Who: Choreography by Director Nichele Woods in collaboration with the performers: Natalie Border, Jonathan Kim, Tara McArthur, Morgan Phillips, and Melissa Younker.
What: Repertory Dance Theatre presents The Woods Dance Project—a new project-based dance entity committed to supporting equity and career sustainability for contemporary dance artists in Salt Lake City. With the support of the Salt Lake City Arts Council, REDUCER will feature five exceptional local dance artists, with guests from UVU’s Contemporary Dance Ensemble and the Department of Dance opening the evening’s performance on opening night.
The evening features two premieres. Volcano, performed by Natalie Border and RDT dance artist Jonathan Kim, is a meditation on the potential inside of quietude. The duet draws from improvisation and a simmering approach to composing choreography. The work asks how repetition offers opportunities for reflection, and what happens when we try not to tackle a “problem” to make it better but rather sit with it and remain curious. It also considers what learned gender roles emerge through contact work and how dancing in contact with another can offer opportunities to reflect upon the roles that we play in relationship to others and ourselves. This work emerged from a gentle place and a desire to accept what is.
Following the duet, a new quintet serves as the evening’s main dish. Woods pushes her Postmodern and Release-style aesthetics into the surreal as she muses upon the space between our private and public lives. To present dance is, for Woods, a public expression of her personal, internal world. Woods is bracing herself for the unknown in this process as the artists together explore the space and tension between these very real though subjective, unique yet shared realities.
Opening the show on June 5th, Clear... as a burnt-out match in a dark room. was commissioned by Utah Valley University's Contemporary Dance Ensemble and premiered at the Noorda Center in Orem on March 28, 2024. We began our 6-week residency with sensorial improvisations that focused on comfort, preciousness, warmth, giving, accepting, and offering support. This physicality came into conversations with questions about memory, and how our perspective of moments may shift over time. Were things really just as we remember? Can we soften and reframe hard memories—experience greater compassion for ourselves and others? The work sweeps and swells over the course of 18 minutes, with a satiating resolution that reframes one of Nichele's most challenging childhood memories.
Where: The Leona Black Box Theatre at The Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 138 W Broadway, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
When: 7:30 pm on Wednesday, June 5, Thursday, June 6, and Saturday, June 8. Please note: There will be no Friday performance!
Tickets: Available soon at https://saltlakecountyarts.org