This profile was originally published in our 2019 publication Utah’s 15: The State’s Most Influential Artists. With the announcement that Linda C. Smith will step down as Executive/Artistic Director of Repertory Dance Theatre at the close of its 59th season and transition to Director Emerita in July 2025, we are publishing this profile online for the first time. As RDT prepares to celebrate its 60th anniversary and moves into a new era under the leadership of Nicholas Cendese and Lynne Larson, we reflect on Smith’s extraordinary legacy, her decades of artistic vision, and her profound impact on Utah’s dance community and the national dance landscape.

Linda C. Smith at Repertory Dance’s practice facilities in the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in Salt Lake City, 2019. Image by Simon Blundell.

Linda C. Smith is one of a small group of strong female leaders who have helped turn Salt Lake City, Utah, into a geographically unlikely center for modern dance. She has become synonymous with a company that makes a splash nationally and even internationally, nurturing the careers of countless dance students and professionals and offering Utah audiences an endlessly inventive and thought-provoking array of historic, world-premiere, and educational dance events. As co-founder and longtime executive/artistic director of Repertory Dance Theatre, Smith has guided these efforts in a way that is radically community oriented, integrating the art of dance in places where no dance has gone before. As Smith says, “Dance has the power to change your life.”

The first remarkable thing about Smith is, her career as a professional dancer began when she was only 4 years old. She traces her dance lineage through Virginia Tanner (1915–1979), a modern dance pioneer from Utah who viewed dance as “the realization of an ideal sublime.” Tanner was one of the greats, but the professional dance company she founded is less famous than those of her peers because it is for children. In the December 1949 issue of Dance Magazine, Tanner proudly announced the creation of Children’s Dance Theatre (CDT) and “a full concert in tribute to Doris Humphrey, the internationally known choreographer.” Humphrey had spent a week in Salt Lake City that year working with Tanner’s group of “unusually sensitive” children. One of those young dancers was Linda Call, years before she acquired “Smith” as her professional and — for a time — married name. “Miss Virginia opened my mind and my world and my vision,” says Smith. “She didn’t teach me a dance. She helped me discover my own dance, one that was inside of me, waiting to blossom.” At Tanner’s studio, Smith met renowned dancers like Ruth St. Denis and Charles Weidman, and in 1953 she traveled with CDT to perform at the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival in New York. The condescending title Life magazine used for their cover story on the festival, “Little Angels from Utah: Mormon Children Make a Triumphant Ballet Junket,” annoyed 13-year-old Linda Call, who thought the company should be taken seriously.

The second remarkable thing is, Smith has spent her long career almost entirely in her own hometown. She grew up in the Marmalade District of Salt Lake City and graduated from West High School. In 1954, she earned a degree in dance at the University of Utah (which also presented her with a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016) at a time when dance was part of the physical education department. Smith was definitely not interested in being a gym teacher. Her CDT experience meant she had more dance training than most other students, and she already was dancing in faculty shows. While still a student, Smith became part of a movement spearheaded by U of U modern dance department founder Elizabeth R. Hayes and Virginia Tanner, as well as Joan Woodbury and Shirley Ririe (founders of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company), to move the dance curriculum into the more professional arena of fine arts. Nowadays, Smith is an adjunct faculty member in the department, considered one of the best academic dance programs in the United States.

Linda C. Smith performing in Doris Humphrey’s “Day on Earth.” Image courtesy of the artist.

In the 1960s, Tanner pulled off a coup when, while negotiating with the Rockefeller Foundation for a grant to start a first-of-its-kind modern dance company — a living dance museum with a mission to preserve a repertory by many different artists — she convinced the foundation to place it in Salt Lake City. She also suggested Smith as a possible member of the company. RDT opened shop in 1966 with eight dancers (a convenient “two cars full” as Smith points out) and no director — after all, it was the radical 1960s and it seemed possible to run a leaderless artistic democracy. “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,” Smith says. By 1977, Smith and Kay Clark had emerged as co-leaders and, in 1983, Smith became the sole artistic director and has led the company ever since. “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.”

