{"id":93296,"date":"2025-05-28T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2025-05-28T19:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=93296"},"modified":"2025-06-18T19:02:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-19T02:02:13","slug":"linda-c-smith-preserving-and-persevering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/linda-c-smith-preserving-and-persevering\/","title":{"rendered":"Linda C. Smith: Preserving and Persevering"},"content":{"rendered":"

This profile was originally published in our 2019 publication <\/em>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\u2019s extraordinary legacy, her decades of artistic vision, and her profound impact on Utah\u2019s dance community and the national dance landscape.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n
\"

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.<\/p><\/div>\n

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, \u201cDance has the power to change your life.\u201d<\/h4>\n

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\u20131979), a modern dance pioneer from Utah who viewed dance as \u201cthe realization of an ideal sublime.\u201d 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\u2019s Dance Theatre (CDT) and \u201ca full concert in tribute to Doris Humphrey, the internationally known choreographer.\u201d Humphrey had spent a week in Salt Lake City that year working with Tanner\u2019s group of \u201cunusually sensitive\u201d children. One of those young dancers was Linda Call, years before she acquired \u201cSmith\u201d as her professional and \u2014 for a time \u2014 married name. \u201cMiss Virginia opened my mind and my world and my vision,\u201d says Smith. \u201cShe didn\u2019t teach me a dance. She helped me discover my own dance, one that was inside of me, waiting to blossom.\u201d At Tanner\u2019s studio, Smith met renowned dancers like Ruth St. Denis and Charles Weidman, and in 1953 she traveled with CDT to perform at the Jacob\u2019s Pillow dance festival in New York. The condescending title Life magazine used for their cover story on the festival, \u201cLittle Angels from Utah: Mormon Children Make a Triumphant Ballet Junket,\u201d annoyed 13-year-old Linda Call, who thought the company should be taken seriously.<\/h4>\n

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.<\/h4>\n
\"Linda

Linda C. Smith performing in Doris Humphrey’s “Day on Earth.” Image courtesy of the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n

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 \u2014 a living dance museum with a mission to preserve a repertory by many different artists \u2014 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 \u201ctwo cars full\u201d as Smith points out) and no director \u2014 after all, it was the radical 1960s and it seemed possible to run a leaderless artistic democracy. \u201cWhen I joined RDT, that was a magical moment. That opportunity was handed to me \u2014 I won\u2019t 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,\u201d 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. \u201cI kind of slipped into a different role. I didn\u2019t walk in knowing how to run a company so I took the skills I had and learned on the job. You\u2019re not taught at university how to run a dance company and if you were you\u2019d probably run in fear.\u201d<\/h4>\n

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\u2019s show, \u201cModern Dance in America: The Early Years,\u201d 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, \u201cwhen 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.\u201d With typical aplomb, Smith brushed off this criticism. She wasn\u2019t trying to impersonate anyone. \u201cWhen I dance, I feel like me, Linda,\u201d she told Terry. \u201cIf those pieces had validity in those days, they will also have validity on our bodies.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Though it defied the New York dance critics, RDT\u2019s 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\u2019t deter RDT from adding more historic revivals to their dance library \u2014 RDT is currently the guardian of more than 350 historic works including the complete repertory of Doris Humphrey (1895\u20131958). During the cultural celebration at the 2002 Winter Olympics, RDT performed three historic modern dance masterpieces for international visitors: Martha Graham\u2019s \u201cDiversion of Angels\u201d (1948), Doris Humphrey\u2019s \u201cWith My Red Fires\u201d (1936), and Helen Tamiris\u2019 \u201cDances of Walt Whitman\u201d (1958). Smith was able to re-create Tamiris\u2019 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\u2019s 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 It\u014d (1892\u20131961), 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 Jos\u00e9 Lim\u00f3n (1908\u20131972).<\/h4>\n

