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.
VOODOO PRODUCTIONS: STREET THEATER
An earlier version of this feature was published on June 26, 2024.
For the second year in a row, the Salt Lake City-based Voodoo Productions will be offering street theater performances on each of the festival’s four days.
Salt Lake City’s deep benches of talent in all forms of dance, music, theater, acrobatics and aerialists and spoken word and slam poetry has fed the network for artists interested in the art of cirque performance. In a 2025 interview with The Utah Review, Jennifer Tarasevich, owner and talent coordinator of Voodoo Productions, said that as demand from clients grew for cirque-style performers in other cities, “I decided to ramp up the efforts in Salt Lake City to organize a hub for cirque talent.” She added that Voodoo Productions has recruited cirque talent with documentation that they are at the top of their game in skills and professions. Periodically, she will issue casting calls for those who have expressed an interest by submitting their portfolio of work.
Voodoo Productions has filled every imaginable request, according to Tarasevich, including large numbers of bagpipers, or pirates and mermaids for exclusive shows as well as Santa Claus for the winter holdings. She explained that their production formula prioritizes creating fresh show content, as needed. Tarasevich said that Voodoo Productions has continued to expand over the past year with hubs and collaborators in the following cities: Denver, Miami, New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. “Our recent focus has been cultivating new local talent and acts, as well as creating immersive offerings that haven’t been available here in Utah before,” she added.
Prior to the 2024 event, when the Utah Arts Festival planners approached Tarasevich about performances involving the same spaces that international acts have used in previous years on the Library Plaza in downtown, she said, “I told that we can make that happen.”
For the festival, Voodoo Productions, which has a well-established portfolio of corporate clients and special events performances, has created acts with new elements that will be seen publicly for the first time. Tarasevich added, “It takes a little circus village to make it happen.”
The newest roving performance acts will include Living Masterpieces: Witness Van Gogh’s Self Portrait with a Felt Hat and Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring step out of their frames through meticulously body-painted performers who interact with audiences and create unforgettable photo opportunities.
Likewise, festival visitors also will see flower ballerinas, with professional dancers en pointe transforming themselves into living bouquets, accented by elaborate floral headpieces and signature platter tutus as they gracefully weave through the festival grounds. Also, surrealist dancers will be featured, where reality bends as contortionists attired in avant-garde costumes perform atop museum pedestals, bringing the dream-like qualities of surrealism into three dimensions. Finally, graffiti stilt walkers will showcase how urban art can reach new heights, with seven-foot-tall performers who combine street art aesthetics with theatrical movement.
The festival’s renewed embrace of street theater resonates with this year’s event, which features emerging artists in every program and new performers on every stage this weekend. “Today, in the cities full of events, the popular spectacle returns to take on an increasingly important significance, aided by the policies of reappropriation of historic centers. Not only the street but also urban spaces lend themselves to become scenic spaces. … New artistic forms are born that combine theatre with plastic arts, circus arts, and mime,” Sebastiano Spinella explained in a 2022 essay. “Popular theatre today, therefore, goes back to the people, rediscovering an ancient decentralization. All this determines the encounter even with people who do not possess theatrical culture and who perhaps would have no other way to assimilate to this type of experience live.”
“It thrills me as an event organizer when people realize that they do not have to go out of state to find this type of experience because we have the talent and resources to do this in Utah on the same scale,” Tarasevich added.