EDITOR’S NOTE: For preview coverage of the 49th Utah Arts Festival, which runs June 19-22, The Utah Review is presenting individual or group profiles of artists, performers, entertainers and some newcomers to the event. Visitors will also see the first significant change of the last 15 years in the festival map. There are several new features this year: Voodoo Productions’ street theater will include roaming graffiti stilt walkers, contortionists and living master works of art. Salt Lake Acting Company will appear for the first time at the festival, offering a sample from its upcoming summer show, The Secret Lives of the Real Wives in the Salt Lake Hive. Urban Arts is offering its largest live graffiti mural installation, while a row of several other artists will be demonstrating their creative process in real time. For kids, as admission for those 12 and under will be free, there will be plenty of make-and-take art options in Frozen Spaces in the Art Yard. The City Library auditorium will be the home to the 22nd edition of the international Fear No Film program, with the strongest slate of narrative short films in the event’s history. Of course, dance, who wears the empress jewels in performing arts, will be represented by Repertory Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Echoing Spirit Dancers and, of course, the ever-popular 1520 Arts, at The Round. For tickets and more information, see the Utah Arts Festival website.
ELISE WILLIAMS’ SIDE HUSTLE DANCE PROJECT (June 20, 3 p.m., Festival Stage)
Among the Emerging Artists performers for this year’s festival, Elise Williams is another example of the prolific dance scene in Utah as an independent entrepreneurial choreographic artist. A white South African native, Williams was trained in and performed in ballet but after a hiatus she decided to take the contemporary and urban dance path. She began exploring dance theater as inspired by the legendary Pina Bausch; Gaga, created by Ohad Naharin, a movement language that focuses on expanding awareness of physical sensations, enhancing movement quality, and exploring new ways of moving, and the works of the U.K.-based DV8 Physical Theatre, which broke down barriers between dance, theatre and personal politics.
Along with dancer LeGrande Lolo, Williams will perform a 30-minute ‘paint piece’ in which they will start with a blank canvas and their movements with splashed paint will create a finished work. Williams said the premise for the work stems from what she describes as a white person coming to terms with the painful repressive legacy of apartheid and white colonization. She explained, “True I wasn’t an active part of apartheid but I come from its shadows and part of my work on this earth is to correct it, starting with self-reflection and hopefully encouraging others to do the same.” An example of her work is found here.
The idea of the Side Hustle Dance Project for Williams is that this venture, as she describes, “will always be my side hustle until it’s my main hustle.” Her current work emulates the iterative and organic choreographic process of Robert Moses, which brings together improvisation, research much like what a dramaturg accomplishes in theater, and continuous honing and refining of movement phrases and vocabulary relevant to a specific work.
Williams spent her formative years in ballet including west Africa, Atlanta, New York and Utah, as well as in San Diego and the Pacific Northwest. She became welded to the creative potential of multimedia dance theater during her time at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance.
Elise Williams and LeGrande Lolo. Photo Credit: Robin Pendergrast.
Williams returned to Utah in 2007 and became interested in acro-yoga. But, she then went on hiatus, and returned to dance only within the last couple of years, while she worked as a waiter. Williams began keeping a dance diary that was integral to her choreographic process and felt satisfied that she had finally found her true self in dance. She decided to collaborate with LeGrande Lolo, to contribute a work to 801Salon’s Playground Project.
For her festival work, she will ask two volunteers from the audience to assist with the paint. Williams has conceived the work as rich in symbolism, drawing elements, for example, from butoh, the Japanese art of modern dance that emerged a decade after the atomic bombings as a way of dealing with the trauma of the war. Likewise, Williams has selected music to parallel the elements of pain, rejuvenation and baptism, love and empowerment: droning sounds associated with the butoh movement, the warm textures of Ibiza music, classical sounds and percussion.
Williams’ next production for the Side Hustle Dance Project will take place in the fall. Springing from themes associated with late-stage capitalism, CHOICE: History of the Hustle and What’s Next, will be an evening-length production to imagine, as she explains it, a new world and forgotten systems that can offer several optional and possible adventures for humanity. The work’s premiere is slated Sept. 18-20 at the Black Box Theatre in the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts.
For more information, see Williams’ Instagram account.