Summer Update!

PHOTO: PELLE RINK

Hello from all of us at NOW-ID, 

We thought we might share some recent news. NOW-ID has been working with local editor Chris Howard to finish a short film of "FEAST", set to Jesper Egelund's music. Even though it obviously can't beat seeing the work "Live" - it still gives a glimpse into the world that was created out at the Great Saltair last May. See the film here.

We are taking "FEAST" to Kansas in November to the Kansas Dance Festival, where we are collaborating with the dance and music departments at the University of Wichita to build even further on the original piece.

Nathan and Charlotte were interviewed by Gavin's Underground for City Weeklywhich you can read here.

Charlotte recently returned from teaching at the WildWind Performance Lab in Lubbock, Texas. This is a new non-traditional, process-oriented Performance Lab that has a pretty phenomenal Faculty. Amongst others: writer David Kranes, J Ranelli (Founding member of the tony-award winning Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Director of "Law and Order" on NBC and more), , Shannon Robert (Designer and Associate professor at Clemson University), Blessed Unrest (Theater company out of NYC) and many more.

She is now heading off to Baton Rouge next week to do a short residency and then on to Copenhagen in August. In Copenhagen she will be choreographing and performing in a site with the Copenhagen-based Figura Ensemble. The project is titled "Et glimt... så er jeg væk igen" (roughly translated: "A glimpse...and then I am gone again").

The project is staged at the Marienlyst Castle north of Copenhagen and has a team of collaborators (musicians, actors, opera-singers, dancers) from Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and more. The work considers the concept of identity.

The project will have a run of 12 performances, so if you are in Copenhagen August 23 - 26th... consider making the trip up to this extraordinary 1588 castle located in the historic center of Helsingor.
 

Have a wonderful Summer from all of us here at NOW-ID and please stay tuned for all of the events we have coming up this year. For more information, contact or visit us anytime at: www.now-id.com

Nathan & Charlotte

Body 0.1: Artemia (Triassic-Present)

[hw]Artemia, or the humble Brine Shrimp, or for those of us of a certain age, Sea Monkeys. [/hw] The great Salt Lake, while widely believed to be a lifeless body of water, is indeed hostile to most aquatic life, but ideal for the alien-like Brine Shrimp, which thrives in highly salty or otherwise toxic environments. The little beasts, which differ little from fossil records of their kin tens of millions of years old, are harvested commercially by highly competitive fishermen, who race to "swarms" spotted from planes. Fishermen have been known to fight over a prime swarm. The harvested shrimp and their eggs are sold as tropical fish food and for commercial fish farming, and can fetch $35 a pound. The dried creatures can live in suspended animation for years, thus making check-out aisle purchase in little paper envelopes a possibility. However their lack of crowns and other royal trappings disappointed many a young customer. Lest ye think these shrimps of the animal world harmless, Mike Cassidy's horrifying science fiction (not so) classic, Attack of the Brine Shrimp (1980), clearly shows the wage of such ignorance. Watch it if you dare. -Mark Hofeling

Ghosts 0.2: The End of the First Saltair

[hw]It started in Ali Baba Cave, the fire. [/hw] Workmen were getting the Saltair ready for the upcoming summer season of children, swimmers, and dancers. In those days, a half million of them came each year by train arriving from downtown Salt Lake City every 45 minutes. The first train unloaded at 9:30 in the morning, the last emptied the dance hall at midnight. Beloved since its opening in 1893, the Saltair was a Moorish style palace designed by architect Richard Kletting. It brought sophistication and prestige to the misunderstood people who settled in the desert at the edge of the inland sea. The Coney Island of the West, they called it. It hovered over the Great Salt Lake atop 2500 wooden pilings and had a pier over 1000 feet-long. It had the world’s largest dance hall, 600 bath houses, a Ferris wheel, roller coaster, merry-go-round, and boat rides. Not too long before it burned, it was so popular that the Charlston was banned "for fear all those people coming hard on the down beat would shake the whole pavilion into the lake," wrote Wallace Stegner.

The workman who discovered the four-foot-tall flames caressing the wall of the cave that day in April 1925, managed to tamp out the fire, but by the time he’d returned with help, the wind had rallied the blaze.

In the end the Ali Baba Cave was lost. The Salt Lake Telegram also reported that the Fun House and Hippodrome were lost, as well as Dinty Moore’s, the Old Scenic Railway, Dodgem, Ship’s café, a shooting gallery, the Automat, a photography gallery, twelve hot dog stands, some concessions stands, and a bathing suit house, as well as the famous dancing pavilion. “The smoke cleared slowly and left a gaunt-like pavilion, once the largest dance hall in the world, nothing but a network of wooden posts gnawed at by the tongues of fire.”

--Amie Tullius

Ghosts 0.1: Palimpsests

[hw]Writing tablets[/hw] used by ancient Romans were coated with wax, so they could be written on, then smoothed, then written on again. It was Cicero who described this process with the word “palimpsest” a word from Greek, παλίμψηστος, or palímpsestos, which meant “scraped clean and used again.”

