Sound and Smoke at UC Santa Barbara

Local dance artist and graduate student in the Department of Theater and Dance Meredith Cabaniss Ventura presents a dance concert at the Hatlen Theater on the UC Santa Barbara campus. Ventura’s work Sound and Smoke is an interdisciplinary exploration of early modern dance and its intersections with the mythical decadence of Weimar-era cabaret. The evening-length performance features dancers from her company, Selah Dance Collective, undergraduate students from UC Santa Barbara, and other community members.

Sound and Smoke is an interdisciplinary exploration of early modern dance and its intersections with the mythical decadence of Weimar-era cabaret. The evening-length performance grew from Meredith Cabaniss Ventura’s work The Violet Hour, commissioned as part of an installation at L’ahah Association in Paris for the exhibit “Homeshaping/Homeshaking: Modern Odysseys” in collaboration with Institut d’études supérieures des arts (IESA). The Violet Hour was also performed at Dixon Place and Gibney Dance in New York City in spring 2023.

As an ensemble, evening-length work, Sound and Smoke have developed into a more extensive investigation of “dancing death.” The work considers the staging of women’s deaths in theatrical representation in conversation with the history of modern dance. Sound and Smoke references historical, literary, and avant-garde figures and blends popular culture and high art, much like the cabaret and modern dance artists that Ventura references throughout the concert. Each dancer in the cast represents a woman whose life, work, and death speak to contemporary ideas about women’s bodies.