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.
Photo Credit: The City Library
BANDALOOP
It is the most logical choice for the Utah Arts Festival to celebrate its 50th anniversary with one of its most popular featured artistic ensembles, BANDALOOP, which marks its 35th anniversary as a pioneer in vertical dance. The internationally acclaimed company, which is based in Oakland, California, returns to the Festival, after previous performances in 2005, 20 13 and 2018. The Festival is the second stop for BANDALOOP on a four-city tour in June, which started in Pittsburgh and will continue in Dallas and Aspen after Salt Lake City.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Melecio Estrella, BANDALOOP’s artistic director, talked about how the company translates choreography started in a studio which then will be rehearsed and performed, for example, on the 240-foot-high curving glass façade of the City Library in downtown Salt Lake City. “In the studio, we generate our material through personal stories and we also draw from our dancers’ movement backgrounds and we do a lot of research along with a lot of reading and dramaturgy, which we take into our bodies,” he explained.
Throughout its 35 years, BANDALOOP has created works that honor unique architectural features in urban buildings, mountain settings, rock formations, historical sites including UNESCO heritage sites, open air arenas and stadiums and interior spaces such as cathedrals, malls, atriums, warehouses and ballrooms. The bottom line is that the choreographic and conceptual process for BANDALOOP’s contemporary dance repertoire unfolds just like it would for a traditional company, with the significant distinction of adapting to and having a conversation with the architecture, the geographic place and, of course, wind and weather conditions.
When the company developed FLOCK, which had its premiere at The Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas, the dancers shared their personal experiences about birds as well as their own stories about families and migration.
“We write about it and then we move the research and the personal stories into generating core movement material both on the ground and on the wall in the studio,” Estrella said. “It is our clay that generates the material which we then sculpt and play with and edit. In Oakland, California where BANDALOOP is based, the company rehearses on two large walls in the city’s downtown, made possible through partnerships with the respective building owners. A most crucial consideration for dancers engaged in flight choreography and in aerial and vertical dance is the length of the rope and its effect on pendulum swings and timing.
FLOCK emerged from Bird Strike, a work drawn from how birds migrate and build nests in urban spaces, which the company performed during the Teatro a Mil international arts festival in Santiago, Chile in January 2023, they performed their show Bird Strike, a piece inspired by the migration and nesting of birds in urban space. The piece weaved the descriptive themes of the migratory pathways birds rely on as well as the metaphorical and political parallels to the immigration stories of families.
A score composed by Ben Juodvalkis included Spanish and English vocals performed by Destani Wolf, a well-known singer with Bobby Mcferrin’s Motion, Cirque Du Soleil, and numerous Grammy-nominated albums. Chile is one stop on the massive migratory corridor known as the Pacific Americas Flyway. BANDALOOP also performed it in several California locations that are part of the same migratory corridor. In a 2024 interview with the Alameda Post, Estrella said, “Migratory birds, directed by ancient internal maps, can perhaps inspire us to consider our own personal migration stories and what wisdom they may hold for us as we navigate the ever increasing changes and challenges of environmental and social change.”
Last year’s premiere of the correct version of FLOCK in Bentonville, Arkansas was well chosen because the city lies along the migratory corridor of the Mississippi Flyway which follows the Mississippi, Missouri, and Lower Ohio Rivers in the U.S. and reaches Canada’s Mackenzie River and Hudson Bay.
For the Festival, BANDALOOP will perform excerpts from FLOCK which are integrated into elements of two other company works: Downstream’ and its newest repertory piece, life || lines. The combination is the definitive choreographic statement for Festival patrons who have been deeply concerned about the Great Salt Lake’s ecological crisis. Utah is a primary layover for birds migrating on the central and Pacific flyways. Downstream pays choreographic tribute to the dynamics of tributaries, flows and watersheds. With its encompassing meta themes, the new work life || lines, which touches on the vital, essential relationships we cherish and preserve, speaks dramatically to the existential questions about whether the lake can be rescued and revived. In recent years, there has been a spate of dance and theatrical works in Utah which have touched on the assemblage of themes which BANDLOOP articulates in the body of work being featured at the Festival.
Thinking about the creeks and rivers of their childhood for Downsteam, Estrella said that he and Farrell thought about how these waterways also are keepers of time, how they are transformed over time and contemplating the choices which our ancestors made and the challenge for us in selecting the right choices.
Regarding the music for life || lines, Estrella commissioned Kate Diaz who made her Broadway composing debut with the musical Redwood, which stars Idina Menzel. Estrella met Diaz while he was recruited to choreograph the musical.
Estrella, who joined the company in 2002, is intimately familiar with the City Library wall, upon which BANDALOOP will dance for the fourth time since 2005. “What strikes me about that place is just how gorgeous the whole landscape is and what we can see from the roof, which is just breathtaking,” he said. “It’s one of the gifts of our job— the adventure of dancing and the excitement of performing in these kinds of landscapes and having the vistas that we have from the rooftops. What comes to mind is the gorgeousness of Salt Lake City and those mountains and the way the clouds form in Salt Lake City is not like anywhere else in the world.”
Unlike cement walls, a curving glass wall such as the one at the City Library is great for BANDALOOP’s dancers who can perform barefoot and slide smoothly on the surface. “We’re dancing with our own reflections, and when we’re looking at the wall, we can see the reflection of the audience, which is really nice so we can feel the presence behind us and in front of us of the audience,” Estrella said. “Also, the sun shines on our backs and then reflects onto our faces where we can feel the heat of the sunlight. The curve of the wall is really graceful. I mean, the whole building itself is really graceful. We’re honored to dance here.”
Co-directed by Melecio Estrella and Damara Vita Ganley, they lead an ensemble of extraordinary dancers including Jose Abad, Rose Huey, B Dean, Jessica Swanson, Sarah Keeney and Wailana Simcock for this performance.
Performances will take place June 18 at 7 p.m, and June 19-20 at 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.