A Throwback Thursday shout out to our incredible hair and makeup team led by @stephstylin1 .... Amazing artists!
Thank you to the Australian Council for the Arts for featuring and highlighting our project “A Tonal Caress” from last year in their annual report.
This project featured Deaf artist Walter Kadiki.
There is still time to get your tickets to NOW-ID's Rite of Spring on Saturday, June 22nd at 9 PM below the 600 N on-ramp!
Please read on to find more information about attending the performance, below images from rehearsal on site yesterday...
RE PARKING AND ARRIVAL:
For those attending the performance, use street parkingalong 500 West and 500 North and come to the check-in station on the southeast corner of 600 North and 500 West(see diagram below).
RE ATTIRE:
Do dress warm - it may be a little cooler than we expected for June 22!
We look forward to seeing you all there!
The below post is the tenth in a series of 13 texts related to NOW-ID's 2019 Rite of Spring taking place on June 22 in Salt Lake City, loosely following the 13 episodes in Stravinsky's score. Ritual Action: Dark Beauty is by Kate Mattingly, Assistant Professor at the University of Utah. Get your tickets to the performance here.
Looking at costume designs by Mallory Prucha for NOW-id’s Rite of Spring alongside drawings by Nicholas Roerich for the 1913 version, there are striking similarities: the red, black, and white palette, the angular poses of dancers’ bodies.
"Three Figures (A Youth and Maidens), Act I" by Nicholas Roerich is a 1912 tempera, watercolor, ceruse, pencil, bronze and silver on paper
And there are differences: instead of intricate patterns around the hem, Prucha’s pants for the dancers appear worn and shredded. They suggest that these dancers have already been through the exhausting ritual and are now performing the dance for a third or fourth time. There’s a compelling tension between the durability of the fabric––which Prucha calls “Monk’s Cloth”––and the wear and tear created by dancing. Instead of peasant-like blouses, dancers in NOW-id’s version will wear body-paint. The deterioration of the paint as dancers sweat and partner one another adds to a sense of disintegration.
Instead of a ritual that begins with pristine garments, NOW-id’s Rite of Spring presents a more somber view. Costumes by Prucha enrich this atmosphere. Charlotte Boye-Christensen says Prucha is her “aesthetic-soulmate,” and multiple times during our conversation, she repeats how grateful she is to be working with Prucha.
Rite of Spring marks their first collaboration, starting with the version performed in February of 2019 in Lubbock where Prucha is an Assistant Professor of Costume Design at Texas Tech University. This summer Prucha is working with Utah Festival Opera in Logan and continuing the collaboration with NOW-id for the Salt Lake City iteration of Rite. “There’s something really valuable in starting a conversation, and then continuing that conversation,” says Boye-Christensen of their collaboration. “It is unusual, and a luxury in creative work, to see a first iteration, then a second, and a third.”
When Prucha and Boye-Christensen return to Lubbock this fall, they will present the third iteration on a much larger cast for three nights in mid-October in a cotton gin shed. Prucha’s decision to use the cotton, “Monk’s Cloth” material for the costumes will be apt for this setting.
This fabric also adds to the industrial setting of the performance this month. It is functional and heavy, suggesting a worker’s attire or pagan costume. There’s also a long history of the material being used for embroidery and associated with “women’s work.” The sturdiness of Monk’s Cloth was attractive to Prucha because it symbolized the strength of women who have produced textiles for centuries. Referring to a book by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, called Women’s Work: The first 20,000 Years, Prucha adds that women have been at the forefront of fabric manufacturing, in part because they could make textiles while cooking, taking care of homes, and raising children. In contrast to the narrative of the 1913 Rite, that a woman must be sacrificed for a community’s well-being, this version foregrounds ideas of female empowerment.
As she created the choreography, Boye-Christensen found that she was inspired by the voluminous pants by Prucha: “The costume designs are feeding the choreography. When I saw the pants I started creating these low walks that made the costumes look like a skirt.” She adds that she loves how the costumes suggest both dresses and warriors’ garments.
Instead of making the dancing look smooth or streamlined, Boye-Christensen is intentionally keeping the movement “awkward.” She likes how this alludes to pagan rites that are performed by a community of people rather than by trained artists. The body paint contributes to this idea of ritual action by disintegrating as the dancers perform: in other words, the ritual generates its impact by being lived and experienced. The blurring of paint leaves traces and residues, much like the patina that covers most of the surfaces under the overpass and in the foundry. This layering makes visible the dancers’ labor, and their exhaustion.
