Utah’s Artrepreneurs: Dancing The Bears Ears “To Learn, Connect, And Serve.”
Startups and tech companies tend to be oriented more to STEM than STEAM (Science, Technology, Art, & Math), but everyone agrees that building community through service should engage all of us. Both entrepreneurship and art are about innovation and intersecting with the community, and business folk and artists regularly partner to bring to light not only how we go to work everyday, pitch our ideas to investors, and take chances … but why.
Amidst the controversy over the proclamation of the Bears Ears National Monument in southeast Utah last December, Salt Lake City-based Repertory Dance Theatre saw an opportunity. As America’s premier repertory dance company, RDT had already commissioned several contemporary dance works connected to land and water, particularly terrain found in the Southwest. The Company called it then, and calls it still, their “Sense of Place” initiative.
So impressed by the Company’s 2011 Clean Air-Healthy Neighborhoods Project for schools, the EPA provided a grant to RDT, the first of its kind for a dance company, an occasion that wasn’t without detractors at the time from Utah’s congressional delegation. Since then RDT has pressed forward, commissioning and re-staging dance works that have relevance and resonance with Utahns in general, but often with a focus on the astonishing landscapes and waterways that animate our arid home.
Now the Company has embraced the Bears Ears, not because of its controversy, but because of its unique story of the five Native American tribes and others coming together for the first time to preserve what they consider to be sacred lands.
It’s a story that has been upended by the controversy, including the recent visit to the Monument of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, earlier this month, at the behest of Utah Senator Orrin Hatch via the swipe of President Trump’s executive pen. But the story is still worth telling, particularly through the lens of what we consider sacred as a collective.
What expression does the sacred take in your life?
What landscapes inspire awe?
What would you do to protect land you consider sacred?
RDT’s Commission of Sacred Lands/Sacred Waters will attempt to answer these questions and others through the abstract art of modern dance. Native Americans have been living these questions for generations, including spiritual advisor Jonah Yellowman (Dine) and Mary Benally (Dine), both of whom recently spoke (and at one point sang) about the cultural and spiritual resources of the land of Bears Ears that will, because of the Monument, be co-managed by the tribes.
NYC-based choreographer Zvi Gotheiner will create the work with a commissioned score by Scott Killian. The project launched May 7, 2017, the same day Secretary Zinke was meeting with officials at the Salt Lake City BLM offices just two blocks away from where Gotheiner, his company dancers (ZviDance) and RDT were meeting with three Native Elders, including Benally and Yellowman, along with Evelyn Nelson (Dine) and others in preparation for a week-long tour of Bears Ears beginning the next day.
The event was open to the public and funded in part by Utah Humanities. Later in the week a gathering in Bluff took place with singing, food, stories and, of course, dancing (the Native variety as well as that of the concert variety). Other public events with Native American presenters as well as scholars will occur around the premiere of the work October 5–7, 2017 at The Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in Salt Lake, before the work goes on tour nationally.
The intersection of land and people, the place we call “home,” is inextricably tied to public lands, especially in the American Southwest. In a market-driven world, RDT believes there has to be a space in which we can explore these connections and how they relate to the spirit, as constituted in the the traditional knowledge of Native Americans and as well as in the legacy of white settlers; and from tourists seeking a counter-weight to urban/suburban living to outdoor recreationists.
For more than half a century now, Repertory Dance Theatre has pushed the boundaries of modern dance, while preserving and celebrating its legacy. It was radical when Utah modern dancers beat out the big city stalwarts to receive a Rockefeller grant establishing RDT as the nation’s first repertory dance company. Today, RDT is just as revolutionary — and entrepreneurial — as they were in 1966 … Even (perhaps especially) when it comes to hot-button issues (and National Monuments) and the human stories at the center of them.
You can learn more about this project through the (spectacular) video here (scroll down for vid.).
As RDT is a 501c3 nonprofit, project sponsorships for Sacred Lands/Sacred Waters, particularly from the outdoor retailer sector, are welcome.