In the professional dance world, the idea of re-creating historically important dances was surprisingly controversial. Dance critics strongly associated modern dance styles with the original artists and worried revivals would tamper with history. Nevertheless, in collaboration with dance historian Marcia B. Siegel, RDT used archival evidence to re-create lost works by Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, the Denishawn school, Helen Tamiris, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Lester Horton. The company’s show, “Modern Dance in America: The Early Years,” was the cover story in the October 1980 issue of Smithsonian magazine. Though not entirely flattering, the article by renowned dance critic Walter Terry illustrates just how gutsy and ambitious RDT was. Terry, who had seen some of the original performers, complained that the highly developed technique of RDT dancers lacked the rough urgency of the old-timers. He wrote, “when the RDT missed, its efforts could be compared with a reconstructed Indian village in which the tepees were made of plastic and secured with aluminum poles instead of being built with the hides and boughs of life.” With typical aplomb, Smith brushed off this criticism. She wasn’t trying to impersonate anyone. “When I dance, I feel like me, Linda,” she told Terry. “If those pieces had validity in those days, they will also have validity on our bodies.”

Though it defied the New York dance critics, RDT’s living dance museum was a big hit in Utah, where it offered a broadly democratic education in dance history to a wide, intergenerational audience. The naysayers didn’t deter RDT from adding more historic revivals to their dance library — RDT is currently the guardian of more than 350 historic works including the complete repertory of Doris Humphrey (1895–1958). During the cultural celebration at the 2002 Winter Olympics, RDT performed three historic modern dance masterpieces for international visitors: Martha Graham’s “Diversion of Angels” (1948), Doris Humphrey’s “With My Red Fires” (1936), and Helen Tamiris’ “Dances of Walt Whitman” (1958). Smith was able to re-create Tamiris’ piece after she discovered a 1961 recording of it on a deteriorating reel-to-reel film in a box donated to the University of Utah’s Marriott Library. In 2009, RDT won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to reconstruct works by early-20th-century Japanese dancer/choreographer Michio Itō (1892–1961), and became the U.S. repository for his technique. In 2018, the RDT Summer Dance Workshop focused on the technique of a former teacher of both Tanner and Smith, the Mexican-American dancer José Limón (1908–1972).

Smith’s brand of community building was essential to building the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center that opened in Salt Lake City in 1996. When RDT began, the company was housed in World War II Army barracks at the University of Utah. By the 1980s, the decrepit buildings were slated for demolition and RDT went in search of a new home. Smith wanted the company to have a greater presence downtown, so in 1994 they moved into the old Restaurant Equipment Supply building at 138 W. Broadway. The area was less than upscale, with transients and homeless people sleeping in doorways. Smith noticed one man in particular would come by repeatedly in order to watch dance rehearsals through the window. In an article for Catalyst magazine, Smith wrote: “One day, I cornered him to investigate his motives. I asked him if he liked dance. He said that his wife used to be a Vaudeville dancer.” The man she had mistaken for a homeless vagrant was Salt Lake City businessman Irving Jerome “Izzy” Wagner, who became the main donor for the new performing arts center. “The Rose,” as it’s now known, has performance and community spaces and is currently home to six resident performing arts companies. The new space allowed RDT to expand programming, including the Ring Around the Rose series that introduces children to the wide variety of performing arts companies in Utah and RDT’s Dance Center on Broadway with classes ranging from African dance (with live drumming), to flamenco, hip-hop, Bollywood, “Prime Movement” for old, stiff dancers, and “Gray Matters” for dancers with Parkinson’s disease.

Linda C. Smith demonstrates with dancer Aaron Wood in an RDT lecture demonstration. Image by Christopher Peddecord.

Smith is not just a dancer and administrator. She is a teacher, as well. The RDT Arts-in-Education program began with the company in 1966 and is responsible for teaching thousands of K–12 students self-esteem, good citizenship, intellectual curiosity, and love of learning through the art of dance. RDT’s educational materials also influenced Utah curriculum standards for fine arts. At RDT performances, Smith is likely to appear onstage with a mini-lecture during a teachable moment in the program and the shows often provide context via enlightening video interviews with choreographers or dancers. Under Smith’s leadership, even fundraising turns into dance education: the Charette events that ran from 2005–2015 were a hilarious competition to become the next “Iron Choreographer.” Contestants were given a group of dancers, a secret ingredient and one hour to create a new dance, while audience members wandered from studio to studio witnessing the sausage-grinder where dance is made (and bribing the judges to pick their favorite). In a 2014 series on “How to Be a Utahn,” Salt Lake Magazine included the instructions “Go to RDT’s Charette.”

