The Bunker by Laja Field & Martin Durov, photo taken by Stuart Ruckman
Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company opened its 2024-2025 season with an evening full of tension, humor, elegance, and exuberance, featuring two world premieres and a dynamic exploration of human emotion.
The evening begins with The Bunker, choreographed by Laja Field and Martin Durov. Set against an original score by Durov, with samples ranging from Bruno Mars’ “Leave the Door Open” to a dance remix of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” the piece combines raw, visceral movement with moments of dark humor. Purposefully disjointed, The Bunker shifts between tense moments of desperation and bold splashes of comedy. Its narrative—based on a reality TV-like scenario of six individuals locked in a bunker for a year—serves as a framework for dynamic movement and emotional tension. The dancers act as much as they dance, navigating the mental strain of survival, and the lead role is embraced with compelling intensity by Fausto Rivera.
Next, Daniel Charon’s Purple Sonata 24 offers a more structured emotional journey. Set to Philip Glass’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, this world premiere captures the rhythmic intricacies of Glass’s music with refined, emotionally resonant choreography. The dancers’ movements rise and fall with the music’s evolving structure, echoing its repetitions and variations with grace and precision. Charon’s use of movement to echo Glass’ minimalist repetitions and variations is powerful, turning the dancers into visual representations of the score’s precision and depth.
The program concludes with Monica Bill Barnes’ It’s Great to Be Here, a joyful explosion of energy and humor, featuring guest dancers from Utah universities. Set to a surprising mix of Bach and David Bowie, the piece juxtaposes classical elegance with pop exuberance. In the first movement, the dancers move individually, feeling their way across the stage, their pop-infused movements slightly out of sync with Bach’s cello suites. As the music transitions to Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”, the energy shifts, and everything clicks into place, building to a crescendo of joy as the stage fills with dancers for “Under Pressure.” However, even in this celebratory moment, an underlying tension lingers: no one ever fully touches. In the brief moments of partnered dance, their hands hover just above each other, a subtle nod to the post-pandemic world and the isolation we’ve all experienced. The joy is palpable, but something feels irretrievably lost.
Throughout the evening, costumes by alum Melissa Younker are fabulous, and Susannah Pilkington’s lighting is especially masterful in the complex work of The Bunker.
Re-Play continues through this weekend with performances on Friday and Saturday evening, and a Saturday matinee. Looking ahead, the Company’s winter performance, RE-MIX, promises to captivate with thought-provoking works, including Raja Feather Kelly’s Scenes for an Ending (2023), Kellie St. Pierre’s The Rate We Change (2022), and jo Blake’s coincidences, when we meet up (2022), along with a new commission from the Choreographic Canvas initiative, spotlighting emerging choreographers.
Re-Play, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, Salt Lake City, though Sep. 21
The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.
Categories: Dance
