Myriad’s assistant director, Fiona Nelson, each of us in full glow-in the-dark skeleton makeup. After performing a spooky duet at a horror-themed event, we were making time to do a retrospective about Myriad’s recent project, PENUMBRA, which we had shared with audiences during the first weekend of October 2019. October is busy for Halloween freelance dance gigs, and we agreed that we’d never again schedule a contemporary show in that month.

courtesy of Kendall Fischer/Myriad

Our discussion of our recent project led us into brainstorming for our next project, thinking of all the lessons we learned and best practices we established that we could apply to this future work, in addition to new things we wanted to try. Over the next few months Fiona and I met multiple times with Sierra Stauffer, Myriad’s creative coordinator, to continue to shape our vision and outline the means to accomplish this vision for our next project.

We wanted to work with multiple choreographers within this show, and to invite them to watch and give input on auditions, better connecting them with the overall project process from the beginning. We brainstormed about the artistic theme and how to guide our choreographers to create a cohesive and impactful show out of separate pieces. For a refreshing artistic effect, we decided to make most pieces in this upcoming show trios, bookending the trio performances with larger group pieces at the beginning and end.

The idea of a show inspired by Dante’s seven deadly sins came from my sister, Jordan. It’s a concept that’s been around a long time and is maybe even overplayed, but what made it exciting for us was the idea of using it as a framework for exploring human judgement. We named the project NOTION, in reference to an impression that one person has about another.

Courtesy of Kendall Fischer/Myriad

I explained to the choreographers that we wanted each piece to be based on one of the distinct seven deadly sins, and that we wanted them to dive deep to explore multiple sides or even a spectrum of a ‘sin’ and its context – and to leave some of it questionable or controversial. I asked them to start with questions like: Why is this a sin? When would it not be a bad thing? When does a good thing become perverted or taken too far? Are there exceptions? Who is at fault?

We had decided on all live music, and encouraged the musicians and choreographers to work together to develop a unified piece of art. Some of the music was adapted from existing compositions, and some of it is composed specifically for this project.

We held a fundraiser gala partway through our rehearsal process. At this event, we welcomed guests to mingle over finger foods, and we showed works-in-progress and encouraged the audience members to share their impressions and ask the choreographers questions about the pieces. I took notes for each choreographer about the audience responses regarding their creation. 

The gala, which we had been inspired to do by the example of Karin Fenn Dance, has become one of my favorite parts of Myriad’s project process. I love that it helps us connect with our audience more deeply, giving choreographers different perspectives at a time when they still have rehearsal hours available to use for making changes based on these different perspectives. 

In addition to providing the audience feedback from the gala, I continued checking in with the choreographers, trying to guide each piece to be distinct from each other piece, to feel compatible within the context of the overall show, and to offer a good balance of clarity versus interpretability.

And then COVID-19 happened, and now the project is postponed for a good while. 

I’m very hopeful that the investments that Myriad NOTION artists, including choreographers, dancers, musicians, costume designer, and company leadership, have made into this project so far can be a strong foundation to build upon when we pick up NOTION again later this year.

I believe that there is so much value in creating art at any time, and especially during periods of uncertainty like this. So with NOTION being on a long pause, I encouraged each of the artists involved to continue creating in the meantime, and to share their creations with others. I’m loving seeing how so many artists in our community are continuing to create within these unexpected circumstances.

I feel that this pause in our project will help deepen our appreciation for opportunities to create art together in the future. And I look forward to sharing Myriad’s art in live performances later on.

Kendall Fischer is the artistic director of Myriad Dance Company, and has enjoyed performing opportunities with Voodoo Productions, SBDance, Municipal Ballet Co., and La Rouge Entertainment, among others. Her choreography has been performed by Myriad, Municipal Ballet, and at Creator's Grid, and her dance film project Breathing Sky received the 2017 Alfred Lambourne Movement prize.

(Another) April Digest: More announcements and at-home resources

Announcement: Survey Closing

It feels like it was a different century when we announced our survey around dance class in Utah. Thanks to all who filled it out. We’re closing it on May 1. From there, collaborators Nichele Woods, Aileen Norris and Nora Lang will consider where to go next in these uncertain times.

If you haven’t taken the survey yet, click here.

Utah Division of Arts and Museums and Salt Lake City Arts Council offer COVID-19 Emergency Grants

This funding is jointly offered by Utah Arts & Museums and the Salt Lake City Arts Council.

“The Utah Individual Artist Emergency Funding is a resource dedicated to supporting working artists residing in Utah who have experienced financial hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Focused on lost income, these one-time relief funds of $500 will be provided to artists for as long as the fund can sustain requests. Funding will be made available for artists practicing in various disciplines including visual, digital, folk/traditional, film, music, performing, literary, craft artists, etc.”

Alexandra Beller shares PRAXISPACE

PRAXISPACE, started by choreographer Alexandra Beller, is sharing a free essay and movement score that Beller created in the hopes that dance communities might benefit. “PRAXISPACE,” writes manager Maureen Janson Heintz, “is an online community designed to connect artists no matter their location, and to stimulate continuous creativity and dialogue. Although it's been around for a year now, PRAXISPACE has gained even more recent popularity as dancers and artists turn to electronic communication and online resources.” 

Digest: More At-Home Dance Resources

Ririe-Woodbury and Minding Motion resources

Ririe-Woodbury and Ai Fujii Nelson, its education director, are offering some free online dance education resources. Ai writes, “We have recognized the gap – we haven't been offering much in live-stream options for the middle-school and high-school dancers. We are ready to step up the game and get those young dancers dancing with us!! One is a workshop of daily classes Monday through Saturday where students can sign up, the other one is a customized live-stream class each teacher can arrange with us…”

courtesy of Ririe-Woodbury

Write to Ai at education@ririewoodbury.com to learn more. In addition to K-12, resources, RW is also directing those interested in movement classes for older adults to Ririe-Woodbury Outreach Director and Minding Motion co-founder Juan Carlos Claudio, “who will guide students through a series of gentle two to four minute movement sequences that incorporate coordination, range of motion, fine, and gross motor functioning from the comfort of your home. These short dances can be done in a chair, standing behind a chair or standing. Please share with your loved ones and anybody who might enjoy these resources…”

Marcela Torres workshop via Recess Arts in NYC

Marcela Torres, who we featured in our March digest, and who would have been in Utah recently for Women to the Front, is teaching two movement classes, April 23 and April 30 via Zoom. I learned about this through an update from Recess Arts in NYC.

