Linda C. Smith . . . from page 1
The call was for real. Thanks to the persuasive efforts of Virginia Tanner, the Rockefeller Foundation was offering money to start a new kind of dance company—instead of concentrating on the work of a single choreographer this would be a democratic dance experiment with no star performers and no real leader; the company would learn and perform repertory from many different choreographers, commission new works and bring the art of modern dance into the dance-starved interior of the western United States (though a proposal to call the new company “Utah Repertory Dance Theatre” was nixed on the grounds that the word “Utah” implied Podunk origins). And so the Repertory Dance Theatre was born.
Nowadays RDT is known nationally and even internationally for programs that re-create the origins of modern dance. A 1980 program, “Then… The Early Years” was featured on the cover of Smithsonian magazine, and in the spotlight of the 2001 Winter Olympics the company presented American Masters including Martha Graham's "Diversion of Angles" (1948), Doris Humphrey's "With My Red Fires" (1936) and Helen Tamiris' "Dance for Walt Whitman" (1961). Here in Utah, RDT is a familiar part of the professional dance scene; Linda C. Smith is my parents’ neighbor and someone I see occasionally out walking her dogs. But after RDT performed in Vienna, the presenter came backstage and kissed Smith’s hand asking, “Does Utah have any idea what a treasure they have in RDT?” I hope we do know. Looking back at the amazing first half century of the company I have to agree with Linda C. Smith that, “the Rockefeller Foundation should feel that their original investment in 1966 paid off handsomely.”
AB: You knew you wanted to be a dancer all your life. Did you have a particular inspirational moment, something like Ruth St. Denis and the cigarette poster?
LCS: I remember from age 4, I just connected with dance strongly. My mother read this article that Virginia Tanner was teaching creative dance— there were other dance schools but they were all what she called “Dolly Dinkle dance”—and I was just hooked. Miss Virginia opened my mind and my world and my vision. She didn’t teach me a dance. She helped me discover my own dance, one that was inside of me waiting to blossom. I remember at age 5 or 6 putting on the Victrola—Chopin was my favorite—and I would dance around wrapped in sheets like Ruth St. Denis. Well, I didn’t know who she was then, but I had lots of aha! moments for sure. I was always serious. A little too serious. As a teenager I would write my own poetry and then compose a dance to it. The Virginia Tanner studio was such an amazing place. You would meet the crème de la crème of the dance world. I remember meeting Ruth St. Denis at Virginia’s studio. My life was just wrapped around how I would continue in a career in dance. It was such a natural thing; it’s what I was born to do. My mother used to say, “What if I had never taken you to dance, what would you have done?” I suppose I would have become a rock, or vanilla pudding. I can’t imagine this world without seeing it through the eyes of a dancer. Virginia had you looking through the eyes of seashells, or flowers. Wherever I looked I was looking for a dance.
AB: Back in 1966 you were the young whippersnapper and now you’re the Grande Dame. Did you have something of the Grande Dame in you all along?
LCS: I still think of myself as 23. When I joined RDT that was a magical moment. That opportunity was handed to me—I won’t say it was a gift, I worked hard, but I tell you that was a golden moment. I was in the right place at the right time. It was an opportunity but a big responsibility too. Those eight dancers that were hand picked, we didn’t want to fail. The world was watching, we wanted to be a success and prove we were worth it, dancers out here in Utah. I’m of a generation where I remember working with people like Helen Tamiris, and she’s gone now. I feel like a connecting thread from the past to the present. I had the opportunity to build the early historical repertory. I discovered the classic dances were being lost and forgotten and I felt like I had to do something. I kind of slipped into a different role. I didn’t walk in knowing how to run a company so I took the skills I had and learned on the job. You’re not taught at university how to run a dance company and if you were you’d probably run in fear. This company has been a laboratory to experiment and try new things. That’s what Virginia and my mother taught me; you open the refrigerator, see what’s there and make a meal out of it. Creativity! That’s where it’s at. What an amazing blessing.
