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?

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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…]

A turkey for your Thanksgiving pleasure…Drosselmeyer Inc (June 2009) told of the weird uncle from the Nutcracker and his unnatural relationship with his dolls Hamlet, Tex, Frenchie, and Tooth-Rot (aka, the Sugar Plum Fairy). Excellent performers and designers couldn’t pull this one out of a tailspin. A balletophile and established dipshit, the local dance critic wasn’t wrong to dislike it though she might have gone a little far to write that my future should be as “a dancer in someone else’s company.” Ouch. Thank God that failure is now acceptable in our creativity-worshiping culture.

After a complicated labor that included a boobs and booze controversy and a ridiculous 4-night creation schedule, Sweet Beast welcomed a new life form into our world.
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