LAJAMARTIN presents EXPOSED

EXPOSED is a new platform LAJAMARTIN created for artists from all over the world to share their stories and experiences. We hope this will help whoever is looking to find their voice, inspiration or simply someone new to follow. The first iteration aired last night. THAR BE DRAGONS, featured Ryan Mason & Annamari Keskinen.

An Interview with Charles Anderson

Charles O. Anderson spent two weeks during the Fall of 2019 working with the University of Utah’s School of Dance discussing issues of diversity, belonging, inclusion and equity in dance academia. He was instantaneously adored and we all inquired if he would ever consider relocating here. To our dismay he responded with a firm “absolutely not”. He returned at the end of January to continue his work with the U and surprised us with an unconfident “maybe” when the question was posed again. A hilarious, unapologetically irreverent Black, gay male, Salt Lake City was unquestionably a bit of a culture shock for Anderson, as well as a drastic climate change. He lives in Austin, Texas where he’s the head of the dance program at UT Austin and, having moved there from Philadelphia prior, continues to recover from that culture shock. He will return to SLC in March for a third and final visit with the U’s School of Dance, and again in the fall for a residency with Ririe-Woodbury – his first commission by a professional dance company, which is unfathomable to those who know him and his work.

His time at the U also included setting (Re)Current Unrest, part of his touring and ever-shifting repertoire, on some of the Ballet and Modern Dance students for the school’s Performing Dance Company and Utah Ballet I performances. I was hashtag-blessed to serve as his rehearsal assistant, and rehearsal director upon his departure. 

Anderson performing Recurrent Unrest, courtesy of the artist

I began our conversation by asking if there was anything in general he’d like to say about himself, or that he wanted people to know about him. 

Charles O. Anderson: I’ve been at this for 25 years now and it’s funny… I know my career’s never failed but because I’ve been so decisive about not buying into the marketplace to become quote unquote successful, and about not buying into the way that success is recognized, there have been some repercussions… 

With that statement, he refers to several Black choreographers who have achieved the dance world’s requirements for success – nods and recognition for crowd-pleasing (and appeasing) performance work, commissions for renowned companies, funded national and international tours. They’re good artists doing good work, but with a different mindset from Anderson.

Charles: I’m not them, and it’s not due to talent but to choices being made around the business of dance, for good or for ill… I’m much more invested in art as a platform for education and social justice than I am in saying look at how talented I am and look how amazing these dancers are. Pay me.

Alexandra Barbier: How long have you been dancing, and what has your path been?

Charles: I started dancing at 19. I was primarily a fully formed human being when I stepped into a dance studio, so I don’t carry a lot of the baggage of childhood and the weird things said to children in dance. I started dancing in an Ivy League college…

Alex: Which one?

Charles: Cornell. It was the only one that had a dance program and it doesn’t have one anymore.

Alex: And dance was your major?

Charles: No, I went in majoring in mechanical engineering. Then I went to a dance concert and a party and then decided I was going to dance.

Alex: Unbelievable… so you studied dance at Cornell, and then what?

Charles: Well since I didn’t know any better, I also started choreographing literally the same year that I took my first dance class at Cornell. And the two got me full scholarships to American Dance Festival so a lot of my training is really through those summer intensives. For three summers in a row, I spent six weeks at ADF and that was where I was exposed to things other than ballet and Cunningham technique. That was my saving grace because if I had only done those (ballet and Cunningham) I don’t know if I’d still be dancing! 

courtesy of the artist

He went on to explain how in that generation he was encouraged to go to the Ailey School and Dance Theatre of Harlem. That sort of racialized encouragement still happens in this generation, however, and I was reminded of another young, esteemed Black choreographer I’ve met who shared that he was frequently told to audition for the “Black” companies and The Lion King throughout his training, instead of other (distinctly white) companies and productions. But I digress. Anderson received a scholarship to study with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, but after attending the first day of class, he realized it wasn’t quite the right fit for him. 

Dancers, if you ever need the motivation to develop your social life outside of the studio, here it is: A self-proclaimed party boy, Anderson shares that his first dance jobs were not necessarily a result of his training (though that obviously didn’t hurt), but through the connections he made with other choreographer/party boys in clubs or at least outside of formal dance studios, namely Mark Dendy, Sean Curran, and Ronald K. Brown. The latter was a particularly major influence on him when he realized he wasn’t interested in the “traditional Black modern dance trajectory,” and after about three years of studying Brown’s work in New York, Anderson joined his company. Around the same time, Anderson became an assistant school principal in East Harlem, in a school for gifted-but-troubled students he related to because “they were really smart but with a lot of attitude.” Insert his notorious giggle here. As the first person to go to college on either side of his family, he felt the need to give back, or pay forward as I see it, which ultimately shaped who he is today in terms of his artistic and professional life.

Alex: You eventually got an MFA in dance?

Charles: Yeah. I moved to Philly and got my MFA from Temple, which also cracked me open because I hadn’t met Black dance scholars like Kariamu Welsh and Brenda Dixon Gottschild. They became my mentors and were people who could satisfy my academic itch. They gave me language to articulate what I was interested in and why I kept gravitating to this work that’s working with Black vernacular forms but not traditionalists.

Alex: After Temple, did you immediately go into working in universities?

Charles: In some ways I’m like the Forrest Gump of dance. I moved to Philly and I didn’t know I was going to grad school. I moved there because the funding ecology for emerging choreographers was so amazing and I was like “Oh bet!” I was adjunct teaching at Temple and they convinced me to go to their grad program. After that I still didn’t think I would go into academia because I was so burnt by Cornell. But at an American College Dance Association regional conference, God bless them they’ve given me so many opportunities, I met the head of the dance program in Muhlenberg College, Karen Dearborn, who asked me to be an artist-in-residence. I was going to teach at a performing arts high school just to make money but she created a position just to hire me. That’s how I ended up in academia and I’ve never stepped away.

Alex: What’s your secret to staying sane?

Charles: I’m not invested in being in academia, to be blunt.

Alex: It just keeps happening.

Charles: Yeah, it’s one of the few areas in my life where I’m very clear – I’m offering a service so take it or leave it. I’m marketable. There are very few parts of my life where I have that kind of confidence. I’m like “I don’t even want to be here anyway, so take it or not.”

courtesy of the artist

Dancers, tip number two: stay confident about your worth and your values. As I was editing this interview, Anderson was promoted to Full Professor at UT Austin, to his knowledge the first Black male to hold that rank in the school’s Department of Theatre and Dance. Not invested, my ass. Also, I guess this means he’s definitely not considering a Salt Lake City relocation….maybe. Bummer. 

Alex: What do you think about dance in academia right now, in general? What are the trends? What’s the landscape?

