Made evident by the consistently enthusiastic response by the audience throughout the 90-minute show, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s 61st season opener, Re-Play, was a roaring successful sampler of the legendary institution’s artistic brand and character.
Joining a sharper, more rousing rendition of LajaMartin’s The Bunker (2022), the two world premieres — Purple Sonata 24 by Daniel Charon, the company’s artistic director, and It’s Great to Be Here by Monica Bill Barnes, whose company is a major dance institution in New York City — capped an ebullient, approachable, riveting experience that equally delighted new and veteran audience members.
Photo: Stuart Ruckman.
The Bunker is a marvelous piece of dance theater, which resonates with the same wit, energy and flourish that the company’s founders — Joan Woodbury and Shirley Ririe — created, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. Created by Laja Field and Martin Ďurov, the work is a sassy, fabulous, serve-the-tea homage to the world of reality pop culture, concocted with the refinement of, for example, a well-executed Mexican mole sauce. As noted previously in The Utah Review, it quotes, twists and remixes moments that viewers have relished from CBS’s Big Brother, MTV’s The Real World, Bravo’s Below Deck and Vanderpump Rules, with RuPaul’s Drag Race added for earthy spice. The six dancers (Nick Elizondo, Megan McCarthy, Fausto Rivera, Sasha Rydlizky, Miche’ Smith and Luke Dakota Zender) also confidently play up the theatrical comedy of the setting. It resembles the Biosphere 2 of the 1990s, on the next to the last day of the year they have had to endure each other during an isolation experiment.
Photo: Stuart Ruckman.
The theatrics in this performance were ramped up from the 2022 premiere, especially in the extended sequence where the dancers are trying to get through the last time of doing laundry before they are allowed to emerge after being cooped up for an entire year. Never has a routine chore looked better. Meanwhile, their morale is exhausted and their nerves are raw, evidenced by the occasional rants and rage. On stage, all six are as comfortable and confident as actors as they are dancers. The live video and stills put the cherry on this ingenious sendup of artificially constructed reality, complete with a concluding narration delivered by Sila Agavale about where each of the intrepid group of six ended up (prison, business entrepreneurship, celebrity, fashion designer, etc.) Ďurov’s remixed soundtrack throbs with the proper tone and textures, showcasing musical quotes from Bruno Mars’ Leave the Door Open, Rupert Holmes’s Escape (the Pina Colada Song) and Ďurov’s original remix of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing.
In his 12th season, Charon took a different path to realize Purple Sonata 24, one of the most poetically stirring, mellow and dreamy works set recently on Ririe-Woodbury dancers. Charon’s works often have sprung from his curiosity about technology’s impact on human emotions and community, his love of literature and science fiction in particular and his enjoyment of film, video and television. As noted in The Utah Review’s preview of Re-Play, the work and its title reflect Charon’s favorite color (purple) and his reconnecting to playing the violin (which he studied as a child and recently resumed lessons along with playing in the Wasatch Community Symphony).
Collaborating with the dancers, Charon set the work based on the entire Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano (2008) by Philip Glass, a chamber piece he has admired deeply and has added to his violin studies. The choreographic interpretation in all three movements is a striking mirror reflection of Glass’s minimalist music language which evokes some Baroque sensibilities (imagine if Vivaldi were alive in the 21st century because he would likely embrace simialr stylistic choices). The dancers were tuned in directly to the creative brief for this work, as they moved in duets, trios, and other combinations. The music’s dark and anxious moods in the first movement were reproduced with impressive credibility by the dancers. The second movement produced some of the finest touching moments, especially in the duet with Zender and McCarthy. The sonata’s final movement has plenty of show-stopping moments, which the dancers replicated with equal effect.
Photo: Stuart Ruckman.
This was the first regular season appearance of the company’s two newest members (Elizondo and Zender) and, consistent to other seasons when new members have joined this beautifully integrated dance ensemble, the chemistry in Purple Sonata 24 was precise and kinetic. There are some who dismiss Glass’ music as showy without much substance, too facile or primitive or even vulgar for its seemingly straightforward harmonic progressions and its repetition. But, in Charon’s sensitive appreciation and deep listening for this sonata, the music’s inner gifts really have come through in this astute choreographic rendering. Likewise, for the work, which Charon dedicated to his partner in life (Natalie Desch), costume designer Melissa Younker and her use of purple accentuated the imaginative choreographic landscape that was created.
No one could have asked for a better nightcap to a season opener than with Monica Bill Barnes’ It’s Great to Be Here, which brought the audience to its feet for a standing ovation. The work featured not only the six Ririe-Woodbury dancers but 28 student dancers from six Utah universities: Utah Valley University, Brigham Young University, Weber State University, Southern Utah University, University of Utah and Westminster University.
This work is all about personality, where the choreographer had generously opened up the space on stage to let each individual dancer’s true character come forward. Barnes originally conceived the material as a duet in New York City, working with her colleague Flannery Gregg, who came to Salt Lake City and staged the work and worked out the complex logistics of making 34 dancers appear on stage without it ever seeming too crowded.
The six Ririe-Woodbury dancers dominate the first two sections of the work, which feature two familiar Bach pieces: Gavotte from the Cello Suite No. 6 in D Major, BWV 1012, in a famous recording by Mstislav Rostropovich and the Sarabande from Partita No. 1 in B-Flat Major, BWV, recorded by Nils Anders Mortensen. What was especially appealing came in how the dancers teased out an edgy contemporary swagger from the music, snapping their fingers and moving, sliding and strutting in a groove that fit right into the Bach background. The historical fact is that Bach was much more of a rebel and maverick than what gatekeepers of musical history have allowed in previous generations. Barnes’ choice of Bach makes excellent sense. And, the nonverbal communication was splendid, with the eye contact from all six capturing the lexicon of emojis we extensively use today.
Photo: Stuart Ruckman.
When the music pivots to David Bowie’s Let’s Dance and Under Pressure, the epic collaboration of Bowie and Queen, the six dancers cue up the dance party that eventually takes up the entire stage. No doubt: the audience loved it. This critic often talks about the breadth and depth of the talent bench in Utah dance and this work drives home the point of why we should always celebrate the culture of dance in these parts of the Intermountain West. It was just as telling when the dancers from Southern Utah University, who had a three-and-a-half-hour drive of more than 250 miles one way, knew that they could not pass up a thrilling moment of Utah dance history that was made with the Re-Play season opener.