The time for the 10th edition of Emerge, Repertory Dance Theatre’s annual showcase of original choreography by company dancers and staff, coincided beautifully with the company’s season-long celebration of its 60th anniversary. When RDT was founded with a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1966, it included a commitment that the company’s artists would develop choreography. Emerge has blossomed over the years, as each work has championed the exceptional scope of Utah’s dance ecosystem, which per capita ranks the state nationally among the top when it comes to dance as an internationally recognized Utah feature in performing arts.
The opener, 60 Moves/60 Years, by Linda Smith, RDT’s co-founder and director emerita, set the appropriate tone. Smith selected a work from each of the company’s 60 years and assigned a short movement phrase from each one to a current company dancer. Meanwhile, the soundtrack featured snippets of recorded memories from the company alumni about their experiences, with the collage edited by Trevor Price. The work is a valuable oral history artefact that will be immensely helpful to future arts journalists and historians.
In Commencement, Ursula Perry, now in her 12th season with the company, set work featuring Utah dance educators. “I wanted to explore the idea of commencement. The end of something, the start of something new,” Perry explained, in an email interview. “The wonder, nostalgia, and reverence that come with it. Each of these talented educators find themselves dealing with this every year with their students, as well as I in this being my last season with the company. I also wanted to showcase how beautifully each of these dancers tell their own stories.” Perry’s piece highlighted a signature strength in the Utah dance community, showing that teachers are not just responsible for future dance artists, they sustain their commitments to being artists themselves.
Set to Futo by Shida Shahabi, Commencement reverberated with Perry’s own experiences in the Utah dance community. I have never been in a place where dance is everywhere. In elementary schools, middle schools, high schools. There is some form of dance incorporated within the curriculum, and that would not be without the pioneer that I have worked alongside for the past thirteen years,” she explained. “Without Linda [Smith], alongside Shirley [Ririe] and Joan [Woodbury], the founders of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, and nVirginia [Tanner] (to name a few), this community would not be as rich in its access to dance. The wealth of dance history that I have been adjacent to in my tenure with this company I will never take for granted. It has truly been a privilege to be a part of this legacy.”
Offering one of two duets for the evening, Kara Komarnitsky’s Mine, which she performed with Lauren Cheree Wightman, provided some of the most emotional riveting moments in Emerge. Set to music from Jon Hopkins’ Immunity album, the piece is part of an ongoing project Komarnitsky has been conducting, by “using light to represent witness in relationships and embodying different dynamics of resistance, surrender, tension, and closeness.”
The piece opens as a duet with counterpoints of tenderness and friction that become more tense and less passionate. But then the piece becomes a solo, with the dancer partnering with the shadows created by changes in stage lighting. As the choreographer explained in an email interview, the soloist is “manipulating the shadows with resistance and fear, sometimes finding freedom and release. She finally turns forward and the lights change once again, returning to the original witness, the dancer opening and offering up different pieces of herself to the light.” It is an arresting study of the abstract creative possibilities with lighting and shadow effects.
Once again, company dancer Alexander Pham offered a skillfully mature example of his faculties as a choreographer. For the last five years, Pham has worked with the Davis High Dance Company and this year, Kitsune was set as an ensemble piece for 26 dancers. The works he sets for the high school dance company arise from a programmatic theme that will characterize an annual concert. Working with the current year’s theme of Myths and Legends, Pham was inspired by the Kitsune of Japanese folklore. As he explained in an email interview, “A kitsune is a mythical Japanese fox spirit known for its intelligence, long life, and supernatural powers, especially shapeshifting into human form, often appearing as a beautiful woman or trickster.”
Using music from the soundtrack of Squid Games 2 which was composed by Jung Jaeil, Pham explained that the work “highlights my love for creating visual architecture and patterning. My choreographic brain tends to work in methodical ways, and the Davis High Dance Company is always able to bring to life the kaleidoscope that lives in my artistic vision right now.” This was abundantly evident in the performance, which the young dancers executed with impressive results.
Pham magnifies the undercurrents of Emerge’s artistic mission. “The Utah dance community has shown me exactly what community means. I continue to witness and experience this beautiful rhizome that feeds one another and isn’t insular or protective of success and reach,” he noted. “Whether it’s attending one another’s performances, creating meaningful dialogue about the world at large through dance-making, amplifying emerging or underserved voices, etc. – there’s an ecosystem here that feels enlivened and taken care of by all of those inhabit it. Because all of the dance artists in SLC truly care about their craft and the impact that dance can and has made.”
Another compelling example was Es Solo Un Momento, choreographed by Jacob Lewis, who leads RDT’s Dance Center on Broadway, and featured eight participants, ranging in age from 20 to 50, who rehearsed for four weeks during an adult-community workshop. The title comes from a verse in Reliquia, a song by Rosalía, the exceptionally innovative Latin America superstar singer. The spiritual undercurrents came through nicely both in the choreography and performance.
It was heartening to see the extent of community presence on stage, with more than 75 dancers outside of the company joining in Emerge. Eleven dancers from the South Valley Creative Dance studio were delightful to see in Nicholas Cendese’s At the Edge of an Ending, with music by the Latvian composer George Pelecis. Working with 11 dancers from Weber State University, RDT company dancers Caleb Daly and Caitlyn Richter set an intriguing piece,No Sense, to music by The Art of Noise, a British group that pioneered the use of sampling in commercial electronic music. Daniel Do recreated the Folded Landscapes, a work that he set for a duet of Westminster University dancers for a concert last fall. The work was created with the requirements that all movement had to be set within a space measuring eight feet by eight feet, with a duration of eight minutes or less, and with only eight hours of rehearsal time. Ingeniously resourceful, the piece touched on themes about the environment and opportunities to nurture practical wisdom about sustainability, resource conservation and scarcity.
With seven freelance dancers from the community and plenty of pillows, Megan O’Brien’s experimental choreography Soft Landing explored the efforts of finding the cushions for absorbing the challenging events and transitions of life experiences. Quoting writer, educator and coach Nadeen Alalami, O’Brien framed her work around the source’s words: “Soft landings do not erase pain; they do not take away grief or uncertainty, but they make it bearable. They make it possible to fall and not break—to be held in the pain, to gently get up, take a step, and trust again.”