Charles: There are some real personality splits in dance academia, and it’s actually reflective of our society. There are programs that are digging into being traditionalists and classicists, much like we see white culture trying to dig into being white. I’m saying that because there are also hyper-conservative Black programs in academia that are no more satisfying to me. A lot of the US is so anachronistic still; it’s stuck in modes of understanding itself that aren’t reflective of the populations it’s teaching anymore, which is why you see so many dance students taking classes outside of academia. They’re paying for a dance degree, and then they’re paying even more to go to a studio. That says a lot... I think that most dance programs in the US have a desire to be relevant but their methodologies are sometimes reproducing the same archaic systems that already existed.

Alex: How about outside of academia? Do you feel like the universities that you interact with are doing a good job at getting students ready for the world if they decide that they don’t want to teach in academia? If they want to be freelance artists?

Charles: Traditionalist, Eurocentric, Heteronormative faculties aren’t paying attention to the real power of the dance presenting field, the ones that dictate the temperature of the entire field. If you don’t pay attention to what they’re doing – when they’re behind, if they understand what’s going on sociopolitically, if they just impose their priorities or hierarchies in terms of what they think is relevant – we’re all fucked and folks like me-who are invested in anti-racist dance- are fucked over. And that’s what I’m seeing.

The presenting field is still so predominately, to be blunt, white middle-class females with savior complexes. They’re all kowtowing to nonsense that is not reflective of the time, or even of the time to come. It’s reflective of what makes people feel like they’re doing something (relevant), and they’re trying to get everyone to recreate that bullshit. I’m seeing a lot of young people buying into that shit and I’m like, that’s not really the kind of work you want to do but you know it will get you funded or get you on stage.

This is not me attacking the Kyle Abrahams or the Raja Reather Kellys. They’re great… but when you can see that they’ve been passed around almost like a cheap whore throughout this country and no other black artists-equally as talented- are getting that kind of attention have, that should give you a hint: nothing’s changed in the field.

Anderson is seeing dance professors of the Baby Boomer generation retire and Millenials rush to fill their spots. He suggests, and as one them I mildly agree, that Millenials can be as rigid and inflexible as boomers. He urges us to not forget about Generation X, the generation to which he belongs, because of their intimate understanding of Boomers. They know the etiquette of their predecessors well. They can speak the code to get them into Universities, and then stealthily change the old systems. How? By empowering Millenials, and acting as though they (we) were the ones to initiate their changes. Sneaky. 

As a hopeful future dance professor, I ended our conversation by asking Anderson a timely though somewhat cynical question. Nearly every job posting these days encourages members of underrepresented groups (read: people of color, lgbtqia+, women) and specialists in the African Diaspora to apply. Are programs truly interested in these individuals, or are they simply attempting to stay on trend and able to check a diversity box in a landscape where academia is (rightfully) under pressure to expand the demographics of their faculties? 

Charles: I think that is absolutely a reality in some places. Sometimes there is a genuine, earnest desire to change but they don’t realize they’re stuck in the idea of having a curio cabinet. They can put all of their interesting artifacts inside of it, but they’re just trying to change the artifacts to look more current. That’s not doing the work (of diversity, equity, inclusion). When you pay attention to the structure of a lot of these job postings, you can literally see they’re still going to marginalize that content, but they’re going to pull it out to say, “Look! I have one of those!” But there are some universities doing the work, where diversity, inclusion, and equity in all dance forms are inherently embedded in their curriculums. 

Alexandra Barbier is a performance maker who has taught courses in creative process, dance in culture, and queer performance art. She has performed with Anna Azrieli and Daniel Clifton, received funding from the Bastian Foundation to produce an evening-length performance, and received the endowed assistantship with the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Program.

An interview with Marcela Torres

One of the many events that’s been cancelled recently is Marcela Torres’ visit from Chicago. Torres was set to perform her work Agentic Mode this week as a part of Women to the Front. This exhibition was curated by Nancy Rivera, visual arts coordinator for the Utah Division of Arts & Museums in collaboration with curator and art critic Scotti Hill. As this Tribune article details, the visual arts portion of the exhibit has been postponed, but its unclear at this point if Torres’ performance will be rescheduled here in Salt Lake.

Late last year, Linda Frank conducted the interview excerpted here with Marcela for our print journal. You can buy our journal online to read the extended version here.

Linda Frank: So, I’ve been reading up on you. You say in one interview I read that fighting helps you communicate with a straight white male audience. Would you say you have a target audience? Would you consider the winning of a fight to be an effective metaphor for your performances?

Marcela Torres: Within my practice, my ongoing goal has been to share racially poignant narratives that reach individuals in many ideologies. In conjunction with performances, I also create workshops, objects and sound installations, allowing for many formats of access. I've often called myself a social strategist or even the director, producer or actor of the “production” to try to explain the multifaceted roles I take on.

My role as a performer, being viewed by others becomes just one part of the strategy. This multifaceted format is meant to include a wider array of people and reveal information, experiences and content slowly with each additional section of the project, like an onion peel. In the last few years I've used martial arts technique within my performance as a scaffolding to represent the relentlessness of fighting as a cultural state of being.

Torres in Agentic Mode, courtesy of the artist

The interview you're mentioning ran in Berlin ArtLink in 2018. I was speaking about my desire to have an expansive audience, not just one that was self-reflective. I want my audience to be full of People of Color, Queers, Women, like myself — as well as the cis men, white people, non-binary, people with more conservative opinions, everyone, to have an inclusive conversation. I'm strategically using martial arts to bring together a diverse group to witness the society they all live in yet experience differently. The ephemeral spaces I create during performances become both a location for similarly identifying people and for others to experience the nuance of their narratives, like, “Oh yes, I know what that pressure is like. This sound is deafening, like when I'm having a panic attack...”

Meanwhile, audience members who don't directly identify with me are entering a visceral experiential portal. They are seeing and feeling me as I go through an intensive set of gestures, replicating social tensions in an audience group of different bodies and histories. Martial arts and fighting can be used as a graceful physical logic and as a spectacle that can tap into mainstream mass media — as a tool of inclusion.

No Contest, 2017, Torres with Chase Calloway, courtesy of the artist

Demographically, more men watch MMA and Muay Thai so it’s in some ways using the master's tools as a way to access that attention and then shift it for new meanings. It’s like if a football game was also secretly a PSA about domestic violence against women.

In many of my works such as No Contest and Favored to Win, the concept of winning is explored as a socio-capitalistic motivation that pushes people of color towards exhaustion, with no real way of “winning”. There has actually never been any real “fight” in any of the work, instead fights are represented through scores of movement. The actual fighting I do is in my Muay Thai life, where there is a winner and a loser. In the artwork I find the murky tenuous position of unwinning to be more like real life.

