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From the Depths of the Great Salt Lake
The last remnants of a massive inland sea, the Great Salt Lake might have given our city its name, yet it’s still often more of a punch line that a source of pride. Sometimes it seems like it’s merely that thing that gives the air a particular pungency, or the reason a neighborhood a couple of miles away gets three inches more snow than you do. But what do you really know about it?
STEAMpunk Academy, Utah Arts Alliance and Salty Sirens dig into the fun, the facts and the myths of the Great Salt Lake’s biome on April 1 at 7 p.m. for the virtual presentation From the Depths of the Great Salt Lake. The centerpiece will be a livestream roast of the 1980 cult film Attack of the Brine Shrimp (pictured), Mike Cassidy’s 1980 25-minute short that takes the tiny arthropod inhabitants of the Great Salt Lake and turns them into a kaiju wreaking havoc across the downtown SLC cityscape. Local filmmaker Brian Higgins will offer his perspective on Attack of the Brine Shrimp.
Other scheduled presenters include Chris Merritt, Industrial Archaeologist with the State of Utah, discussing the history of the Great Saltair and rumors of whales living in the Great Salt Lake, while Jaimi Butler and Bonnie Baxter of the Salty Sirens regale attendees with the truth about brine shrimp and other lake facts.
Register in advance to receive a free link at zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wX_eI0vqTtuL82R. For those unable to attend the live event, a recorded version will be available later via steampunkacademy.org (Scott Renshaw)
MIKE CASSIDY
loveDANCE more: Only the Lonely
When a “new normal” presents itself—even if the “new normal” might only be temporary—there aren’t many options. Either you can bang your head against reality, or you can embrace reality and use it to your advantage. Faced with the reality of staging live dance during a pandemic, loveDANCEmore leaned into the circumstances for Only the Lonely, a series of virtual dance performances that could be created and performed safely and remotely.
According to loveDANCEmore’s Samuel Hanson, Only the Lonely was originally planned to support two artists, presenting projects that were “happening either entirely virtually, or with the safest possible inter-household interaction.” But after receiving the responses to the call for submissions, the company’s panel of judges decided to support seven works. “I think it’s fair to say that we were interested in what new kinds of creativity might be elicited by the comparatively strict but sensible (we think) COVID-restrictions we put in place,” Hanson says. “The results have been exciting — the old axiom about the power of limits still holds up!”
Only the Lonely programming begins April 3-4 at 7:30 p.m. with two pieces: Nora Lang’s TV Dinners Presents Binary Coding, an interactive experience with a game show-like component; and the double-feature of dance films Blinding Light and Companion (pictured) created by Dmitri Peskov and Jung Ah Yoon and featuring local dancer Warren Hess of Ephraim. Two additional programs are scheduled for April 23-24 and May 4. The presentations will feature a live Q&A after the programs; register at lovedancemore.org, with a $10 donation encouraged. (SR)
COURTESY PHOTO
Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival
It’s been a full 18 months since the 7th annual Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival was hosted by the Salt Lake City Library, for reasons that might be fairly obvious. And while the world is nowhere near back to normal, the arts have shown a remarkable ability to adapt. That includes the format for the 8th annual Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival, which will take a virtual form this year with two days of programming showcasing 16 local, national and international creators via Vimeo.
Each day is broken up into individual blocs of presentations, with two on Friday, April 2 and three on Saturday, April 2. Many of the scheduled works explicitly explore the past pandemic year, how it has affected us, and how it has affected the creation and presentation of art. Myriam Laplante’s You have to be there explicitly addresses what is lost when the artist is not physically present to the audience. Chilean artist Alexander del Re also dives into this topic through his piece Exercises in Reality, and Salt Lake City’s Eugene Tachinni (pictured above left, with festival curator Kristina Lenzi from 2019) looks into his own experience of having his apartment building change ownership in the middle of the pandemic.
But there is also an opportunity for this virtual format to present notions that wouldn’t have been possible in person. Boston-based Marilyn Arsem’s Signs of Spring will find her livestreaming a walk through a local park in her home city, looking for evidence of the changing seasons, while inviting those watching remotely to do the same. Visit events.slcpl. org/event/4880736 for additional program descriptions and Vimeo links. (SR)
Edison Eskeets & Jim Kristofic: Send a Runner @ King’s English online
The United States’ long history of cruelty to Native peoples includes too many individual incidents to number, but some of them have achieved a special level of infamy. Such was “The Long Walk”—the forced repatriation in 1865 of Navajo (Diné) people from their ancestral homelands in Arizona to a reservation in New Mexico. The 18-day, 330-mile journey cost at least 200 lives, and while the Diné eventually made a return journey to their original lands in 1868, the event left a deep mark on the people.
