SB Dance

Originally, June 2020’s New Creation– tentatively titled The Broken Bridesmaid– was going to be a collaboration with Satu Hummasti and Daniel Clifton, both excellent artists and faculty members at the U of U. I remember the last planning meeting in early March. The three of us were in a coffee shop. Just getting over a cold, Daniel had a lingering cough that sounded like a foghorn. (Oh the days when people coughed in a crowded room and didn’t cause a panic. Now I cross the street to avoid someone on the sidewalk and they thank me.)

Rehearsals were scheduled to begin in a few weeks. K-12 schools had just been cancelled. They got a text alert that the University was closing down. We talked briefly about delaying rehearsals to mid-April. Then May. Then the theater closed. Then everything closed.

After 20 years of making new shows every spring, it was weird to sit on my hands, doing nothing. So I went to the Commie Market (aka NPS) to see what the Godess of Firesale had to offer: she delivered a roll of bright blue rubber flooring, 75% off for a sales price of $35. Definitely a sign. Bought 2x4s and baltic birch ply. Started measuring my camping trailer. Figured that a stage so small and so elevated needed something solid for performers to hang onto. Talked to Cole about battery powered lights. Bought a JBL battery powered PA. Then it was time to see what Annie could do on the hamster stage. Curbside Theater was born.

At this point, it’s been 37 shows and 500 viewers. Two solos, two duets, working on new pieces. A 60s lounge feel with classic songs rendered by the amazing collaborators Raffi and Ischa. Experimenting with longer formats in a tailgate configuration. Rehearsing outside. Performing outside. Intimate audiences. Donations helping keep the ship afloat. Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time…

A sold out show that opened Fest Salt Lake Stages 2020, the second year of the Kinky Beast Cabaret was even more mind-blowing than the first. Let me count the ways. There was a hitting scene that was more caring than a cuddle puddle. A sub-dom act that was a model of self-affirmation. A tender needle scene that felt like a slow-motion love affair. I could go on and on listing expressions of sex-positivity and acceptance that were onstage.

One newcomer– a patron at SB Dance performers who knew nothing about kink– couldn’t stop talking about the contrast with her preconceptions. “I thought Kink was about being bad” she said. “But I found out it’s about being good. Nasty good!”

It’s on to the New Creation for us now. Hopefully a blog during the process.

PS– A quick update on the last post about SB Dance being denied funding from the Salt Lake City Arts Council. The whole thing stunk enough that we made an open records request. Lo and behold, the records were filled with disturbing and unprofessional behavior on the part of the Arts Council review committee. SB Dance wrote a report about its findings, and it’s slowly making the rounds.

In 2018, the Salt Lake City Arts Council cut funding to SB Dance by 75% compared to the company’s previous award. In 2019, the 5-person City Arts Council panel declined to fund SB Dance at all. These decisions are kinda weird. They differ from decisions reached by every previous City Arts Council panel since 2000. They also differ from the judgements reached by decades worth of County ZAP panels and State panels, which, by the way, increased funding to SB Dance in 2019 by 50% and 25%, respectively.

So what happened at the City? SB Dancers are kinda scratching our heads. Colleague organizations and other professionals are astonished. The new Division Director Felicia Baca, who I respect very much, stands by the reviewer’s decision. What else can she do in her first year as Director? The grant got a few comments about the narrative section being too general. But no feedback about budget or video samples or metrics. There wasn’t anything missing. Nothing like “SB Dance is fake art and they should just go back to their rat-infested studio and start again.” At the very least, you’d think that the City’s granting agency would be ready to justify such a radical opinion with some objective evidence. After all, how many professional arts nonprofits are there in Salt Lake? It’s not like this is the MacArthurs.  

For what it’s worth, Salt Lake City Arts Council is itself kinda odd. Not without controversy, it is organized in part like a private nonprofit. It uses an idiosyncratic grant review process that is conducted by a subcommittee of Board Members, some of whom are not arts professionals. Also, the Salt Lake Arts Council recently went through a rough patch, effectively leaderless with an embattled Division Director and then no one in that post for several months. While the arrival of Ms. Baca is a breath of fresh air, the City Arts Council has some work to do before it can argue for a budget worthy of a capitol city. I think that argument just got weaker by making an unprecedented—and pretty much unsupported– decision to cease funding to one of just a handful of professional arts groups in Salt Lake.  

It stings. It’s one less performer in the upcoming year. SB Dance has chugged through crap like this before. If this decision leaves you puzzled, and if you’re a Salt Lake City citizen, give your City Council Member a call or email. Let them know that there’s good weird and bad weird, and this City needs much more of the former, especially in the arts.

The team packed up The Pushers a couple of weeks ago. It was our deepest, juiciest and most polished production– an unpredictable narrative with funny and poignant moments, substantial physical innovation, unusual video projections, miraculous lighting that included state-of-the-art rovers, outstanding performances, and an onstage bar that made an intimate theater feel more intimate. [Read more…]

Mixing it up with theater-goers is an old old device that you can trace from Commedia Dell’arte to French Enlightenment salons to 60s protest theater to the current cool kid in school, a NYC smash called Sleep No More.  Once labeled “screwing around with the audience”, this contrivance has been re-branded as “immersive” theater. This October, SB Dance trots our horse out of the stable. It’s called All Saints Salon, known also by its endlessly entertaining (to me) acronym, and described as an adult treat for Halloween. [Read more…]