Linda: I was taken by the mention of your work being selfish. How do you transition a work from being for yourself to being for an audience or community? Have you ever performed a work that was purely selfish? What is that selfishness?

Marcela: It’s funny for these questions to reference interviews from the past, it's hard for me to know exactly what I was talking about then! I think that selfishness is a characteristic of the work being self-possessed, of it being a true reflection of my bodily agency and enjoyment. I'm interested in this idea of racial violence because it's so prevalent, so affecting and persistent. I want to be able to point a finger at it. And on the other hand I take pleasure in consensual pain, it's a factor I want to play with. Most of the current work is not necessarily selfish, but it is a vessel I want to be in and maybe it felt selfish to be so me, me, me.

I'm very focused on audience-ship. I can perform, but then I can also take a step back and teach a workshop or be a mentor. Being a teaching artist has been a huge part of my life, its empowering for me to think about what I've learned to do and to find legible ways of teaching others to feel the strength or vulnerability I'm feeling. To channel that out. I think being a professional artist can feel selfish because it's making a career on just what you like or your research. So many of my performances might feel selfish, but I'm giving so much to my audience, hours and hours of training to share the story with them because I think it's important. Maybe the right word isn't selfish.

Linda: How would you say the body transcends the object within your practice? What rituals do you use to get into the zone?

Marcela: In undergrad I studied sculpture and although I enjoyed making objects, I didn't feel like they were as dynamic as the performative work I was making. I'm a fan of sculptors like Doris Salcedo, Mika Rottenberg or Simone Leigh that do in fact evoke so much power through their sculptures, but I'm not sure I'm that astute. Objects have become tools that heighten my movement.

In Agentic Mode I built boxing bags that have embedded microphones, they're activated through a series of striking combos, the sound repeats through a loop pedal and becomes a soundscape. I've trained in Muay Thai for the last five years and although the moves are impressive I wanted to create objects that could resonate the movements and transform the scenario. Sound was the solution.

As far as rituals, I don't have specific spiritual processes for performances, but I am very systematic about logistics in order to cope with intensive anxiety. The pieces I perform are often extremely involved technically, physically and emotionally and I need a framework of professionalism and routine to feel calm. I find when I challenge myself physically by running, or hitting pads, or dancing I can transcend my mind. I can find a place of peace and stability.

For performances I train as if I'm going into a fight, daily exercise, line rehearsals and no alcohol. Day-of I rest and harness energy inward with no energy to socialize. I'm soft with myself, I eat happy things and sleep well, pamper myself to feel calm. I like to run through tech, check sound and stretch, while continuing to care for myself.

After the performance I usually need an isolated space where I can cry and release the emotions of being seen. I enjoy having intensive control of the production of my performance, so when I get onto the stage I can be intuitive and flow, knowing the structure I built will hold me safely and I can tell my story.

Like most artists and grown people I've had to find ways to feel love for myself. It's a challenge for every person, no matter what situation we were born into. There’s so much against us.

One of my personal solutions is martial arts, in order to feel like I can defend myself, like I'm smart, like my body is a technical miracle, a place to put my anger, a way to respect people different than myself. Martial arts also provide a non-western lens to give diverse body types value. I enjoy taking these small things I've learned and being able to facilitate them with others.

I've developed a self-defense course that pairs social emotional learning, personal narratives and community bonding with Muay Thai techniques. Each time I teach it I'm committed to the community it will be given to. For the non-binary group I taught in Munich, they needed a form of escape to exercise their strength outside of the physical voicelessness they face. In Den Haag, I taught this course to an LGBT Youth group, we had moments to write personal declarations, each person met each other person and became a team. We talked about things that might feel scary in an open way, full of support, everyone shared resources.

I'm a catalyst for these moments of healing, my skills and vulnerability open up the door but it’s the energy of everyone else to buy in and be there for each other.

Linda: Is installation a large part of your practice? Or are objects within your exhibitions sculptures, readymades or props for the performative material?

No Contest, 2017, Torres with Chase Calloway, courtesy of the artist

Marcela: Right now, yes, for sure installation is hugely important to my practice. I enjoy building these spatial portals as context for my performances. It's like making a habitat, one's own kingdom, and creating the way you want to be seen and exist to others. In real life, I'm a very different person, I can be shy or evasive or nervous. People are often shocked when they meet me, because my power is not always exposed.

In my performances, the set is a playpen to release my energy and to make my concept understandable. If in my research I decide I need an element or a sound, it’s a call for me to learn a new making process. I sew all the leather, I’ve mastered foam pouring, I know about sound, etcetera. I can see myself continuing to work this way but adding more and more skills.

Linda Frank is a multidisciplinary artist based in Philly. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and co-directs The Space Program.

Announcements: Quarantine Events, Special Digests and Archive Content

As the world faces COVID-19, and we all spend time inside contemplating our human fragility, loveDANCEmore intends to do what little things we can do, bringing more dance journalism and writing out of the archive for you to read in the next few weeks. We’ll also be prodding the dance economy (a tiny bit) by commissioning some extra new work by some of our veteran writers.

As always, if you have an idea about something you’d like to get paid to write about, email me at sam@lovedancemore.org. The reviews side of the page may go quiet for a bit, but we will have plenty going on over here on the digest side. (We also still have a few unedited reviews in the pipeline from before school closed and public gatherings stopped happening.)

Emmett Wilson at the last Mudson, photo by Emma Hanson

Here are some local and nation online dance classes you can take to keep training:

Repertory Dance Theater has some online resources for professionals and students here.

Ririe-Woodbury too!

Utah Cultural Alliance has some advocacy materials and a survey for arts groups here.

This is a great reference for classical dance.

Movement Research is offering this online Feldenkrais class.

Jess Young, who we featured here, is holding intermittent online classes, email her at jessiealexandra@gmail.com.

Also don’t forget to take our class survey, which closes at the end of this month.

There are all kinds of performances happening online this week.

For example: AUNTS, a dance platform in NYC, is doing a chain-curation of online performances called AUNTS: WPA micro stimulus which started last night. (There’s another one tonight!) If you know of anything like that happening here or elsewhere, email me and I’ll consider adding it to our calendar for review.

I’ll leave you with my fifty word, run-on sentence review of one of the first of these pieces on @aunts_here on instagram:

Thank you, Benjamin Akio Kimitch, I enjoyed watching you and your fan dancing on a roof on March 21, from three thousand or so miles away, temporarily forgetting about the pandemic while for the first time noticing how unlike the wind the sound of wind in a cell phone is.

