EDITOR’S NOTE: For preview coverage of the 50th Utah Arts Festival, which runs June 18-21, The Utah Review is presenting individual or group profiles of artists, performers, entertainers and some newcomers to the event. The curtain raiser highlights the history of the Festival which is marking its golden anniversary. BANDALOOP, among the most prominent pioneers of vertical dance, returns to UAF for the fourth time, having appeared in 2005. 2013 and 2018. Once again, the Oakland-based arts company will perform on the 240-foot-high curving glass façade of the City Library, as part of a June tour in four cities featuring a work with ecological roots that will resonate with collective concerns about the Great Salt Lake’s ecological crisis, as the dance artists perform FLOCK while integrating company repertoire pieces including Downstream and its new creation, life || lines, all with an original score featuring music by four composers. Salt Lake Acting Company will appear for the second time at the festival, offering a sample from its upcoming summer show, The Gaslight Zone. Make-and-take opportunities will be among the most extensive in history, with Make Salt Lake as well as Secondhand Salamander which is bringing back the classic Mad Hatter project, and, of course, the Kids’ Art Yard. Urban Arts is offering its largest live graffiti mural installation featuring eight artists in four Festival campus locations, while a row of several other artists will be demonstrating their creative process in real time. Holdman Studios, based in Lehi with an international portfolio of commissions to create stained glass in religious and civic buildings, including a recent update to the Utah State Capitol rotunda, is offering an unprecedented series of free workshops for participants to create their own stained glass artwork. The City Library auditorium will be the home to the 23rd edition of the international Fear No Film program, with 84 short films on a slate of 15 programs, the second largest 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, Sock Opera Dance, and, of course, the ever-popular 1520 Arts, which will feature Trash Panda Drum Group and competitions featuring Sol Tribe as part of the Salt Open Styles Battle along with the Red Bull Dance Your Style battle and a collaboration with Utah Valley University’s ESPRIT in Rep Your Set Choreo Competition, with choreographers who specialize variously in hip hop, contemporary, salsa, reggaeton, afro, popping. Headliners this year include Digable Planets, well known among jazz musicians as well as hip hop artists (June 18); Yola, six-time Grammy-nominated artist, songwriter, and actor (June 19); Austin-based musician Alejandro Rose-Garcia, better known as Shakey Graves, who has been cited for creating new musical experiences tailored to each fan, ranging from Bandcamp-exclusive releases to hosting interactive scavenger hunts while on tour (June 20) and Rubblebucket, a band well known for its hybrid genre blend of psychedelia and electronic dance music (June 21). For tickets and more information, see the Utah Arts Festival website.
CONSTANCE ANDERSON
Constance Anderson, who earned her master of fine arts degree in modern dance at The University of Utah, has two projects in different venues at this year’s Festival, including one of the Utah short films for Fear No Film (Sissy, a screendance project) and Phantom Limb, a dance work which her company Sock Opera Dance will perform.
Anderson has previously created site-specific work that augments and amplifies a venue’s architecture. Sock Opera Dance, which she established in 2019, enhances the creative experimentation of the process and dances she has choreographed for such spaces.
Among the works that she has considered as inspirational and influential for developing her own movement language is Bodies of Water, which premiered in 2016 in Seattle as a five-hour hybrid performance spectacle by Italian-American choreographer Alice Gosti, in collaboration with composer Benjamin Marx, produced by Velocity Dance Center. Also, she has been drawn to the work of the U.K.-based Gecko, an internationally touring physical theater company, as well as works by Karl Wilhelm Alexander Ekman, a Swedish ballet dancer and choreographer. One of Ekman’s most noted works was Cacti, featuring 16 dancers who collaborate on creating rhythms. The work so impressed Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands that she gave the work as a gift to the Norwegian royal family. Anderson’s graduate studies also emphasized philosophy and phenomenology, which nicely augment other influences such as clown based theater, film and fashion, especially the works of figures such as Wes Anderson, Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood.
SISSY (Fear No Film Screening: Friday, June 19 at 2 PM, Utah Program 1)
Inspired in part by the story of St. Joan of Arc, imagery of women in armor and the tough resilience of her mother and sister, Anderson set out to develop her project. In an interview with The Utah Review, Anderson, whose Sock Opera Dance company also will be performing during the Festival, said, “I really don’t see chainmail very often as a costume and I thought about how that would look on screen or how it would make dancers move differently because it does have the weight to it.”
Additionally, as a gardener, she explained, “There’s something about the fragility of plants mixed with this very intense heavy material that feels initially hyper-feminine to me but also is very strong because it takes a long time to grow. And, there’s a patience to them but once they’re there, they’re pretty, and have a lot of longevity and strength. So there’s something about the juxtaposition of these two things that spoke to each other.”
To enhance these effects, Anderson used 16-mm film, instead of shooting digitally, and recruited Garrett Ranger as DP. The floral costuming props were provided by Galore Floral artist Meagan Bertelsen. The work features dance artists Addison Cambia, Maeve Friedman, Alex Seager and Mads Ward. The original soundtrack, with march-like rhythms that emphasize resilience and resistance, was composed by Ble Biru (Minas Vakaloudis).
PHANTOM LIMB, SOCK OPERA DANCE (JUNE 19, 6 p.m., The Round)
Sock Opera Dance will perform Phantom Limb, which features a prominent fully integrated prop in the choreography—a fifteen-foot-long swan sculpture created by artist Cody Anderson. During a residency in Spain last year, Anderson was inspired by a 17th century painting in the Prado: The Recognition of Philopoemen, a rare and brilliant collaboration in the Baroque Era by Peter Paul Reubens and Frans Snyders. The painting illustrates a moral story from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. The details are rich nd striking, as the painters depicted a ravishing abundance of animal carcasses and provisions — including prominently a swan— that project sensations of both sumptuousness and crudeness. It is stunning how such a 17th century painting could seem so painfully relevant in our contemporary time.
The swan’s imagery in the painting promulgated the creative concept for Anderson’s choreography. “We have a beautiful swan which is initially pulled onto the stage as a trophy and by the end of the piece we realize that it has been decapitated and conquered. But, in the end, it is actually beautiful,” she explained. Anderson works from the conceptual ideal of the exquisite corpse, which was championed by the French Surrealists in the 1920s. The ideal branched out from the classic literary and poetry game, where each person writes a word on paper, folds it, and passes it on to the next player for his or her contribution. The general sentence or narrative structure is established at the outset to avoid letting the flow head off in an absurd, ridiculous or irrelevant direction.
The work has gone through several iterations and the Festival performance will be the first time that the completed sculpture will be on stage. “Honestly, it’s a surrealist interpretation of loss,” Anderson explained, adding that it also captures the emotion of wanting something so badly but one cannot figure out how to get it or even if it is necessarily the thing they want. Furthermore, it is realizing that it was a dead end in the first place because it turned out to be something we did not need. “I feel like I made it from a dark place, but the rehearsal process has had such a beautiful levity to it because we were making it just to be with each other,” she said. “So, I felt like the community surrounding it has actually made the piece very bright for me, even though it was very dark content at the beginning.”
The piece is performed almost entirely without music, save for a one-minute snippet from Girls Just Wanna Have Some by The Chromatics.