Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse - an evening length work by Satu Hummasti and Daniel Clifton
May 9, 10, 11 at SugarSpace Arts Warehouse
SUGARSPACE SITE: http://thesugarspace.com/buytickets/
RESERVE SEATS: https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/30255
A socialite lost her sparkle and begs to be allowed to die.
A couple hides from the world, refusing to leave their hotel room.
A young woman longs to become a wild horse and run free on an island.
Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse examines what it means to live a fulfilled life. Colliding narrators and dancers change roles throughout the evening, alternating between literal spoken narratives and linear abstraction through movement. Through conversations, soliloquies, dance, stage design, and sound design, the hyper-real world of Lost Love Socialite asks questions of the audience about their personal sense of fulfillment.
In a first-time evening length collaboration, Satu Hummasti and Daniel Clifton present this original work at SugarSpace as artists-in-residence. Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Reclusepromises to enchant and challenge audiences. The piece has a distinct whimsical flair and is performed by an eclectic mix of dancers that Salt Lake City has not yet seen together on stage: John Allen, Natalie Border, Juan Carlos Claudio, Christine Hasegawa, Eliza Tappan, and Bashaun Williams.
Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse runs one weekend only. Shows at at 8:00 PM May 9 -11, 2019.
Tickets are available through SugarSpace.com/buytickets/.
Background
Before beginning the creative process, Hummasti and Clifton knew they wanted to work with diverse dancers at different stages in their lives. Part of this is due to the collaborative relationship with the dancers; Hummasti and Clifton have worked closely with the cast to write the script and build the dance material. The individual experiences of the dancers are important to the voice of the work. While Hummasti and Clifton are ultimately the curators and directors of the content, it would change significantly with a new set of dancers. Embedded in the creative message of the work is a larger artistic question: “What do the intersecting places and experiences of performers offer the development of a work?”
In this case, the spectrums of experience were vital. To develop the story lines that drive Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse, Hummasti and Clifton began their creative process by asking the dancers to reflect on several true stories about loss, love, and time, and then ‘catching’ material from the dancers as they reflected on this initial source material. In contemporary dance, this practice can be traced back to Tricia Brown and is often used by choreographers to grasp at the essence of an idea. For Hummasti and Clifton, ‘catching’ worked improvisationally with spoken word scores and movement ideas, based on a collection of stories and newspaper clippings. They asked the dancers to riff improvisationally on social experiences at a party, or talk about a time when they felt like a wallflower. From those improvisations, Hummasti and Clifton collected phrases, noting through lines and recurring ideas. As they built the work, more threads and offshoots from the main narratives emerged. Hummasti and Clifton refer to their early rehearsals as ‘processing in the moment’. Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse operates like a sort of postmodern novel, jumping from character to character, allowing the physicality of movement to tell the story as well as the dancers speaking directly to the audience.
For Hummasti and Clifton, part of the process was reading many, many stories and listening to stories of the cast in rehearsal. As the stories and form of the show began to take shape, more collaborators joined the studio time. Clifton is writing the sound for the show, collaborating with Matt Starling, both of who will play the show live. Dan Evans, a graphic designer at the University of Utah, works closely with both Clifton and Hummasti to develop the stage design. Rehearsal for Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse sounds like a circuitous, multi-loop of collaboration. Overlapping loops and negotiations make their way on stage as the dancers change roles and navigate relationships throughout the evening.
While Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse includes abstracted movement and whimsy, it also rides the wave of tragedy and comedy, implying that we are all the socialite who has lost her sparkle, and that we are all the recluse who never wants to leave their room. The performers themselves are aware of the artifice of their performance, riding another wave of presenting and commenting on the presentation. Much of the content in Sweet Love Recluse asks the audience to suspend their belief, creating space to wonder about personal ideas of validation and isolation.
It has taken over a year of thinking, imagining, and grant writing to be able to hire the collection of dancers that Hummasti and Clifton wanted to work with in Salt Lake City. It has taken another seven months to build and craft the piece. The demands of University work are unforgiving, even in creative fields, and the two directors have had to protect their creative time. In order to be ready to move the work forward, Hummasti and Clifton spent equal if not more parts time preparing for rehearsal. Their process of gathering content, formalizing ideas and structures, and then freeing the performers within those forms demands more than rehearsal time. It demands time and space for the work to emerge out of newspaper clippings, dance phrases, one word ideas, two sentence conversations, and musical riffs. Protecting creative time creates a rich textured work like Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse.
There is nothing formulaic about Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse. The nature of the collaboration between Hummasti and Clifton is fluid, leading to an ever-shifting rehearsal process, and this interchangeability is a legible part of the performance. Working with a process that includes many sources of information and collaborators has lent itself to a work full of surprise and unimagined realities.
Lost Love Socialite Sweet Love Recluse is not to be missed.
Purchase tickets
SUGARSPACE SITE: http://thesugarspace.com/buytickets/
RESERVE SEATS: https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/30255
By Modern Graduate Student Hannah Fischer