—Samuel Hanson, editor

Postcard from the Basque Country

Editor’s note: Carson Leys, a dancer and student at Salt Lake Arts Academy, has taken a sabbatical for her seventh grade year to live in Spain with her family. She sent home an email with this delightfully descriptive review of a performance by Baldin Bada Dance. Special Thanks to Karin Fenn, her teacher.

First, to set the stage. Five rows of chairs set in a messy semi-circle on the slick cobblestone of the Plaza de Brisco. The whole town seems to be seated on these chairs, or else on benches, spindly-legged cafe stools, or on the smooth stones themselves. Little kids from San Juan de la Peña Primary school bounce balls off each other or the three glass walls of the bus station, toddlers run rampant through the flower beds, and middle-aged men and women scroll through the photos on their phones, waiting for the show to start. The sun sinks behind the cityscape, and the church bells announce that the time is seven oclock.

No curtain rises, but it is as obvious as the house lights going dark when the dancers are ready to begin. On the stage is one blank canvas, two dancers, and around fifty seemingly-empty five gallon buckets. A woman pops out from behind the canvas, her dark hair tied in a Star Wars-style ponytail, with smudges of different colored paint on her face and fake-denim romper. Her face lights theatrically when she sees the audience, and a playful grin spreads rapidly across her features. She gestures excitedly, and a man walks out from the other side of the canvas. He walks purposefully across the stage and sits down at a keyboard disguised under more buckets of paint. He has a broad face, not particularly memorable, with light brown hair and beard. He also has a slight potbelly, edging over the waist of his pants, but confined inside his suspenders.

A beat echoes from some hidden speaker, and he begins to pick a melody. Then his partner starts to dance. I won’t describe the entire piece, for I doubt you or I would have enough patience for that, but the time flies in a swirl of paint, rhythm, and random but highly enjoyable gymnastics tricks on top of paint buckets. At the end, after all heads are full of memories of a wonderful performance and the once-blank canvas is covered in with blend of colored paint, the dancers face the audience for their bows.

Now, all dance concerts have messages the dancers intend for the audience to understand. Whether they are as obvious as the sun in the sky or hidden under layers of emotional struggle and depressing piano solos, they’re there. And this one, even though it was in a language I only half-understand, was my favorite of all of them. Some of the details may have gotten lost in translation, but the gist of it is the same.

“All of our children hold a powerful tool in their hands. It may be a paint brush, a pencil, or even a fat orange crayon, but they have the power to create. We must allow them to paint the reality they want, and make their own way in the world.” Okay, it may not have been quite that cheesy, but you get the idea.

This is the review part. When I sat down to watch this performance, I was not planning on writing a review. I didn’t even want to go. And yet here I am, less than two hours later, writing a review for a class that I’m not even a part of this year.

The thing that struck me most about this piece was how sound was almost, if not equally, important as the movement. Of course I’m not talking about the music, although it was quite impressive too. The man expertly handled three different instruments, piano, accordion, and a loop machine, sometimes two at a time. But what I found really interesting were the ways they used their movement to create sound, or how they allowed their dancing to be wholly influenced by the music.

For one captivating sequence, there was no music, and the only sound was the rhythm created by the empty paint buckets. The dancers would lift them, clap them, stack them, and slam them on the ground, each time creating a faster and more complicated beat. There was also a really fun section where the woman was dancing on a ladder, moving up, down, and sideways depending on the notes of the keyboard.

Even after all that, my favorite part would have to involve the paint. At this point in the performance, everyone had seen maybe half the piece, filled with paint buckets but no paint. You knew it had to come in at some point or other. As the woman picks up a wide brush and a paint roller, her partner exchanges his keyboard for a large metallic accordion.

This part was a lot like other dance concerts I’ve been too, dancers moving in a way directly influenced by the music, only a lot more fun for any kid because paint was involved. She jumps, slashes, and slides across the canvas, until it is covered in a collage of blue and white shapes. It is only at the very end you realize what she’s painted. A self portrait, in profile, shouting the words “Baldin Bada”. This is the name of the piece, in Basque, and means, by direct translation, “if any”.

Career Transitions for loveDANCEmore

I can’t believe it’s 2020. (I actually just typed “I can’t believe it’s 1010,” which must be some kind of slip, Freudian or otherwise.) Change is the only constant. This January, loveDANCEmore says farewell to Amy Falls, who has diligently kept the reviews flowing for most of the last five years as editor extraordinaire. THANK YOU AMY! Amy has also worked administratively for Ballet West, as well as dancing for Municipal Ballet Co. and in the work of Ashley Anderson among many other local choreographers. She kept Mudson alive during the transition out of the Masonic Temple after the Masons cruelly raised the rent on us for no good reason. We wish Amy the best as she pursues an MBA. Hopefully she’ll continue to write the odd review and perform around town. 

Amy Falls, right, with Katherine Adler, in Adler’s work from Walt, photo by Will Thompson

Future press inquiries and requests for review opportunities should go to sam@lovedancemore.org or you can call 801.915.0625. 

Which brings me to a plea. So much has already happened this year and in the transition, I seem to have missed Body Logic’s show last weekend. Did anyone go who might like to share their impressions?

I did make it to one of the many events that comprised Dancing Around Race: Whiteness in Higher Education, a symposium on race, dance and academia put together by U of U professor and loveDANCEmore contributor Kate Mattingly. 

In a panel called Decolonizing Methodologies, Maile Arvin, Tria Blu Wakpa, Charles Sepulveda discussed their work. Arvin had just published Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania. Blu Wakpa talked about an article she presented in Dance Research Journal and Sepulveda spoke about his contribution to a volume entitled Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society. Two of the three teach here at the U. 

Decolonizing Methodologies, photo by Samuel Hanson

If you participated in Dancing Around Race we’d love to publish your thoughts, reflections, responses, diary entries, poems written in response to these important conversations. Additionally, If anyone is interested in writing a review of one of the books mentioned above, we’d be happy to pay for the book in exchange for you writing about It for the digest…

What else do you want from loveDANCEmore? We are trying to figure out where the organization is headed. Mudson is currently on hold as we reassess its viability. Do you miss it? Is there some other service we could offer the dance community that would mean more? Do you read the reviews? Does the print journal reach you? Ask not what you can do for loveDANCEmore, but what loveDANCEmore can do for you!

September of 2020 will mark ten years of loveDANCEmore. We need your input to help us figure out what the next ten years are going to be all about! Write to Sam or Ashley.

