Utah Dance articles published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s Art Magazine.
“We were changed.” It’s a phrase Zvi Gotheiner says repeatedly as we discuss his new work, “Dancing the Bears Ears,” being performed this week at Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT). It becomes almost a mantra. A rhythmic punctuation mark to pace his thoughts. It’s something he said repeatedly along […]
Ririe-Woodbury in Daniel Charon’s Exilic Dances. Photo courtesy of Ririe-Woodbury. Sept. 28-30, Ririe-Woodbury’s six artists undertook the task of creating for their audience a sense of Parallax — the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions. What ‘object’ […]
Photo of DRYPP, courtesy of EyeKnee Coordination. En route to DRYPP, I passed people taking photos of the sun diffused by haze caused by smoke blown into the Salt Lake Valley from fires as far away as Los Angeles and the Pacific Northwest. I thought about my family and […]
Samantha Matsukawa and Efren Corado perform in Those With Wings. Photo by Pete Vordenberg On a warm summer evening, I gathered with a small group of people at Bend-in-the-River park by the Jordan River for a performance of “Those with Wings,” billed as an “immersive dance experience” based […]
Left to right: Samantha Matsukawa, Amy Falls, and Daniel Mont-Eton in “Homeward”. Photo by Dat Nyguyen/Motion Vivid, lighting by James K. Larsen. When I think of Daniel Mont-Eton’s Homeward I think ambient – a word derived from ambire in Latin, meaning “to go around” – and around and around. I think of the dancers’ […]
Dancers in “very vary” by Molly Heller at the Eccles Regent. Photo by Tori Duhaime. Molly Heller’s “very vary” was just that: a very varied patchwork. For the duration of the hour-long dance, the cast of six — members of Ririe-Woodbury and freelancers alike — approached Heller’s performatively […]
Footage of SALT Contemporary Dance in Ihsan Rustem’s Voice of Reason. SALT Contemporary Dance closed their 2016-2017 season with a collection of current works from local, national and international choreographers. This was my first time witnessing a SALT performance and I am so grateful I finally had the […]
Bashaun Williams in Ann Carlson’s “Elizabeth, the dance”. Set by Torry Bend. Photo courtesy of Ririe-Woodbury. Choreographer Ann Carlson has a longstanding relationship with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, originally studying modern dance under company co-founders Shirley Ririe and Joan Woodbury at the University of Utah in the 1970s. While […]
Artists of Ballet West in Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table, by Kelli Bramble Photography. For the close of their season, Ballet West presents a program that spans over 80 years of dance making with three astoundingly diverse works. Beginning with George Balanchine’s Chaconne, dancers in softly draped dresses cover […]
The performance content of Save Your Own Skin is inspired by questions arising from a prototype of bulletproof skin and other ways that we attempt to shield ourselves from vulnerability. The collaborators of the work include Tanja London, Carloss Chamberlin, Jason Rabb, Nick Foster, Ami Hanna. The performance takes place […]
Keanu Brady & full cast of a previous performance of You by Graham Brown, courtesy of the Sonder fb page Sonder, a collaborative immersive dance theater experience choreographed and directed by Graham Brown and produced by Sackerson will run for two weekends at the Eagles Hall. This historic […]
Ballet West artists in Oliver Oguma’s 2016 Innovations work “Fragments of Simplicity”. Photo by Dave Brewer, courtesy of Ballet West. Formerly known as Innovations, Ballet West’s newly titled Works from Within has moved to the Eccles Center in Park City. Works from Withinshares choreography from company ranks and 2017’s iteration presented world […]
Backdrop for Utah Regional Ballet’s production of Snow White, by Cassandra Barney. Painter Cassandra Christensen Barney has plenty of experience coming up with costumes and set designs for the characters in her paintings — whimsical females in period dresses, often surrounded by a menagerie of flora and fauna. […]
Attending two performances addressing themes of gender, sexuality, race, and power in Salt Lake City over the same weekend in November was disorienting. UMOCA’s When Flesh Becomes Matter: Bodies Unbounded, by choreographer Yasin (Ya-Ya) Fairley, and the University of Utah School of Dance’s Gender/Power, by Maya Ciarrocchi and Kris Grey alongside U […]
Repertory Dance Theatre’s season opener, Élan, was an eclectic evening of dance which opened with “Handsfree,” a piece commissioned for Britain’s National Youth Orchestra in 2012. The piece tasks performers with creating rhythms by clapping, stamping, singing and beat-boxing, and RDT’s version draws on the talents of both […]
Ririe Woodbury’s 2016 Fall Season presented a re-staging of Tzveta Kassabova’s “The Opposite of Killing” (2010) and Jonah Bokaer’s “Fragments” (created for the company in 2014) alongside the world premiere of artistic director Daniel Charon’s “Elegy.” A thread that linked the three works to each other conceptually was […]
“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 […]