When she is not designing for opera, dance, and musical theatre, Prucha works on composite drawings for law enforcement, and recently completed a sketch for the Lubbock Police Department. She talks about this part of her research as connected to her theatrical productions because both are about understanding archetypes and aesthetic frameworks.
“Costumes speak about identity and communicate ideas about character traits,” says Prucha. “There’s a quote I love, that defines ‘character’ as the essence of an idea.” Her designs for the Rite of Spring operate as both an added layer of communication, and a barometer of the performance’s exertion. Her costumes will absorb the sweat and toil of the dancing, becoming tangible artifacts for a fleeting art form.
Drawings above by costume designer Mallory Prucha.
The below post is the ninth in a series of 13 texts related to NOW-ID's inaugural Rite of Spring, loosely following the 13 episodes in Stravinsky's score. Glorification of the Chosen One is by Kate Mattingly, Assistant Professor at the University of Utah. Get your tickets to the performance here.
—
Exhaustion plays a crucial role in the story and score of The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s music builds from spare, almost melancholy melodies to swirling, pulsing, and pounding rhythms. Choreographers have reflected this intensity and velocity in movement that tests the limits of dancers’ capacities.
One of the Joffrey Ballet dancers who performed the role of the Chosen One, the virgin who dances to death, in the company’s reconstruction of Nijinsky’s choreography, described the fatigue as distinct from other ballets: "A lot of times in ballet you get winded, your breath is short and you start to lose some of the control in your legs. At the end of the Chosen One, it feels like your legs have melted beneath you," said Anastacia Holden.
Parallels could be drawn between the physical disintegration that is produced through the choreography and the environmental disintegration that happens in neighborhoods where industries are no longer relevant. The area where NOW-ID has chosen to perform their Rite of Spring used to be a flourishing center for metal casting. The May Foundry, located at 454 West 600 North, was established in 1912 by Ruben May, and lasted more than 100 years before shutting down a couple years ago. Mike May, great-grandson of Ruben, was the general manager in 2014 when he told Company Week that foundries are “misunderstood” as relics and irrelevant. May Foundry produced 80 types of metal, including super-duplex stainless steel and ductile iron. Their client roster included companies like Caterpillar and Barnes Aerospace. In addition, they worked with military, automotive, industrial, and agricultural clients.
But the company couldn’t survive the economic downturns and technological advances of recent years, and its machinery now stands unused. Such devastation, especially when it occurs to a business that is family-owned, can take a toll on individuals. Evidence of just how quickly industries can change, the foundry looks more like a museum than a factory. To situate a Rite of Spring in its vicinity seems to beg the questions, “How do we sustain changing economies? How do people transition when vocations that were once needed become obsolete? How does the physical exhaustion that the Rite of Spring presents help us think through and perhaps work against assumptions that people are disposable?”
Liz, Jo, Tara and Sydney.
The below post is the eighth in a series of 13 texts related to NOW-ID's inaugural Rite of loosely following the 13 episodes in Stravinsky's score. The author, Liz Ivkovich, is also a dancer in the piece. Get your tickets to the performance here.
—
Mystic Circles: The Weather In Space
The exclusion zone outside of Chernobyl is a 770 mile wide ring of empty villages that will be uninhabitable for thousands of years.
Hours after the 1986 explosion, a Soviet team flew their helicopter around this circle to try to figure out what the hell had happened and measure active radiation contamination. The pilot spotted a strange looking cloud and flew towards it. “Large beads of liquid began to form on the canopy [of the helicopter]. At first, [the pilot] thought it was rain. But then he noticed that it wasn’t breaking over the glass like water: instead, it was strange, heavy, and viscous. It flowed slowly like jelly and then evaporated, leaving a salty-looking residue. And the sky remained clear…”*
It was a cloud of radioactive particles.
A circle blurs origin point and return, as mystic blurs supernatural and earthly. When I read “mystic circle”, I picture this cloud of radioactive particles landing softly as dust in an ever-widening loop around Chernobyl. This mystic circle is not innocuous. Stacy Alaimo says “... the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions.”**
These radioactive fleshy beings surely have their own needs, claims, and actions that we cannot know. If I see them through this lens, Tracy K. Smith’s poem The Weather in Space gives me the creeps.
The Weather in Space
Is God being or pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we’re certain to lose, so alive—
Faces radiant with panic
*From Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham
**From Bodily Natures: Nature, Environment, and the Material Self
Thank you to all who came to Pecha Kucha last night, to our awesome presenters, to our generous sponsors and to everyone who helped to make this event phenomenal!
#pechakuchaslc #nowidslc #design#architecture #performance#coolspaces #addictivebehaviour#publikslc #lazizslc#dentedbrickdistillery
Nathan, Charlotte and Cole.
