{"id":45625,"date":"2019-06-18T06:19:49","date_gmt":"2019-06-18T12:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=45625"},"modified":"2019-06-30T06:35:47","modified_gmt":"2019-06-30T12:35:47","slug":"sb-dance-reexamines-and-reimagines-sleeping-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/sb-dance-reexamines-and-reimagines-sleeping-beauty\/","title":{"rendered":"SB Dance Reexamines and Reimagines Sleeping Beauty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Annie Kent and Nathan Shaw in SB Dance’s “Sleeping Beauty”<\/p><\/div>\n

In addition to re-imaginings of company repertoire as well as happenings and installations throughout the year, SB Dance produces an original new work each June. Their latest, a two-night run of Sleeping Beauty<\/em> at the Rose Wagner, contained many of the unique hallmarks that have developed with the company over its 20-year span. These hallmarks include intricate and energetic movement that retains the vitality of just the right amount of creation and rehearsal time, consistently deft prop and set piece incorporation and manipulation, interdisciplinary collaborations, thoughtful production choices, and representations of elements of queer identity. Also included are frequent references to S&M, bondage, and sexual power dynamics. This could easily play out as a shortcut to dynamic tension, but it instead emphasizes charged human connection in the well-practiced and integral role it plays in SB works. Themes of consent as well as physical and psychological dominance and submission are modally fitting for movement-based theater. These very themes are subtextually quite present in existing classical interpretations of The Sleeping Beauty<\/em>, and explicitly take center stage in SB\u2019s retelling.<\/p>\n

In the program notes, director Stephen Brown cites two books that re-engaged his interest in the \u201ctypically misogynistic classic.\u201d One is Robert Coover\u2019s metanarrative novel, from which Brown borrows the multiple-perspective approach of the different fairy tale archetypes to frame the show. But the show is critically divergent in this way: Where the novel is postmodern in structural form, SB reverts to the classic storytelling device of explicit narration. This is an apt choice for the more abstracted media of interdisciplinary live dance theater. The narration is carried out with stagey charm by vocalist\/actor Ischa Bea and string accompanist Raffi Shahanian, jointly billed as MiNX. These two serenade us in song and introduce the primary characters and their conflict: Annie Kent as Aurora and Nathan Shaw as Maleficent, in a dramatic first romantic encounter.<\/p>\n

The introduction is an intense duet. Both characters wield a carving knife in each hand. The flourishing knives never supersede their interplay; they serve as an extension of the sharp, symmetrical movement quality. Annie Kent is instantly a compelling performer in the titular role whose presence reads well in the intimate black box theater, a space with effective technical production and unobstructed sightlines from the stadium-style seating. The audience gazes down on this private moment of consensual, equal power play; it is the show\u2019s last. Maleficent alludes to the classic cursing pinprick with a knife cut along Aurora\u2019s skin, thus felling her. Aurora is put in her figurative box as an inert object of desire \u2014 by being stuffed quite literally into a cardboard box and loaded onto a dolly, which Shaw step-ball-changes, impressively lightly yet ominously, into the wings.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Nathan Shaw as Maleficent<\/p><\/div>\n

The next scene features four boxes, each containing a languid, sleeping someone in navy gender-neutral jammies \u2014 Aurora and the three Beauties, performed by Christine Hasegawa, John Allen, and Ari Hassett. Arms flop and butts lift from within as harpsichord strains evoke the Baroque, to great effect. These sleeping cuties re-emerge and re-enter their packages and sprawl onto their pillows in a very realized dreamstate, and momentarily make us wonder just what they\u2019re up to in there. They begin to interact, and execute a catching and falling sequence into the pillows. Shaw then reappears to partner the dreamers. SB newcomer Ari Hassett sought her withheld pillow by avidly scrambling up Shaw into a highflying press lift, to general gasps. She consistently displayed the great strength and agility of someone you suspect may be more comfortable inverted than not. Shaw packs them and stacks them, continuing the deft utilization of props with a believable slapstick drop of the topmost box before exiting to leave the lone packaged princess center stage.<\/p>\n