— Samuel Hanson, editor

December Digest: Dat Nguyen on Lune Production's "Palao"

“In dance, cultural representation flickers in and out of somatic identity like a high-frequency vibration, dissolving the boundaries of categories such as self/other, nature/culture, body/mind, and private/public. This interconnectedness of bodies and identities creates what I consider the transformative power of live performance, and contemporary dance makes the most of it.”

– Ann Cooper Albright

Appreciation or appropriation? I suppose that is the question a dance writer should ask when seeing a show about culture. Palao, one of the four shows produced by Lune Production in Vietnam, anchors its theme and subject matter in the rich history and culture of the Cham — one of fifty-four ethnic minority groups in Vietnam. When I first heard about the production, I was quite skeptical because I was afraid I would see something that would be cultural bait, a practical tool of Vietnamese tourism, which would utilize the culture of anyone and anything to pander to people who are there only for spectacle. I am glad to say I was very wrong. 

More than a month after first seeing it, I can still vividly remember the production’s heavenly images and its spirituality, which are both grounded in representations of historical struggles and celebratory traditions. Movements unfolded in a wide range of tableaux, from vigorous exertion and bursting energy to gentle care and stillness as juxtaposition. The embodiment of each and every performer, whose haunted eyes and haunted cries echoed in the moon-shaped theatre, told a story beyond what words can do. What was intended as a representation has transcended into a beautiful tribute that extends beyond its commercial value.

“[Champa is] a kingdom of many small united tribes in the central [region] of nowadays Vietnam, established in AD 192. Believing in co-existence, the civilization grew towards spirituality and adopted Hinduism. Continuous territorial conflicts with external forces, especially from the north, led to gradual loss of land, until Champa was totally absorbed in 1832. Once great voyagers of the sea, many Cham fled the country to other South East Asian lands.”

The remaining Cham community now lives scattered in different parts of Vietnam. This context, taken directly from the Palao program notes, reminds me of the similar struggle that Native Americans went through and are going through. It strikes me, this time personally, thinking about the violent history buried underneath the land I grew up in. With such a traumatic past that leaves heavy imprints on contemporary life, Palao was created to honor their rich culture while also giving them a chance to confront history, to find catharsis, and to let go.

“In Cham words, ‘palao’ means ‘let go.’ When a large ship is about to leave shore, when young adults leave home on a quest to find their fate, Cham people ‘palao’. This performance, therefore, presents a poignant question of how present-day Cham and Vietnamese deal with their traumatic past, behave towards their own native cultures which have suffered much , and are now fading in light of globalization. Can they ‘palao’ the burden of history, of nationalism, and find their place in the world today?”

In contrast to the complexity of its mission and message, Palao employs minimal production design, leaving emphasis on the performers’ embodied experience and allowing these stories to unfold in a poetic manner. Palao’s visual language is mainly red and white. “White covers from costumes to ambience and represents spiritual purity... Red is in the “fire dance”, in symbolic terracotta pots of various contextual meanings and spiritual values.” To me, I read in the color white a sense of fragility, singularity, and tranquility, while the earthy red exudes a sense of groundedness, community, and intimacy. The terracotta pot, which went through various exuberant journeys, manifests Cham philosophy and its approach to life and death, destruction and creation. In one scene, it took a giant shape and appeared out of the dark. Then, as if it was holding the infinite universe inside, one performer after another jumped out of the vase (there were about eleven or twelve of them). A celebrating ritual ensued, honoring this ‘womb’ sacredness of carrying life with all of its abundance. In another scene, five or six medium pots appeared on stage left, dimly lit under the ethereal blue light. Long white silks started to fly out from the pots up toward the center stage ceiling. The image was clear: the spirits of the dead, having completed their journey on earth, rise and drift toward a new spiritual realm, getting ready for their celestial rite of passage. By the end of this scene, all the white silks are tied together to suspend a tiny dancer mid-air, curdling up like a fetus — the spirits have finished their divine journey and are now ready to be reborn into the world again. I guess this is why I was drawn to this production despite its representational façade — the journey never felt forced like a didactic culture lesson, nor was it too metaphysical for its abstract and surreal imagery. The spectators’ journey was gently guided with a sense of honesty and appreciation. I remembered clearly the moment when the small pot fell and shattered at the end of the show, signaling its finality, an end to a journey, to life, and with it a sense of accepting and forgiving. It was let go by the hands that held it so gently, diving into gravity to pull away from its troubled past, untangle its regret, anger, and sorrow.

The terracotta pot in its giant shape — a symbol for the infinite universe, a womb carrying life and all of its abundance.

I had the chance to interview some of the artists involved in the production, asking them what gave the production the empathetic power that it has. The common answer I received was that Palao is a journey that is lived and not performed. During the creative process, Palao seems to not to have had a constrained structure at the beginning to dictate how the show was going to form. Dancers, choreographers, musicians, and composers alike contributed to the show and fed off of each other for inspiration and connection. It’s worth noting that the artists come from various backgrounds and experiences, skill levels and styles. One dancer told me that they came from breakdancing and had not been exposed to contemporary dance; others also acknowledged the lack of any formal movement training. This challenge, however, became their strength as one said they didn’t have to investigate the subject matter through the lens of contemporary dance. They only had to look within themselves to understand what they, with all their life experiences and lack there-of, could offer. Palao owes its sense of unity, coherence, and divine sincerity to these vibrant individualities. 

“The story that we share on stage is the story of real life, and our expressions do not only belong to us, but they also belong to and encompass our humanity as a whole.”

— a cast member (translated)

This statement, by one of the performers makes me think about the lack of individual ego from everyone involved, beyond the fact that Palao is a show about culture and community. One interesting example is that when I received the interview responses, none of the answers seemed to have any name written alongside — the interviewees didn’t bother claiming credit for their opinions, except for one or two after I specifically asked — a collective of individuals speaking as one and taking responsibility for the group as a whole. Another example is that their program note, which spans six-pages and is filled with Cham stories and illustrations to help us understand the show better, has zero information about producers, choreographers, composers, performers, nor technical crew. No bios, not even their names! It must be more important that the show leaves some sort of impression behind, rather than giving us the names of who we should marvel for their skills and artistry. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering whether this has to do with the way things are, or whether the production is meant to be commercial and thus, artist credibility is nothing more than trivia. After all, nineteen years of life has made me more than familiar with a nationalist sentiment encouraging repression of individuality. Nonetheless, in the context of this show, the cultivating wholeness of the group also proved to be personally beneficial. Most agreed that this process satisfied them regardless of where they come from or what ethnic group they belong to. Some dancers from the Kinh ethnic group (the majority in Vietnam, the category to which I belong) acknowledged that they didn’t have any information about Cham culture before working on the show, and the learning process has opened their eyes to values and ways-of-being that are more whole and fulfilling. Even those with knowledge about Cham culture felt that working on the production had led them to a more intimate understanding of what Palao had asked them to embody. 

