“One…two…three…four…five…six.” We’re at my home in my kitchen with my four-year-old daughter. Tzveta Kassabova is not counting out the moves from her choreography (if you know her well enough then you know that she doesn’t often, if ever, work with counts). She is counting cups of flour. She is teaching my daughter how to make...
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Nomad at the Nomad Network
Dancer stands in black Mouth open yelling no sound the streetcar leaves dusk is coming, clouds backlit, urban landscape another dancer approaches Nomad presented a handful of new works by recent University of Utah graduates Natalie Border, Austin Hardy, and Elle Johansen at the Nomad Network, a collective arts space that sits alongside the Sugar House...
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NOW-ID explores migration through movement and music in Exodus
For its fourth show, NOW-ID presented the multi-collaborative performance Exodus to Salt Lake audiences July 27-29. While the company has previously opted for less conventional spaces—the Masonic Temple and Saltair are two examples—Exodus was presented at the University of Utah’s Marriott Center for Dance, and aimed to focus on the human need to migrate. NOW-ID,...
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Deseret Experimental Opera Company’s Red Lake at the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival
by Liz Ivkovich In Red Lake, presented by Deseret Experimental Opera Company as part of the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival, Producer/Librettist Luke Swenson, Composer/Performer Stuart Wheeler, and Choreographer/Director Emma Wilson created a post-modern marriage of music, poetry, and dance. Each creator wore multiple hats and multiple layers of costuming—the musicians were clad in brightly...
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Fresh Beginnings: Brad Beakes and Alex Bradshaw explore short-form dance programs in BRACE
Alex Bradshaw and Brad Beakes began by holding hands. They slowly but confidently adapted their grip. As their fingers looped and laced the two dancers created a visible and kinesthetic bond. As dancing separated them, the pull they created in that first moment worked like gravity, connecting the two throughout their collaborative duet, BRACE. For...
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Summer Dance (P)Review
Friday night, Ririe-Woodbury continued a multiyear partnership with UMOCA by presenting Interstice, a performance installation featuring choreography by Artistic Director Daniel Charon inside of Jennifer Seely’s exhibition “Supporting Elements.” In the first two summers of this three-year partnership, the dancing, while compelling, was forced into the open spaces between gallery walls, but this summer, due...
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SNaked: The True Story of the Garden of Eden
The preview performance of SNaked was assuredly like a first kiss — reeling in various exciting directions, sometimes disjointed with a limited scope, but consistently provocative and engaging. Before the lights dimmed, SB Dance artistic and executive director Stephen Brown thanked the audience for offering a preliminary “pucker”—payment for a ticket of the same price...
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Space as Collaborator: NOW-ID’s Workshop Series
Take a warehouse space near Salt Lake City’s baseball stadium, throw in a team of dancers, choreographers, artists and architects and tell them to create a work together. If it sounds a bit like our co-lab series, that’s precisely why we’re excited about it. But whereas we give our artists a month to work together,...
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Ballet West’s Innovations at the Rose
Ballet West’s annual Innovations series opened this past weekend, showcasing work by company artists alongside Jessica Lang. As always, the evening presents wide-ranging approaches which will expand next year with a new National Choreographic Festival and a move of Innovations to Park City where it will be retitled, Works from Within. The evening opens with...
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Sunlight Unlimited at the Fallout
Municipal Ballet Co. is a collection of dancers and choreographers, organized by Sarah Longoria, that aims to present ballet in unconventional spaces: sidewalks, libraries, bars and historic buildings. In its own words, Municipal Ballet “collaborates with local musicians and artists because it’s a lot of fun and because everyone’s art combined turns into something unpredictable and magical.”...
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Rosie Trump’s Fill in the Blank at Sugar Space
In Fall 2013, loveDANCEmore published a performance text by Rosie Trump, a Nevada- based choreographer. Since that time, the text has become fully realized as a performance, Fill in the Blank, to be presented at Sugar Space this month. When asked to describe the performance text in context, Trump says the idea was to have...
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Reimagining a Riot: Nijinsky at Ballet West
While introducing “The Nijinsky Revolution,” Ballet West artistic director Adam Sklute recalled the riotous shock with which much of Vaslav Nijinksy’s work was met. Sklute described the boundary-pushing nature of Nijinsky’s movement and libretti, inviting the modern audience seated in the Capitol Theater on opening night to see if they, like their historical counterparts, are scandalized...
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RDT’s “Revere” Brings Collaborators to Celebrate Jose Limon
Repertory Dance Theatre has a long tradition of collaborating with the arts community. It only makes sense for them to culminate their 50th anniversary season with a collaboration. “Revere” brings together various artists to honor José Limón, whose work has been part of RDT’s repertoire since 1967. The Salt Lake Vocal Artists, conducted by Brady Allred, world-renowned...
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Third Time’s the Charm: Ririe Woodbury’s “Spring Season”
In the intimate space of the LeonaWagner Black Box Theater, Ririe Woodbury opened Spring Season with two premieres and one reconstructed work, concluding the company’s annual season with a show that is as virtuosic as it is contemplative. Joanna Kotze’s commission, “Star Mark,” begins with increasingly rapid projections of floral prints. With dancers clad in...
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Erica Womack
Despite my best efforts, I was running late to Mudson, a works in progress series presented by loveDANCEmore. As I rushed into the lobby of Sugar Space, my eyes just barely caught the long limbs of a dancer, clad in relaxed rehearsal clothes, finishing a swooping movement and coming to rest in a wide stance....
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