The narrator next introduces and campily sexualizes Prince Phillip, played with hyperbolic virility and suavity by Juan Carlos Claudio. He distributes flowers among the audience in the single house-lights-up nod to immersive audience interaction. Then begins the beautiful and effective and creepy duet with a half-lucid, half-conscious Kent. I have been recently discussing the classical dance trope of the partnering of an exhausted\/poisoned\/dying woman a la Swan Lake<\/em>, La Sylphide<\/em>, etc., and was gratified to see it so explicitly treated here. The narrator jumps the gun with a \u201chappily ever after\u201d: As Aurora awakens to the Prince\u2019s (steamy) nonconsensual attentions, she slaps him and heads out. Here the \u201creworking of a classic fairy tale\u201d metanarrative becomes central. The narrator frantically rewrites the story (adorably, with a feathered quill in a very contemporary libretto binder). Her accompanist, enjoined to \u201cplay something!,\u201d delivers a cringily deadpan rendition of Sublime\u2019s \u201cDate Rape.\u201d Directed to play anything else, he moves along to Eurythmics\u2019 hit \u201cSweet Dreams (Are Made of This).\u201d Tellingly, this is a shift from a direct naming of the violation of body autonomy to fantasies of dominance and submission. There is herein some precedent for the show\u2019s glancing identification of abuse pivoting to the focal artistic treatment of desire and sexuality.<\/p>\n

We next see Aurora striking out for L.A., a classic naive waif with tattered nightie, shawl, and old suitcase in tow. The former cohort of Beauties in forced slumber now become minions of their malevolent captor. They are intriguingly costumed in black, their bad-guy hats still sporting tags, Hassett in full mustachioed Groucho mask, all sporting bedroom slippers. This last addition made all the following choreography exceptionally interesting and beautiful \u2014 lots of fluid petite allegro and gliding undercurves. The three Beauties establish themselves as a compelling ensemble, whose different movement qualities mesh together in a cohesive whole.<\/p>\n

This cohesion holds well throughout the knife-wielding dance led by Shaw in what seems to be a warehouse of the boxed. Shaw\u2019s Maleficent grinds on the cardboard containing the Princess, gaining pleasure from his control. The Prince obsesses over the same object from behind a stack. The two begin a voyeuristic game of withholding and expressing proprietary power over the box, deepening their characterizations and dynamic tension. The captured and bound Prince must watch the sadistic stabbing of his object of (unilateral) desire as the box is repeatedly punctured by Maleficent and company. Thus follows another hard reset of the story as the Prince charms his way into a telling of his version of the fantasy. It is narrated as \u201can Aurora who wants saving,\u201d and is presented as the male fantasy contradiction of an experienced, sexually mature woman who is also lacking power (while literally bound at the wrists) and who requires childlike protection. This Aurora duets with each Beauty in turn before being carried off by the Prince. Kent\u2019s duet with John Allen begins in struggle but features moments of lilting beauty, especially encapsulated by a swinging turn where her feet skim and glance off the ground in a dreamlike slow skip. Christine Hasegawa expertly twines with and directs Kent in a more dominant mode, and Ari Hasset brings a forceful tenderness to their duet. Aurora\u2019s long velvety cuffs are then positioned over her eyes as a blindfold, with her elbows pointed upward. This makes for a very interesting posture in her dancing with Nathan Shaw and Juan Carlos Claudio as well as underscoring her lack of free and informed choice.<\/p>\n

After Princess Aurora is swept away, another abortive \u201chappily ever after\u201d is cut off by the Beauties, now clad in frilly frocks and silly tutus, skittering about and demanding their turn in the telling. By slumping against and running into the many cardboard boxes in a believably haphazard stupor, they in fact artfully rearrange the set pieces into a central cluster upstage. The Prince arrives to kiss them awake, with comically loud smacks, only for them to be repeatedly cursed by Maleficent, as heralded by the loud \u201csnick\u201d of the knife. It is a light treatment of the dark theme of the willing recidivism in The Beauties\u2019 victim\/perpetrator role. This cycle of drugging and waking escalates and intensifies until it comes to a head. The bodily manipulated John Allen and his repeated falls to the pillowed floor become untenably frantic, like something between Pina Bausch\u2019s Caf\u00e9 M\u00fcller<\/em> and The Three Stooges. This built tension is capitalized on as the Prince and Maleficent forge a felt erotic bond in a charged look over the inert bodies they control. The two pair up and the narrator resignedly sighs something to the effect of \u201cyou <\/em>two, of course, no, that makes perfect sense.\u201d And more so than any other moment, this one has been prefigured and developed; it perfectly does make sense.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Juan Carlos Claudio as the Prince and Annie Kent as Aurora<\/p><\/div>\n