We have been commissioned by the University of Richmond to do a site-specific project under the Manchester Bridge in November and went there this week to have a look at that space and others.
Inspiring trip.
Thank you to Anne Van Gelder, the Director of Dance, for hosting us so beautifully!
Photos by David Newkirk.
Dancers Liz Ivkovich, Sydney Sorenson, and Jo Blake
The below post is the seventh in a series of 13 texts related to NOW-ID's inaugural Rite of loosely following the 13 episodes in Stravinsky's score. The author, Liz Ivkovich, is also a dancer in the piece. Get your tickets to the performance here.
—-
I love what Kate described about the relationship of photography to architecture, and criticism to dance in her latest post. She said, “...just like many people only know a building through the photographer’s carefully framed image, dance history has depended on critics’ writing as a kind of archival or circulating material for an art form that is embodied and sensorial.”
I am curious about a similar relationship of performer to choreography.
I think it is often true that for dancers, our own experience of being in the studio learning from a choreographer is often substituted by the artifact of stories from friends or friends of friends. Though most of us won’t work with most choreographers, we may still feel like we know about it, even though we’ve never had an embodied experience. The choreography has been framed for us by the circulating material of dancer stories. I think this is an interesting phenomenon.
On the note of being in rehearsal, getting into the studio on June 3 with Charlotte and the other three dancers is on my mind. I always get nervous in advance of learning choreography. In fact, in a recent NOW-ID blog post, Charlotte asked the question:
Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process - how do you learn new choreography?
I answered: “I almost have no answer here -- I am embarrassingly bad at learning new movement. I used to learn really quickly (ok, like in high school, but whatever, I’m only 32 34 (I lost count), so it’s recent history) and now it takes me so much mental labor to retain choreography. I absolutely have to do it full out a lot of times / I watch what other dancers are doing in the mirror until it settles into my body.”
So in preparation for entering the studio, and since today’s post is aptly titled “The Procession of the Sages,” I thought I’d cull from stories of the three other dancers, my sages, who are processing in front of me before we begin rehearsal. These quotes are responses to the same question, “Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process - how do you learn new choreography?” And since Jo Blake, Tara McArthur, and Sydney Sorenson each have more experience working with Charlotte’s choreography than I do, these artifacts of their embodied experiences are guideposts for me.
Jo: When I learn choreography I stand behind the choreographer and pretend that they know what they are doing. (jk) And, with as little energy as possible, I will experiment with the choreography. (jk) Do I like to dance? No, not really. (jk) Do I want the choreographer to know that I am passionate about dance? Naaaah. (jk) Do I LOVE the creative process in the studio with the choreographer and dancers? HELL YEAH!! I live for the creative process!!
Tara: My creative process is a constant evolution, shifting from project to project. When learning new movement I get really curious about the transitions between movements, shapes, or concepts, not only as a way to string it together and solidify it in my mental and physical memory, but also to find my own creative voice within a certain structure. When learning movement from someone else I like to try and imagine what the movement must feel like to them, what it would be like to be in that particular body, and then use that information to inform how I approach the choreography. If I’m asked to generate material, I feel most successful when I am able to fully immerse myself and ‘buy into' the world the choreographer is trying to create. Some people work from the fined tuned details out— I tend to start in broad strokes and narrow in on subtleties as I go. I am definitely movement driven as opposed to shape. My instincts are to blur the lines a bit.
Sydney: When in a new creation process I try to be as pure of a dancer as possible for the choreographer. I desire to serve their vision. I also aim to move expansively within the realms of the choreography if it calls for it. I find big, full movement to be the most satisfying, so I try and keep that in mind when dancing either classical steps or in a new creation.
I’d say I am a visual learner. When learning phrase work it helps me to see it first before I put it into my body. However I’m learning to approach choreography kinesthetically by trying it on, and allowing my body to process before I over-think.
The below post is the sixth in a series of 13 texts related to NOW-ID's inaugural Rite of Spring, loosely following the 13 episodes in Stravinsky's score. Dance of the Earth is by Kate Mattingly, Assistant Professor at the University of Utah. Get your tickets to the performance here.
—
I recently watched a documentary called Visual Acoustics that described how a photographer, Julius Shulman, documented architectural designs in Los Angeles.
Unexpectedly, I found many connections between the film’s ideas and my theories about dance criticism: many people will never visit the homes that Shulman photographed, but his images circulate these architectural designs to millions of people.