AB: When RDT was founded it was important to the funders that it was in Utah. How has that relationship to place played out over the years?
LCS: The Rockefeller Foundation had been giving seed money around the country to help decentralize the arts. They had in mind giving money outside metropolitan areas to nurture professional dance. They did a lot of research and they thought that dance had “fertile ground” in Utah. We just roared at that, we thought it was so funny, but you know Brigham Young built a theater before he built the temple. It’s just a place where dance is one of the greatest resources. We still look at dancers trained in Utah first.
AB: In 1971 you met Frank Zappa and you said, “He loved my rather psychedelic choreography, 'Diamond.’” Does RDT still perform "Diamond?"
LCS: We don’t do it any more because it takes 12 slide projectors and where would you get them? It really was a piece of its time. It was a dazzler. It was a light-show dance and it was pretty innovative. People still talk about it and say why don’t you bring “Diamond” back, but you know, some pieces have a shelf life.
AB: I was poking around in the University of Utah library archives and found an RDT program from 1968 and realized that I went to that concert when I was 7 years old. I think seeing performances like that as a kid is why I write about dance nowadays.
LCS: You need to put that in the article. We did a lot of arts education even back then. There is a loyal audience that remembers the 1970s and they invariably say, “You made such a difference when I was in college.” It connected with a whole generation of people. My point is, we have an audience that’s been with us all 50 years and that thrills me. I think we made a difference; we made an impression on people. At least I hope so.
AB: You’ve been the sole artistic director of RDT since 1983. Does the original democratic spirit of the original RDT live on?
LCS: The company is not my company. The mission is at the center of everything. So it was a consensus after the first 10 years that we would be smart to have some people a little more equal. The Rockefeller Foundation had it in mind that the company would find a way to govern themselves based on the mission and leadership would come from within. It’s still like that with Nick [Cendese] and Lynne [Larson]. If you don’t have the dancers behind you, you can’t be a success, so it’s a representative democracy.
AB: What’s your plan for the next 50 years? Are you planning to retire?
LCS: I don’t like that “R” word. I’ve got a list of projects, like everyone asks, when are you going to write your book? My mother lived to be 105. There are some good genes there. I want the company to survive. I think it’s an important and a valuable institution in Utah. Maybe my job description will change, but for the anniversary year, I just want to enjoy the good will and congratulations. It’s a fun year. There are some bright young creative people coming up. The dance world—some parts of it are really changing. I think it’s important that the voices of today, the younger voices, need to be heard. I’m a facilitator, I’m a producer, I’m a dreamer, to call myself a visionary seems a little highfalutin. I’m part of the team. The company won’t go away if I go away. It should live on and on.
AB: Anything else you’d like to say?
LCS: I’m just so proud of the company and I’m proud that we have been able to keep it alive and well for 50 years. The people that you meet! To be able to work with brilliant choreographers, composers, staff members—it’s quite a cruise ship. It’s been an honor working with the people.
For Further Reading:Linda C. Smith (interviewed August 5, 1995). Everett L. Cooley oral history project, Accn 814, Special Collections and Archives. University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott. Salt Lake City, Utah. http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/uu-elc/id/4908
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Performance Review: Salt Lake City
Off and Dancing
Ritual opens Repertory Dance Theatre’s 50th season
by Geoff Wichert
Of all the brilliant theatrical tropes that Repertory Dance Theatre has introduced over half a century, one of the best comes right at the start of each performance. As the house lights dim and the roses on the curtain fade from sight, anticipation calls the audience to order. Then, when the stage lights come up, the curtain has disappeared. No clanking stage machinery here; rather, direct access to the dream state. Dance is the purest kinesthetic equivalent to music, which is to say the most abstract form of theater, instantly accessible to anyone who wants it. RDT lets nothing get in the way.