Smith believes kinesthetic memory means movement is an ideal way to connect people to a unique sense of place. In 2010, after Utah experienced a period of prolonged drought, RDT organized a multidisciplinary show called H2O. A watery preshow by Brolly Arts filled The Rose with aquatic art installations and performance pieces. There were even dancers flushing toilets in the ladies’ room performing a piece by Mallory Rosenthal to the lyrics from the N.E.R.D. song (All the girls standing in the line for the bathroom.) To open its part of the show, RDT reached into historical repertory with CDT to perform Doris Humphrey’s “Water Study” (1928). The Salt Lake Tribune review of H2O griped that “the program’s political theme doesn’t necessarily work,” but RDT kept right on making politically relevant dances.

In 2011, Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop was likewise flummoxed by the concept of socially relevant dance. “Repertory Dance Theatre is superb,” he said, “but it is just not an organization that EPA should be involved in supporting.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had given RDT a $25,000 environmental justice grant in order to “use dance activities to help K–12 students understand the impacts of air pollution on environment and health.” A video recording of the 2010 Wallace Stegner Symposium shows Linda Smith presenting the resulting “Green Map Project for Salt Lake County.” She tells the audience: “Dance can connect you to the world in very meaningful ways,” explaining that as students dance the Green Map they will learn about sustainability kinesthetically. “It’s a circle,” she says. “Your brain responds to the gesture and the information within the gesture and that is a wonderful way to learn.” Then she calls out, “Let’s have the icon for solar energy!” Four dancers onstage demonstrate movement patterns for solar energy, free speech, waste dump, wetlands, and recycling. Then, Smith gestures for audience members to stand up. “You’re going to learn and practice recycling,” she announces, meaning that they are going to dance the idea of recycling directly into their muscle memory, “and it’s going to change your life!”

The power of dance to change the world was on display in October 2017 when the company found themselves at the center of a controversy over Bears Ears National Monument. After President Obama created Bears Ears as the first monument specifically established to preserve a Native American cultural landscape under significant tribal oversight, RDT commissioned New York-based choreographer Zvi Gotheiner to create a celebratory new work. President Trump, however, slashed the size of Bears Ears by 85 percent. The monument downsizing opened a deep gash in Utah’s social psyche, dismantling years of hard work by Utah Indian tribes and their allies. As always with RDT, the vision of community healing came through dance. RDT formed a partnership with Utah Diné Bikéyah, an Indigenous nonprofit organization that works to protect culturally significant, ancestral lands. In Salt Lake City, RDT hosted panels featuring tribal members and a presentation by respected photographer and writer Stephen Trimble. With crowd-sourced funding, members of RDT and Gotheiner’s ZviDance took a five-day journey to the Bears Ears region in the company of Navajo guides. Smith blogged, “as we began to open our eyes, hearts and minds to the breathtaking landscape, we soon realized that our sense of time and our perspectives were changing.” When Gotheiner’s “Dancing The Bears Ears” was performed onstage, the emotional effect was profound. Salt Lake Tribune reviewer Kathy Adams wrote, “For more than two decades, Repertory Dance Theatre has employed the power of dance to defend and protect Utah’s landscape, but never with the ferocity of ‘Dancing The Bears Ears.’”

Smith has spent her career wearing all three hats — dancer, administrator, and educator — and she’s still going strong. “I’ve got a list of projects,” she remarked in 2015, as RDT prepared for its 50th anniversary. “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.” The long reach of Smith’s influence was captured perfectly in “She,” a tribute to Virginia Tanner choreographed by University of Utah dance professor Jacque Lynn Bell (herself a former Tanner Dance student), which opened that season. It featured multigenerational dancers from CDT ranging from the toddler daughter of RDT dancer Chara Huckins to the master teacher herself, Linda C. Smith, then 75 and outfitted in pastel pajamas. Smith was especially delighted with the way the young dancers treated her as an equal onstage. “The little kids would cue me, ‘Linda! Your part is coming up.’”

Linda C. Smith performing in “Jews of Silence,” 1976. Image courtesy of the artist.