Similarly, many people have never seen the performances that shape histories of dance, like Nijinsky’s 1913 version of the Rite of Spring. Instead, critics’ writing circulates as representations of performances, often as stand-ins for events that are multi-modal and trigger multiple interpretations.
In other words, just like many people only know a building through the photographer’s carefully framed image, dance history has depended on critics’ writing as a kind of archival or circulating material for an art form that is embodied and sensorial. As I thought about this, I wondered if some productions may be better served by having an image instead of words circulate as its representation. Applying this idea to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring I collected 11 images of different productions: from Stravinsky’s appearance in Disney’s Fantasia (1940) to Etienne Bechard’s 2018 version of Rite for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. Do you see through-lines or themes running through these very different creations? Do you think certain images convey a sense of the productions’ dynamics more effectively than a video recording or a critic’s words?
1913 - Vaslav Nijinsky
1940 - Disney’s Fantasia
1959 - Maurice Bejart
1974 - Glen Tetley
1975 - Pina Bausch
1993 - Marie Chouinard
2013 - Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart
2013 - Stanton Welch
2013 - Yuri Possokhov
2018 - Wayne McGregor
2018 - Etienne Bechard
2018 - Etienne Bechard
To see more about the black hole and spiral jetty…
The below post is the fifth in a series of 13 texts related to NOW-ID's inaugural Rite of Spring, loosely following the 13 episodes in Stravinsky's score. The author, Liz Ivkovich, is also a dancer in the piece and was inspired to write this text while visiting the spiral jetty with a group of lady-shamans last week! Get your tickets to the performance here.
—-
We enter the circle counter
clockwise
towards the undoing at the center of it,
which is the dark hole at the center of every universe.
(our own is Sagittarius A*)
It has finally been photographed,
a creepy nothingness from
which no force could possibly
expel you
when the event horizon (the point of no return)
entrains you.
It’s a blurry, uninspired shot. Doesn’t seem worth the effort, TBH.
And the stars spiral on,
and we spiral out.
“Pieter C. van den Toorn attributes the ‘effect’ of Rite of Spring on listeners, to ‘the raw, relentless character of the dissonance,’ and it's the fourth section, ‘Ritual of the Rival Tribes,’ that introduces Stravinsky’s massive stratification…” - Kate Mattingly
The below post is the fourth in a series of 13 texts related to NOW-ID's inaugural Rite of Spring, loosely following the 13 episodes in Stravinsky's score. Ritual of the Rival Tribes is by Kate Mattingly, Assistant Professor at the University of Utah. Get your tickets to the performance here.
—-
There are many quotes about the transformative powers of music:
“Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.” ― Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.” ― Kahlil Gibran
“Music can change the world because it can change people.” ― Bono
How does this “change” occur?
“Entrainment” is the word that describes the means by which music’s meter is internalized. Music scholar Pieter C. van den Toorn writes that “listeners entrain to meter, which in turn becomes physically a part of us. Entrainment is automatic (reflexive) as well as subconscious (or preconscious). Like walking, running, dancing, and breathing, meter is a kind of motor behavior.”
In other words, when we listen to music, its meter infiltrates our eardrums, brains, and nervous systems. Listening is an embodied and interactive process: it changes us. In the example of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, disruptions of meter generate a sense of displacement and irregularity. Pieter C. van den Toorn attributes the “effect” of Rite of Spring on listeners, to “the raw, relentless character of the dissonance,” and it's the fourth section, “Ritual of the Rival Tribes,” that introduces Stravinsky’s massive stratification (see image). One of several reasons why the first performance of The Rite of Spring provoked such a riotous response was because these stratifications were unprecedented in the art music of Russia and the West. As anyone who studies African dances and drumming knows, the polyrhythms and ostinatos in Stravinsky’s score are also found in African music.
Music that compels us to move may be the best evidence of entrainment theories, but it also points to a more sinister reality. If we entrain to meter, what else do we internalize? Thoughts and messages that become part of our subconscious, also known as implicit bias, propel our judgments and assumptions. Just as we internalize music’s meters, we also operate with internalized value systems that are activated involuntarily, without awareness or intentional control. When I think about the sexism and patriarchy presented in productions like the 1913 Rite of Spring, I wonder if audiences internalize these views the way they internalize Stravinsky’s meters. Much of the social inequities perpetuated in our world today can be traced to implicit biases and their activations in educational, political, and legal settings. As Rebecca Solnit wrote recently about our current political candidates, “Unconscious Bias is Running for President.”
The fortunate aspect of implicit associations is that they can be gradually unlearned, and, for me, performances are a great mechanism for rewiring our bodies and brains: performance practices shape perceptions of the world because they invite us to feel and think differently.