Thereafter, as the audience can only have been eagerly anticipating throughout, Aurora takes her turn at directing the narrative centered on her experience. She voices and then enacts her own fantasy, bringing the show to its abrupt, violent conclusion.<\/p>\n

The other book Brown cites as inspiration is Joan Gould\u2019s Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal About the Transformations in a Woman\u2019s Life<\/em>. It is a nonfiction exploration of fairy tale as allegory for the breadth of the changing, lifelong experiences of womanhood. And though SB Dance presents strong and vital personalities across the gender spectrum, the central character of Aurora was not terribly developed. Rather, the multiple-narrative perspectives sacrificed her singular ontological continuity to the presentation of an object through multiple lenses. Annie Kent embodies Aurora completely and performs the role stunningly, but the role is object and naif. When she finally wrests back her agency (through engagement with the super-structural narrator, not her abusers), she enacts a brief and frenetic revenge fantasy a la Quentin Tarantino. Revenge fantasies make us feel the reward of redressing grievance, but don\u2019t do the rhetorical work of conclusively addressing expository complexity. Sleeping Beauty<\/em> features Kent as a performer but doesn\u2019t center Aurora\u2019s experience as a character.<\/p>\n

I grant that the processing of trauma, confrontation and accountability of (living) abusers, complexity of emotional attachment, and complicities would make for a very different ending \u2014 one that is less of a campy-dark combo, more truly dark. And I\u2019m not advocating for that alternative, necessarily. However, the presentational scaffolding of program notes, press releases, and interviews invite this expectation. A City Weekly<\/em> profile indicates that Aurora\u2019s character will be especially rich, and the ticketing blurb asserts a \u201c#MeToo warp\u201d to the classic tale. Organizations like Whistle While You Work<\/a> (@whistle_whileyouwork) facilitate a platform for whistle-blowing and providing resources for the dance and performing arts community to actively benefit from engagement with the #MeToo movement. While metacommentary doesn\u2019t easily make a work artistically stronger or more enjoyable, when artists choose to reference social and political movements there is then a greater onus to address them responsibly and more fully. Not to do so then borders on appropriative. Sleeping Beauty<\/em> beautifully and inventively updates a classic fairy tale and peoples it with darkly compelling archetypes. But I did wonder if it intended to address or redress the entrenched misogyny that it identifies in the original.<\/p>\n

In his program notes, Stephen Brown expresses gratitude to his truly fantastic group of co-creators with the witty neologism \u201cWTF-people,\u201d as in \u201cWTF are you doing in Utah?\u201d This is an example of the countercultural positioning that, as a nonnative, I find intriguingly endemic to Salt Lakers. It implies both separation from Utah\u2019s political and social establishment and affiliative solidarity with the subversive underground. But actually, and hopefully not to their chagrin, SB Dance is<\/em> a pillar of the local arts community. Besides being a long-running successful company with lasting internal relationships and frequent new fruitful collaborations, they are teachers and college\/university faculty, alumni of other long-standing dance institutions like Repertory Dance Theatre and Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, and entrepreneurial arts therapists. Not least is artistic\/executive director Stephen Brown, who creates programming connecting arts organizations, businesses, and local nonprofits, such as Eat Drink SLC, and serves as president of the Performing Arts Coalition, which addresses arts and culture policymaking, was instrumental in the needs assessment and creation of the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, and represents the Rose Wagner\u2019s many performing companies in residence. In fact, less so than anarchic countercultural arts rebels (of which Salt Lake is certainly possessed of a few, like personal favorite Forbidden Fruits [@slcfruits]), SB Dance is very much a part of the fabric of the Salt Lake City arts establishment. And as an innovative, sex-positive, broadly collaborative company, that is to the establishment\u2019s benefit. Perhaps this bit of Podunk posturing is an ironic understatement by an artist, producer, and organizer who in fact takes immense pride in the standing legacy and ever-growing stature of the Utah arts scene.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This article is published in collaboration with loveDANCEmore.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In addition to re-imaginings of company repertoire as well as happenings and installations throughout the year, SB Dance produces an original new work each June. Their latest, a two-night run of Sleeping Beauty at the Rose Wagner, contained many of the unique hallmarks that have developed with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1618,"featured_media":45628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[1628],"class_list":["post-45625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dance","tag-sb-dance"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/anniekentandnathanshawinsbdancesleepingbeauty.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 20:10:57","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1618"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45629,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45625\/revisions\/45629"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}