Then half a dozen or so dancers take the stage, sometimes singly, or in pairs from opposite sides, or three in unison. These quantitative entrances, and the exits interwoven with them, make up an important, structural part of the choreography. Costumes are minimal: modest enough; designed to facilitate movement rather than create fictional identities. Some dancers’ gestures are broad and sweeping, graceful full arm swings alternating side to side. Others are mincing, small gestures made with hands directly in front of the torso. Heads rock from side to side as if building up momentum, then revolve in great circles exaggerated by whirling hair. Legs extend, reach out and draw back. The figures glide across the floor, then hop, hop, hop. A pas de deux is traded in sequence from pair to pair, like a line in a baroque canon; then all six (or eight) dancers join together and weave an intricate pattern among each other.
There were five dances in the first concert of RDT’s 50th season, and it’s not a criticism to say that this description fit all five. Rather, it’s a measure of the company’s large repertoire of superb modern dance works saved from extinction that, given the impulse, they have sufficient dances on hand that fit a single model so closely, allowing the differences and the details to shine like so many crystals in a chandelier. In the opener, “Chant,” the costumes were marked by heavy, vertical bars, which my companion said made RDT alumnus Tim Wengerd’s Pueblo-inspired choreography seem like it was happening in black and white. Modern dance began by reconnecting feet to the floor, but in “Chant” the patterned steps restore attention to that fact.
Dance is unique among the arts in having two audiences. If a musical soloist or a theatrical performer is particularly brilliant or unusually regrettable, most of the audience will recognize it. In dance, though, painful or difficult passages immediately divide those watching into the wildly appreciative and those baffled by all the cheering. Two excerpts from “Energizer” made the point more broadly. That anyone remembers all the rapid-fire steps, let alone possesses the stamina to complete them, is cause alone for those who can feel the demands in their bodies to cheer. But a case can also be made that such cause may indeed stand alone. Why this somewhat baffling catalog of sexual roles set in amber 35 years ago remains in the repertoire just might testify to an indifference to content in the face of sufficiently exciting choreography. Yet if critic Anna Kisselgoff was right to say, in 1980, that this was the future of dance, one wonders why its evolutionary approach to complexity hasn’t inspired replacements for the one uncomfortably segregated pair of performances the evening offered.
Thirty years and a lifetime or two of dance evolution separate “Pigs and Fishes” from “Dabke,” but it’s equally fair to say of either that time in the theater cannot be better spent. The former, in spite of its venerable age, contains some stunning steps that felt completely new and original, introduced by a single woman whose solo sets up all that follows. When she is joined by three men and three more women, a versatile asymmetry is established among seven figures who explore the possible permutations. As in all five works throughout the evening, it proceeds in large part from focused actions that begin in one spot and spread through the company, and creates intricate patterns in which each dancer threads a path between the others. Unlike the rest of the program, in both “Pigs and Fishes” and “Dabke” the dancing gets down to the floor. That said, “Dabke” takes an approach that contrasts with that of “Pigs and Fishes.” As befits a work born in the age of musical sampling, much of its material draws on contemporary folk and popular dance sources. Pretending race and national origin don’t matter is as daft and pointless as treating sex as destiny, and Israeli-born choreographer Zvi Gotheiner proves it by illuminating a fundamentally Palestinian and Arab expression as only an outsider can. Some of the solos feel so intimate and self-expressive that after one particularly plangent and disturbing scene, convincingly made to feel spontaneous by Efrén Corado Garcia, three more figures double his precise motions to make the point that what feels like individual fate and personal response is never entirely autonomous: everyone in conflict ends up acting a part.
Ritual opened Repertory Dance Theatre's 50th anniversary season, October 1-3. The season continues with Revel, November 19-21, a celebratory acknowledgement of RDT’s alumni dancers and choreographers, emphasizing pieces that are full of levity and joyous energy; and Revere, April 14-16, 2016, a tribute to José Limon, whose iconic and timeless work has been performed by RDT since 1967.
For another review of the performance, check out our partners at lovedancemore.org.
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