For 15 years, loveDANCEmore has served as a catalyst for Utah’s experimental dance community, presenting performances, publishing criticism and sustaining a dialogue about what it means to make and witness dance in Utah. Founded by choreographer and educator Ashley Anderson, the organization has evolved from a grassroots effort into a multifaceted platform that supports artists through programming, fiscal sponsorship and a nationally respected journal of dance writing.

In this conversation, three of loveDANCEmore’s current leaders—Ashley Anderson, Samuel Hanson, and Halie Bahr—reflect on the state of dance in Utah today, and on the changing role of their organization in that landscape. Anderson, a 2014 Mayor’s Artist Award recipient whose choreography has been presented nationally from New York’s Danspace Project to Salt Lake’s Rio Gallery and who currently serves on the Salt Lake City school board, provides a long view of how the city’s unusually rich dance ecosystem developed.  Hanson, a dancer, educator, and writer who has performed in the work of Ishmael Houston-Jones, Yvonne Meier, and Simone Forti, speaks from the vantage point of executive director—balancing the realities of education and funding with the creative aspirations of a small, artist-run organization. Meanwhile, Bahr, an experimental choreographer and recent Utah Division of Arts & Museums Performing Arts Fellow, is steering loveDANCEmore’s journal toward new models of criticism.

Together, the trio discuss the challenges facing Utah’s dance field: rising costs for rehearsal and performance space, shrinking federal arts funding, and the fragility of small organizations. Yet they also celebrate the resilience of artists who are, as Bahr puts it, “shapeshifters,” who keep adapting.

15 Bytes: How would you describe, to someone outside of the state, the history of modern/contemporary dance in Utah? Broad strokes.

Ashley: Due to a combination of where the arts were on a national scale and the historic support of the LDS church, Utah experienced an influx of opportunity and funding in the sixties that led to the establishment of many arts organizations, including the two repertory companies, RDT and Ririe-Woodbury. It is unusual for a city this size to have one, let alone two, established dance companies. This combined with area universities sustains an audience for historic modern dance and its postmodern progeny. Figures like Virginia Tanner further ensured that Utah children were more likely than their peers across the nation to be exposed to modern dance in schools. This also cultivated a culture of viewing and participating in dance which sustains performers, choreographers and audiences over the last 60 years.

Samuel: I think that’s a very good broad-strokes description. What we have is unique, particularly in terms of the educational infrastructure. When I was an undergrad in dance at the U, back in the first decade of this millennium, there was a grad student there who once described Utah as “the great dance orchestra with no conductor.” I think what she meant was that we had systems to support the training of performers, but no analogous systems to support the development of dance artists or choreographers. I think that dynamic has started to change in the last 15 or 20 years, in part because of loveDANCEmore and other small organizations, and in part because, as much as people leave Salt Lake City and Utah, they also come back.

For instance, I recently wrote a review which appeared on our site and here on 15Bytes of a show Meghan Wall and Dmitri Peskov produced at the Rose. It felt like a real homecoming to me. I ran into Brandin Steffensen there who recently moved back to Utah after dancing and teaching in Oklahoma and New York—he’s married to Leslie Kraus who is the new artistic director of Ririe-Woodbury. I saw Lehua Estrada, Eileen Rojas, Corrine Penka—performers and makers I really admire who have been working in our community for a long time. And new faces too. I said this in so many words in the review, but it bears repeating. We’re lucky to have seasoned dance artists like this in the Salt Lake City community.

15 Bytes: How would you describe the current state of dance in Utah—what feels most vital or distinctive about it right now?

Samuel: One thing that really excites me, which has recently become a part of the programming we support, is Dance Class for Humans. Their organizing committee right now is Meagan Bertelsen, Kara Komarnitsky, Lauren Wightman, Maeve Friedman and Rae Luebbert. (I should say the whole thing was initiated back in 2023 by the amazing Sam Stone, who now lives in North Carolina.)

DCFH presents an ongoing class series at Westminster College. We couldn’t make this happen without the support of the chair in dance there, Meghan Wall. We present advanced-level modern and contemporary dance training, through a rotating teacher model. DCFH provides cross-pollination of many schools of contemporary technique and attracts students from different dance disciplines to try new types of classes at a low cost.