The year 2018 marked the sesquicentennial of the Diné’s return to Arizona, and to mark the occasion, Edison Eskeets—a former AllAmerican long-distance runner—decided to honor the occasion by re-tracing the steps of “The Long Walk,” all 330 miles from Canyon de Chelly, Arizona to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was a plan a decade in the making, with a goal of the then-58-year-old Eskeets finishing the journey on July 1, 2018—the exact 150th anniversary of the return.
In Send a Runner: A Navajo Honors the Long Walk, Eskeets and writer Jim Kristofic relate the story of Eskeets’ 15-day run to honor his ancestors, bring a focus back to “The Long
Walk,” and provide a vision for the future of the Navajo people. Eskeets and Kristofic participate in a virtual author event via The King’s English Bookshop (kingsenglish.com) on Wednesday, April 7 at 6 p.m. The event is free, but advance registration is required via the website; patrons who purchase a copy of the book via the website will receive an autographed bookplate. (SR)
THEATER Allied Farces
Black Benatar’s Black Magic Cabaret finds audacious humor in a risky topic.
Generally speaking, you might think that a theatrical experience incorporating queer drag culture into conversations about racial justice would have a pretty self-selecting audience—the kind of folks, in other words, who think that they already “get it,” and are just there to cheer along with ideas they already agree with. But in a sense, that’s a feature of Black Benatar’s Black Magic Cabaret, rather than a bug. This is an experience that isn’t about preaching to the choir, but about letting the choir know that they still have a few tunes left to learn.
“That’s actually the whole story of the show,” says Kyle DeVries, production manager for Black Benatar’s Black Magic Cabaret. “It’s the dynamic between this powerful, black queer femme ringleader of the show doing this circus around racial justice, and this trying-to-do-well but never-doing-well-enough white ‘reparations intern.’ You think you know enough, but there are going to be a lot of times you don’t.”
Black Benatar’s Black Magic Cabaret takes the form of a variety show, including circus-style performers of acrobatics, stage magic and more. The centerpiece narrative between those acts, however, involves that interaction between Black Benatar (co-creator Beatrice Thomas) and the aforementioned intern, Wyatt Allai (cocreator Steven LeMay). It’s bawdy, funny and frisky—not at all a lecture.
Designing the show with that sense of fun was important to Thomas, who began sketching out the idea for the show at a San Francisco club a few years ago with LeMay and writer John Caldon. The trio started improvising ideas for skits exploring themes of racial justice and allyship, and the trials and tribulations of trying to be an activist in these times.
“I feel it’s so important to bring joy and humor even to the most difficult topics, of which racism is definitely up there,” Thomas says. “If we’re ever going to change hearts and minds, we need to be able to create connection, and I find collective joy to be a powerful force for creating connection. Plus, for those of us who are doing the work, we need to be able to laugh and smile in between the tearful moments. It gives us hope and strength.”
“Everything has this big Vegas sensibility—costumes larger than life, characters larger than life, a game show going on,” DeVries adds. “All these things that have a flavor from our culture of being joyous and fun. It’s this little bit of a rollercoaster it takes audiences on, sometimes having them think deeply, sometimes just laughing.”
Thomas and their collaborators started workshopping the production in 2018 and 2019, developing the basic format that would include the performances between the main narrative segments. When the pandemic hit last year, it stalled the development process somewhat, but also provided an opportunity to receive a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts National Theater Project.
As it happened, 2020 also included the high-profile national protests for Black Lives Matters surrounding police violence and racial injustice, but DeVries believes that despite the timing, those events really didn’t have a tremendous impact on the show itself. “I think the show was already so much along that trajectory, that it hasn’t shifted the content of the show much at all,” they say. “It’s already so much about that. If anything, it’s more relevant and more on people’s radar.”
This week, Black Benatar’s Black Magic Cabaret finally makes its full premiere, on the Kingsbury Hall stage—but not in front of a live audience. Instead, the show will live-stream on Friday, April 2, in a presentation that incorporates local performers from the BIPOC and LGBTQ communities, as was always the goal for the show as it toured. Adapting to a virtual show did require some fine-tuning, as audience participation was always meant to be a key component of the show. Now, online viewers will engage in that audience participation digitally, with viewers getting a QR code that takes them to a website with interactive components.
“Getting filmed and streamed presented a whole new set of challenges,” DeVries says. “There were certain things that would have worked much better with [a live audience], and not as well when you’re filming it. But we have a five-camera set-up with professional equipment, for a show that otherwise wouldn’t have had that support.”
And, significantly, Black Benatar’s Black Magic Cabaret is able to make its debut by taking its message everywhere at once. “The great thing is that, by streaming it out, we’re going to be able to bring it to a national audience,” DeVries says. That means even more people can learn that being an ally is more complicated than it might seem—even if you think you already are one. CW
Beatrice Thomas as Black Benatar in Black Benatar’s Black Magic Cabaret
BLACK BENATAR’S BLACK MAGIC CABARET Virtual performance from Kingsbury Hall April 2, 7:30 p.m. Pay-what-you-can utahpresents.org