“I was born with Cham blood in my veins, but I didn’t have much understanding about its culture and history. It was a setback, having to contribute to such an important creative process, so I have been researching into my own history since I started working for Palao.”

— a cast member, translated.

This interconnectedness between various experiences and backgrounds, and the experience of embodying another culture (or one’s own) remind me of another statement by Albright: 

“Cultural identity is not necessarily synonymous with somatic identity. Yet neither is a somatic identity anymore “real” or essential than a social one simply because it is anchored in the body. Rather, the two are interconnected in the process of living that we call experience. Understanding the multiple features of that experience will help us to articulate how the dancing body can at once enact and resist its own representation.”

The transformative power of Palao also lies in its innovative blend of traditional language and contemporary voice. The detailed symbolism of Cham culture has extended itself into the realm of abstraction and expressivity. At this point my brain starts to ask this very important question: does this make Palao any less authentic? I don’t know, but I’m inclined to say that I don’t think so. I guess the question should be: is there even a point of authenticity to begin with? Like other cultures, Cham culture is ever changing and flexible. Whether such-and-such ways of being/representing are authentic or not is none of my concern, except that chauvinists always try to narrow down the experience of a community into a single image they deem acceptable. Palao is more than just an image, it’s a journey of the individuals and the community; it tells history through fiction, explores philosophy through imagery, and celebrates culture through fantasy. Just as the dancing body can enact and resist its own representation at the same time, Palao reiterates Cham culture as dynamic and adaptable while also resisting a cultural singularity defined the past. Palao did all this by bringing in new approaches:

“I believe that the mixing of these languages for the show is very interesting. It’s not at all an obstructive wall but a connecting bridge for us to catch each other’s rhythm, which is important for our creative process. This blending has layered us with more nuance, abstract thinking, and freed our imagination to its emotive power. Throughout history, Cham culture (sea culture) has always been open outward to welcome fresh waves and learning from foreign cultures, exchanging, absorbing, and filtering appropriate materials to enrich our own. Cham Philosophy welcomes innovation. Therefore, the mixing of languages feels very appropriate.”

— a cast member (translated)

“...the music in the show is no longer Cham music as we first knew it. With technique and experimentation, it is rearranged in different multiple dimensions while being layered with philosophy and religion. That’s why it feels surreal. However, the overall structure of Cham music with its signifiers always stays close and true for any part of the show, lending it a sense of intimacy and honesty.”

— Thanh Lam, Palao vocalist (translated)

It is worth noting that the show was specifically created with foreign audiences and tourists in mind. Inra Jaka, one of the creators of the show, acknowledged that contemporary dance and geographic art and culture, like Palao, has a difficult time approaching general Vietnamese audiences. I will spare you my thoughts on this and just say that I agree with this statement, sadly. However, I also acknowledge my own privilege. Investing in an art education to be able to appreciate shows like Palao is not something an average Vietnamese can gamble on. I feel quite sad that most Vietnamese audiences are not taught to comprehend and appreciate these kinds of beauty, leaving it to foreign audiences to enjoy on this work on their vacations. Also, it’s quite funny and weird to be greeted in English coming to see a show in my own country. They must have mistaken us for tourists.

“If you treat Palao as a living being, then this being is a not a fun being to be with. There will be tourists, who seek entertainment, coming to Palao and [who will be] disappointed, but it is the essence and color of the show. I don’t know what Palao will be if its only value is commercial value.”

Inra Jaka also shared that during the first few performances of its debut, Palao receptions fell into two categories: either people really liked it, or they hated it. This forced them to rethink the structure and rebalance the energy of the show. After five months, audience reception grew more positive, yet this alone couldn’t sustain the production for very long. At writing, the production is scheduled to suspend by the end of October, after already having to cut down the production budget and the number of artists involved, leaving more space to one of its sister show, the  A O Show — a circus production which focuses more on virtuosic spectacle laced with some witty caricature. Note that culture is still a selling point for A O Show, emphasizing its commercial value by giving tourists a look into how different Vietnamese are and how our casual behavior is entertaining. Anyhow, Palao’s creative and production team are thinking of different ways to keep the show going. One of their strategies is to cultivate workshops to create artworks deriving from symbolism within the show. Their vision and hope right now is to be able to take Palao on an international tour to approach a wider range of audiences.

“Palao is a metaphor for releasing and letting go in order to revive our humanity. Life needs altruism and mercy; it needs forgiving and sacrificing when confronting a life and death decision. To let go is the highest thing one can do, but Cham philosophy doesn’t stop there. There is another layer to Palao’s meaning: it means to let go of something we don’t need in order to stay. It’s like releasing the anchor so the ship can balance during turbulent winds, with our soul being the anchor, and this chaotic life the winds.”

Photos courtesy of Lune Production

Dat Nguyen is a choreographer, photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist. He was based in Salt Lake City, Utah until recently returning to his native Vietnam. He received his BFA degree in Dance at Sam Houston State University and earned an MFA degree in Modern Dance with a Screendance Certificate at the University of Utah. Before leaving town, he was a founding member of this May’s inaugural Queer Spectra Festival.

His theatrical works and collaborations have been presented at multiple venues and festivals around the country, including 12 Minute Max, Bailando International Dance Festival, Mudson, Marriott Center for Dance, Jim & Nancy Gaertner Performing Arts Center, and The Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival.

His photography credits include working with notable dance companies and university dance programs, such as Repertory Dance Theatre, Keith Johnson/Dancers, Myriad Dance Company, The BBoy Federation, Nicolay Dance Work, the University of Utah, Brigham Young University, Utah Valley University. His photos have been seen in major publications, including Salt Lake City Weekly, SLUG Magazine, loveDANCEmore, The Utah Review, Front Row Reviewers Utah, and PhotoVouge by Vouge Italia.

November Digest: Gina T'ai & Gabe Gonzalez on Drag in Southern Wisconsin

This month, a postcard from a different part of the country. Gabe Gonzalez is a Senior at Beloit College double majoring in Dance and Sociology. Gina T’ai is an Associate Professor in Theatre and Dance and Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College. Here, they discuss Performing Gender, a class taught by Gina that Gabe was part of in Fall 2018, as well as their individual experiences with drag, performance, and queer life in Southern Wisconsin. (All images courtesy of Gina T’ai.)