During the 2025-26 season, DCFH, in collaboration with loveDANCEmore and Westminster, will present more than 70 classes for dancers in the Salt Lake City community. This service to the field created a sustainable training opportunity outside of existing university and company models that our city has been demanding of for many years.

I think this is one really significant development—which I am glad to be a part of—because in other cities, class is a place where artists connect and network. I think about my own experience as a performer living in New York in the 2010s. Most of the opportunities I got were about that kind of networking rather than the auditions people outside the dance world always picture. I think having a sustainable, public laboratory for dance outside of the companies and the universities is a very significant step for this city if we can keep it alive over the next few years.

15 Bytes: The big companies are in periods of transition. What do you think is the most important thing for them to do to help sustain and move dance forward in Utah?

Ashley: I actually hope they lean into their historic missions—being repertory modern dance companies showcasing a historical perspective. I think this might be an outlier opinion, but as we continue to see attrition of young dance makers in Salt Lake City, these companies could re-center an arts culture that has become more fragmented over the past few years.

Halie: I don’t feel like I can answer that for the larger companies, nor do I really want to. From my background working in complex arts organizations, I know that each company has a unique funding structure and mission. Of course, larger companies can help local artists thrive by continuing to offer a platform to present their work, preferably for free, or better yet with pay for the artists, but that might not be in the missions of the companies. With the recent loss of grant funding across the nation, it simply might not be possible in this current moment. I get that. As for loveDANCEmore, we are in a place of reimagining how we can more sustainably and substantially support independent artists in Utah – through all the avenues that Samuel listed. And, simultaneously, we are focusing on reimagining the way we write about dance in support of artists.

15 Bytes: Where is loveDANCEmore at right now?

Samuel: We are all at different places in our lives. Halie and I are in a place where we travel a lot between Utah and the Midwest. Ashley is in Salt Lake City full-time, managing our arts education efforts and doing a lot of community activism around education.

Those of us who make or support experimental dance find ourselves highly-incentivized toward pursuing opportunities in academia and around the country to teach and show work. For a long time this organization has been about posing Salt Lake City as an alternative to living in New York City as a dancer. However absurd that might seem to some people, it’s an idea we still take very seriously.

loveDANCEmore has long engaged that question—can the kind of work that Ashley was making in 2010 when she started the organization exist in Utah? Can an artist like her, or like Rae Luebbert or Stephanie García, our current resident artists, can that kind of artist have a career and context for their work in a place like Utah?
Rae Luebbert’s choreographic work, including a collaboration with the acclaimed DC-based Emily Ames has blossomed, leading to further upcoming collaborations on the East coast and beyond. Luebbert’s work running our artist’s support programming—including Monday Movement Lab and Noori Screendance Festival—connects her to artists all over the valley and all over the world.

Stephanie García was just awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for choreography. The fact that she was able to do this in Salt Lake City—rather than a recognized art capital like New York or Los Angeles—without being a tenure-track professor, is, to us, a proof of concept for what loveDANCEmore is about, the idea that with the right community-building apparatus, dance made here in the Salt Lake Valley will be taken seriously by the larger world. What we lacked 15 years ago is what loveDANCEmore provides now — forums for debate and experimentation.

I raise the case of García’s success not to take credit for her achievements, but to assert that we want to make our community continue to be a place where artists of her stature can work and grow. This spring we supported her co- curation of the inaugural Corriente Alterna festival, which brought together acclaimed Mexican dance artists who’ve shared stages with international stars like Pina Bausch and Sasha Waltz with dozens of local Latin American artists from Salt Lake County. Local playwright Matthew Ivan Bennett wrote of Stephanie’s From the borderlands to the roots, it “marks one of the most ingenious uses of the Black Box space in downtown Salt Lake City’s Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts…García’s choreography… abolishes the sense of separation. Not so much because the dancers come close and sit amongst the audience at some points, but because the overall composition is rhythmically varied such that we never see the performers as this or that…[Her work’s] power lies in its refusal to be merely political. Borderlands may be about struggle, but it also insists, over and over, on being about celebration. Each darker harrowing sequence is followed by eruptions of joy blending folk and art pop.”

This local praise matters more to us than any national award.

15 Bytes: You’ve always been champions of smaller, emerging companies. Are things getting better/worse/staying the same for them? How have things changed in this respect over the past decade or so? Or maybe last five years? Was Covid a definite mark in time that established a before and after for dance in Utah, and if so, in what ways?