The word came to be applied to the reuse of other writing materials, as well. Crackly, reed-based papyrus, is delicate and does not take well to either scrubbing or time, but the more robust skin-based parchment was frequently reused. The animal membrane was also labor intensive to create, having to be stretched tight on a frame, cleaned, bleached, and scraped. Scraped wet. Scraped dry. Scraped and stretched again. And so it was often wiped clean rather than archived.

A grain ledger might have been rubbed by a poet with milk and oat bran until the ink washed away. Years later, increments and amounts would start to reappear, and juxtapose themselves among the verses. Legal documents might be cleaned 300 years after their first incarnation, to come back as correspondence in a different era, different handwriting, different culture.

Our palimpsest is a place. Our page is a landscape, washed by water, salt, fire, and wind. Because it is so stark, everything that's written on the Salt Flats takes on a distinctness, even if it doesn't endure. What's left after the inevitable erasure are trilobites mingling on the page among Ferris wheels, and Victorian bathers bobbing corklike in the 25% salt content of the Great Salt Lake-- though their impression is only faintly visible. Garfield & Western's interurban rail cars are scribbled on by Deadmau5. And soon enough that is scrubbed off. The Saltair itself has been rubbed away by fire and then re-written twice. They say that it's haunted.

Perhaps "ghost" is another word for the writing of an earlier era.

--Amie Tullius

Update + Script Excerpt from Playwrite Troy Deutsch!

[hw]Flying Bobcat has enlisted NYC Playwright Troy Deutsch to create the script[/hw] which will weave between dance and set and music. Charlotte has begun the choreographic process with Jo and Jenn and Scott and Andra. Nathan and Gary have the stage/set concept designed and we are all, with you, bringing out something special from our beloved shoreline venue. And here is a small excerpt to whet your appetites...

She is not a Peregrine Falcon. But I did wear gloves when I sent her off. A long, long time ago, back before...Thick black leather gloves. I still have them. Still wear them. Sometimes. At night. Sharp beak. No. Feathers. Yes. In her hair, her hair... She will make you cry, but not for the reasons you think. Pretend she is your chance. Your only chance. She is the one who got out, who slipped through the cracks and went away, far, far... The one whose breath will smell like wind and there will be flies in her teeth. She is the one whose feet will be mud and callused rock and there will be archaeologists and podiatrists studying the sediment layers she stands upon and walks with. She is 'see' and she is 'find out'. Because you cannot. You must not. Because you are here. Trapped. This is your place. All of this, this, this, this, this...Is yours. Your inheritance. Your albatross. The salt is yours. The endless salt. Listen to it out there! Listen! The whispering salt. The relentless salt. The dirty, dirty. The festering f...

...

We project that with tickets sales after this Indiegogo campaign, to create and share FEAST as the experience it is destined to be... As of right NOW we want to raise an additional $8,460 moving forward here on Indiegogo, for a total of $16,500 for this campaign. Please encourage your friends to get their tickets as soon as possible, and/or to get on the bus with you! Your donation is immensely appreciated and is truly what will make this mythic event happen. YOU are making it happen. Please join us in encouraging others to create this with us here.

Shoreline 0.1: The Spiral Jetty (1970):

[hw]The Spiral Jetty is considered the seminal work[/hw] of American environmental sculptor Robert Smithson. This remarkable and remote earthwork is located two hours from Salt Lake City, and is accessible only in decent weather when the mud road is passable. It is a counter-clockwise spiral 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide. Constructed during an unusually low water year in the Great Salt Lake, it has spent most of it's 40 year life submerged. It has made brief dry appearances since then, but is usually shallow enough to be seen even when submerged. Smithson was attracted to the slates, at the north end of the lake, because of it's primordial nature, and the intense red of the salt-resistant algae that flourish there. He was a believer in entropy, and wanted this massive installation to erode and react with and to it's surrounding environment, and the earth itself, as it is slowly doing. Sadly, Smithson is unable to witness this glacial decay. He was killed in a plane crash in Texas just three years after finishing his iconic work. -- Words by Mark Hofeling

Vancouver Residency

[hw]During the month of February, Charlotte created[/hw] a new work at the University of Wichita, Kansas and followed that with one at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Here are a couple photos from her workspace at the later residency: The old Woodwards building in the heart of Gastown, Vancouver. The SFU piece features seven dancers, will premier in April of this year, and is titled Graze.

SFU Studio

NOW Dance wins an Arty!

[hw]In a public vote, Charlotte has won an Arty for Best Choreography in Salt Lake City for The Wedding. City Weekly writes:[/hw] Charlotte Boye-Christensen's newest artistic adventure, NOW ID—an internationally culled, interdisciplinary dance company created with her husband, architect Nathan Webster—began with "an exploration of the most public of private rituals."

The Wedding was staged in the Salt Lake Masonic Temple, which saw a perfect marriage of Boye-Christensen's choreography—a combination of emotive duets and solos—and Webster's love of unique spaces. As far as the movement vocabulary goes, it's Boye-Christensen's keen ability to juxtapose sharp angularity with softer, more fluid gestures that imbued The Wedding with both its power and vulnerability.

Read the City Weekly article