Gabe: I was given the opportunity to perform in drag for the first time with an email that read “Hey, so I have heard that you may be interested in performing in the drag show. This is a little bit late notice, but if there is still any interest please get back to me and we can work it out for this Friday!” It was a Monday in 2017, my second semester of college, and word had already spread across campus about my fascination with performing in women’s clothes. I was also tasked with finding a wig, dress, and heels in five days after excitedly replying “YES!”. 

My experience with college drag in the years that have followed seems to fall within the same realm of chaotic improvisation. It went something like this: people wanted to have a drag show, they knew I was interested or they had seen me perform in the past, they’d ask me without any time to prepare, and I’d do an improvised performance full of splits and hair flips.

Beloit College students before performing at the Students for an Inclusive Campus event in March 2019. (This was a counter-event to a talk that Erik Prince was giving.) Performers left to right: Panika Takk, ScottyD, Le Big Tasty, Jasmine Rice, Miss Andrea, Shay La Vee, Aural Sex, Chiki Elektra, Adam from Accounting, Vittoria Emanuela

It took until my fifth semester for me to finally take my drag fate into my own hands. I enrolled in Gina’s Performing Gender class and found a space to answer the question “why do you want to do drag?” for myself and nobody else. What I took away from that class was different from my previous performances. I had found a liberation in drag that has been felt by queers before me and queers to come. Miss Jasmine Rice was not birthed in a week from a place of chaos, but rather she sauntered in, after a semester-long gestation, confident, queer as all hell, and ambitious to liberate herself and her school through the art of drag.

Gina: I first was put into female drag when I was seventeen by my brother’s drag queen friends while visiting NYC. They gave me a man’s ID so I could get into bars and clubs to see drag shows. Two years later, I was in a dance by Sam Piperato at CalArts when I dressed and performed as a man and it was transformative. I felt that I could take up space. Throughout my childhood I was always told (by women) that I took up too much space. Dressed as a man, that was encouraged, expected. Claim all the space. When I transferred to Hollins University, a group of us started a Drag King group called KitchN’Sync. We performed as the boyband, N’Sync. Performing masculinity feels free, natural, and empowering. I am a cis woman, femme, and pansexual. My performance of masculinity is the embodiment of entitlement. It is one of the many ways I practice my feminism. 

The artist prepares.

I created the first iteration of the course Performing Gender in 2014 at Beloit College. The course is one-third drag history/theory/media, and two-thirds drag performance. Students spend the semester creating a drag persona, and building a performance for a drag extravaganza at the end of the semester. I teach this class this to encourage, educate, and support the next generation of drag artists and gender fuckers. And also to have a safe space for students interested in gender performance (in life and/or on stage) to play and experiment in a non-judgemental environment. 

Gina T'ai as Ginger Caruso preparing for a drag show at FIVE Nightclub in Madison. April 2019.

As Gabe and I talked about this class a year after he took it, he was saying that this class — my drag and choreographic work — are not normal. “The “mothering” mentoring is normal. Putting it in academia is not.” That’s right. It’s not normal. It’s queer as fuck. Teaching this class in academia is punk, drag. I feel like I am getting away with teaching it, and every time there is a change in administration, I fear it will be taken away. It is simultaneously the least traditionally academic, and most impactful class I have ever been a part of. Gabe was part of the 2018 class, also known as The PowerHaüs. I watched Miss Jasmine Rice develop and to say Jasmine burned the house down isn’t doing justice to her fire. 

Gabe: I have been thinking about what it means to be seen. And especially what it means to be seen here in rural Wisconsin. What makes being seen here special is that when I am here, I am not given a place that feels like home automatically. Being here means that sometimes I don't have a place of acceptance, love, and celebration. College is not fully equipped to provide those spaces for all people, which means that I have to make those places exist by willing them into being for myself and others. I of course do not do this work alone, which is where the role of drag comes into play. 

Performing drag creates a function of the missing family home. Drag on campus creates a family, through mentorship, loyalty, and support — which then come off of the stage and back into the community. Family and home are, to me, places where your being is loved and everything that you are is brought to the table, not only to be seen but to be valued.

Gabe Gonzalez as Jasmine Rice posing at the Coming Out Ball. October 2019, Beloit College, Beloit, WI.

This is the goal of my drag-based activism work. In the face of discrimination, what does it mean to celebrate ourselves rather than giving our energy to people who hate us? Creating spaces of celebration has been a goal of mine and drag helps me get there. I can be visible in drag always, but being valued in drag is such a better feeling. If I were to arrive to a protest in drag, I wouldn't feel safe. I would feel visible in all the wrong ways. However, creating a space where I can celebrate myself, and where others can openly celebrate what it is people hate about them feels powerful and feels needed. 

As I look down the future as a senior in college, the question is “what's next?” Will I have to continue making space for myself, or will the space provided by the club scene become my new platform. Previously unavailable to me because of my age, the club and bar scene now becomes the space I sought to create in college. My question during my journey into this scene is: how much work is there to be done about creating the family role here? Are these places that feel celebratory? Or will they simply be places of visibility, forcing me to again find or create my own celebratory space?

Gina: Drag in Southern and Southeastern Wisconsin is heavily pageant-driven. There aren’t many Drag Kings. There are a couple of Drag King shows. They are poorly supported and poorly attended. There is one organization, Glitter Stage Productions, that has a pageant for Mister Glitter Stage, inviting both male entertainers and drag kings to compete. I judged the Mister and Miss Glitter Stage pageant in 2017 and there was one lone contestant in the male category, Pony Boy. He won. 

Gina T'ai as H.O.G preparing for a drag show at FIVE Nightclub in Madison. April 2017.

My concert stage work is heavily inspired and influenced by drag and gender performance. I feel more in control when creating for, and presenting in, a more formalized dance concert. Last year I created a solo for myself called Milkjug Luminary. It is a drag dance for sure, though through the lens of postpartum depression and the butching up I felt I had to do in order to function in society during that time. I’ve had experiences in gay clubs where I didn’t feel safe. No, I don’t want you to put a dollar in my pants. No, I don’t want to hear your thoughts about if drag kings belong in traditional drag queen spaces. No, I don’t want your tongue anywhere near me as I am performing. Inspired by the students in Performing Gender, and with some gentle nudging from friends who do drag, I tried performing in drag again in gay clubs. First as a drag king named H.O.G, and then as a female entertainer named Ginger Caruso. Neither felt quite right. I had to go to Madison to perform, which isn’t too far. Just over an hour away from Beloit. But I am not immersed in the community there. It isn’t my home. My home is helping to create and encourage the spaces here, at Beloit College, for those that need it.