Samuel: Well, a lot of the players that have been around longer than us—the two modern dance companies, Ballet West, SBDance, etc.—I think they actually all handled the pandemic with a striking degree of success that is a testament to each of these organizations individually and to the collective strength of the community that supports concert dance in Utah. There was a lot of churn at the smaller scale, but that’s always been the case. COVID was such an intense experience that I am not sure we’re far enough away from it to talk about it yet.

Halie: I can’t speak to COVID, as I wasn’t directly involved in loveDANCEmore at the time, but I can speak to the difficulties of this moment and the arts funding cuts we are experiencing across the nation. loveDANCEmore wasn’t directly affected by federal grant funding, but we are feeling the impacts of this wave. So, maybe worse in those regards, however, the optimist in me does believe that not all is lost. These impacts have sparked questions about how to support community differently, in a way I think is quite responsive to the current times.

15 Bytes: For galleries, I have a sense that most last about two years. Is there something similar for dance companies in the state? What’s the average lifespan. And why?

Samuel: In December 2019, Ashley wanted to delete our website and put up a blank page that said “Gone Fishing.” We aren’t a dance company, but I think part of why I insisted that Ashley let me take over in late 2019, was that I felt intuitively that if we could push ourselves over the 10-year mark, that a more sustainable version of what we’d done for the previous decade would become more possible.

Movement Forum, an improvisation collective that did amazing things in our community, which was founded by Danell Hathaway and Graham Brown, lasted about 10 years. At the end, they had this show I was privileged to be a part of where they brought in some impressive choreographers—Gabe Forestieri, Ishmael Houston-Jones, who’s been on our board for years, and Yvonne Meier. I thought it was so sad that they disbanded right as they were getting to the point where things like that could happen. But it’s hard. The financial landscape for dance is very difficult and remains so.

Even in places where there is more money for dance—NYC, Minneapolis, San Francisco etc.—the company model that worked for some big-name artists in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s isn’t sustainable anymore. For at least a generation’s worth of careers, a project based model, in which choreographers hire dancers for a single project they might work on for months or years at a time, is much more the norm in places like that. Companies are the exception, not the rule.

loveDANCEmore offers fiscal sponsorship in part to make that model more possible in Utah, and to make people more aware of the advantages of working that way. In that way, Ashley—and to a lesser extent myself—has done a ton of largely invisible work over the years supporting other artists and making things happen that are possible with fiscal sponsorship. Dance journalism also becomes even more important in that landscape because it provides a record of what a community is up to that someone can refer to for grants, or that audiences can look to to orient themselves.

Halie: It just depends on the artist leading it and the conditions or resources they are able to access. I find that artists who keep making work, much longer than two years, tend to not have a lot of overhead cost. They go through periods where they can grow and shrink. They don’t have a rented space, brick and mortar. They adopt the project-based model in order to adjust their costs as funding fluctuates. They are able to be flexible with the times and keep adapting, even if their programming changes shape over a few-year span. There are a lot of artists working much longer than two or even ten years, but that is also the different structure of the performing arts vs. a gallery space. I think dance artists–myself included–are excellent shapeshifters, creating community spaces to support their work and then altering at their will to continue to make a life for themselves.

15 Bytes: What about loveDANCEmore? How have you changed? The publication is not as active as it has been in the past. Why is that? Halie, what are you hoping to do with the publication going forward? Ashley and Samuel, what are your roles going to be?

Samuel: Back when we first started there were newspaper critics at the Desert News and the Tribune. Sadly that’s no longer true. I learned so much from the years I spent reviewing and then editing as well. At a certain point, like Ashley, I found that I needed a break. And, a big part of bringing Halie in was that I knew the journalism part of our programming needed a new vision. So that side of things is totally in her hands now. I will still write from time to time—and I hope Ashley will too, despite how busy she is!—but the direction that part of our work is in Halie’s hands. So I’ll let her describe where she’s taking it…

Halie: Ashley, “Gone fishing” would have been lovely! I think the times when we want to “throw in the towel” are just as important as the moments we are clinging on. This career is brutal. But in all seriousness, I am glad that Samuel and Ashley didn’t replace the journal with “Gone Fishing,” not only for my benefit, but more importantly for the substantial archive that has been built. I have regular conversations with artists across the nation, in dance scenes much larger than Salt Lake City, that are amazed by the amount of dance journalism that has been maintained for 15 years. In my experience, dance, especially experimental dance or emerging artists, never get that much consistent written attention about their work.