Smith\u2019s 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: \u201cOne 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.\u201d The man she had mistaken for a homeless vagrant was Salt Lake City businessman Irving Jerome \u201cIzzy\u201d Wagner, who became the main donor for the new performing arts center. \u201cThe Rose,\u201d as it\u2019s 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\u2019s Dance Center on Broadway with classes ranging from African dance (with live drumming), to flamenco, hip-hop, Bollywood, \u201cPrime Movement\u201d for old, stiff dancers, and \u201cGray Matters\u201d for dancers with Parkinson\u2019s disease.<\/h4>\n
\"Linda

Linda C. Smith demonstrates with dancer Aaron Wood in an RDT lecture demonstration. Image by Christopher Peddecord.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u201312 students self-esteem, good citizenship, intellectual curiosity, and love of learning through the art of dance. RDT\u2019s 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\u2019s leadership, even fundraising turns into dance education: the Charette events that ran from 2005\u20132015 were a hilarious competition to become the next \u201cIron Choreographer.\u201d 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 \u201cHow to Be a Utahn,\u201d Salt Lake Magazine included the instructions \u201cGo to RDT\u2019s Charette.\u201d<\/h4>\n

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\u2019 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\u2019s \u201cWater Study\u201d (1928). The Salt Lake Tribune review of H2O griped that \u201cthe program\u2019s political theme doesn\u2019t necessarily work,\u201d but RDT kept right on making politically relevant dances.<\/h4>\n

In 2011, Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop was likewise flummoxed by the concept of socially relevant dance. \u201cRepertory Dance Theatre is superb,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it is just not an organization that EPA should be involved in supporting.\u201d The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had given RDT a $25,000 environmental justice grant in order to \u201cuse dance activities to help K\u201312 students understand the impacts of air pollution on environment and health.\u201d A video recording of the 2010 Wallace Stegner Symposium shows Linda Smith presenting the resulting \u201cGreen Map Project for Salt Lake County.\u201d She tells the audience: \u201cDance can connect you to the world in very meaningful ways,\u201d explaining that as students dance the Green Map they will learn about sustainability kinesthetically. \u201cIt\u2019s a circle,\u201d she says. \u201cYour brain responds to the gesture and the information within the gesture and that is a wonderful way to learn.\u201d Then she calls out, \u201cLet\u2019s have the icon for solar energy!\u201d 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. \u201cYou\u2019re going to learn and practice recycling,\u201d she announces, meaning that they are going to dance the idea of recycling directly into their muscle memory, \u201cand it\u2019s going to change your life!\u201d<\/h4>\n

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\u2019s 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 Din\u00e9 Bik\u00e9yah, 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\u2019s ZviDance took a five-day journey to the Bears Ears region in the company of Navajo guides. Smith blogged, \u201cas 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.\u201d When Gotheiner\u2019s \u201cDancing The Bears Ears\u201d was performed onstage, the emotional effect was profound. Salt Lake Tribune reviewer Kathy Adams wrote, \u201cFor more than two decades, Repertory Dance Theatre has employed the power of dance to defend and protect Utah\u2019s landscape, but never with the ferocity of \u2018Dancing The Bears Ears.\u2019\u201d<\/h4>\n

Smith has spent her career wearing all three hats \u2014 dancer, administrator, and educator \u2014 and she\u2019s still going strong. \u201cI\u2019ve got a list of projects,\u201d she remarked in 2015, as RDT prepared for its 50th anniversary. \u201cLike, everyone asks, \u2018When are you going to write your book\u2019? My mother lived to be 105 \u2014 there are some good genes there. I want the company to survive.\u201d The long reach of Smith\u2019s influence was captured perfectly in \u201cShe,\u201d 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. \u201cThe little kids would cue me, \u2018Linda! Your part is coming up.\u2019\u201d<\/h4>\n
\"Linda

Linda C. Smith performing in “Jews of Silence,” 1976. Image courtesy of the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1518,"featured_media":93306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[1771,1626],"class_list":["post-93296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dance","tag-linda-c-smith","tag-repertory-dance-theatre"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-27 09:20:17","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Linda_Smith-87-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93296"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93461,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93296\/revisions\/93461"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}