Regarding my dreams for the journal, I am noticing a pretty large shift in dance journalism, stemming from what artists might need now. Over time, loveDANCEmore will move away from traditional reviews, which has historically been a singular voice as a witness that speaks to the merit of a work. Instead, we are reimagining the way we write about dance in support of artists. And in turn, making a strong case for dance as an art form in these current times. The role of the dance critic used to be in support of artists by holding artists accountable and prodding important questions that shape the field. Today, I am noticing a disconnect. That former model, which was essential to dance criticism’s history,  might not actually be what artists or the field needs.

One emerging dance criticism model that excites me is an “in-house writer.” I have noticed other dance scenes across the nation fiscally support a writer and artist pairing. The writer produces several written pieces alongside an artist as they create a new work. I actually really love this model because of the in-depth conversations about artistic processes that emerge, but also because it has the ability to generate new ideas about the work itself before it is complete. It reminds me of the original intention of loveDANCEmore—to give context for the kind of work Ashley was producing in 2010. This model of writing does exactly that. As the editor, I am more interested in conversations between artists with larger questions about the field. Connecting cultural ideas, the history of an artist, or how a current work might refract ideas between different dance scenes across the nation. The goal is to have Utah artist’s voices at the forefront of the field.

15 Bytes: Changes to the university systems in Utah have impacted the performing arts. How do you see them affecting the future of dance in the state?

Ashley: A reduction in opportunities in higher education, if sustained over a long period, will ultimately impoverish the cultural landscape for dance in Utah. However, the structures created by women like Tanner, Betty Hayes, Anne Riordan, Shirley Ririe, Joan Woodbury and Linda Smith—the list goes on—have weathered many analogous moments through the decades.

15 Bytes: How are things as far as infrastructure—funding, rehearsal spaces, performing spaces. What are you hearing about funding changes for individual organizations?

Halie: space to rehearse in and venues to rent for performances have gotten increasing more expensive and difficult to fund for many artists, myself included. Requests for free or low-cost rehearsal space is a huge need for our community. I get a message about this at least once a week from artists trying to navigate solutions. While there are many partners who offer free or low-cost performances spaces, that often comes with rules restricting our ability to ask for donations. The majority of our programming is grant funded, and without the ability to charge ticket sales or ask for small donations, it is difficult to fiscally support the work we produce. loveDANCEmore is incredibly grateful for those who have opened their doors to artists and organizations  like us in support of a thriving dance community—again Westminster University and Meghan Wall have been a huge community partner, not only for us, but other collectives across Salt Lake City. The demand for affordable space is just so large in our community currently. It seems like everyone (loveDANCEmore included) is operating with far less funding, but trying to maintain the same level of programming. At some point, this will be a felt shift in the dance community if it hasn’t been already. We are always open to partnerships for space or resources for artists, if there are more organizations in the community that would offer or open their doors for us.

15 Bytes: What are you excited about for the upcoming season—sure, for your organization but also Utah dance in general, whether that is individual performances, new dancers, choreographers, etc?

Halie: I look forward to supporting new work and emerging choreographers. I look forward to trying new things. At our heart, loveDANCEmore is about experimentation. I am thrilled that we are bringing back Sunday Series this year, while still producing Monday Movement Lab, Noori Screendance Festival, and Dance Class for Humans. I love watching how dance ecosystems change over time.I am genuinely excited to see how the dance community at large pivots with these waves of change in directorship and funding. Jason Rabb has asked loveDANCEmore to co-curate a 12 Minutes Max event, and I am thrilled to support his new direction for the programming after the late Paul Reynolds, who was a champion of the Salt Lake arts community.

loveDANCEmore is hoping to receive the funding to launch a new dance criticism platform titled CIRCULATION DESK in 2026. CIRCULATION DESK was born out of the need to reimagine  criticism for the professional sphere. Many iconic artists have circulated through Salt Lake City. They leave to live in other places across the nation, but sometimes they also return. The goal is to engage artists’ ideas from roughly-same-sized, non-coastal cities, and to have conversations across the nation that connect different geographical hubs for experimental dance. This programming is designed to get at the heart of the complex realities that have inspired and questioned artists both in Utah and across the nation.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.