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Choreographer Charlotte Boye-Christensen has collaborated with painters, poets, actors, composers, her architect boyfriend and even a graffiti artist. This year she'll be working with stand-up comic Ethan Phillips.

"Prism," Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company's December concert, features the choreography of Boye-Christensen, the company's artistic director, and the annual performance has evolved into a series of works-in-partnership.

Of all those past collaborations, it's hard to say which was the most unlikely pairing, but the mash-up of stand-up comedy and contemporary dance certainly would be in the running.

"The beauty of collaboration is that artists from other art forms stand back and are brutally honest," said Boye-Christensen. "Collaboration forces you to be economical in your movement choices because there are other people involved. So you have to conserve and not just waffle on endlessly."

Phillips is remembered for his role as Neelix in "Star Trek: Voyager ," but he's also acted in more than 30 films and worked extensively in New York and regional theater, including Salt Lake Acting Company's 1987 production of "The Foreigner."

His other Utah connection was a stint at the Sundance Playwrights Conference, where he developed his own play "Penguin Blues," and then went on to help form the Los Angeles-based First Stage, a playwright development lab.

Boye-Christensen met Phillips through writer and former University of Utah English professor David Kranes, whom she collaborated with last year on the premiere of "Touching Fire," which included Boye-Christensen's partner, architect Nathan Webster. The three continued their friendship. "I want David to adopt me," Boye-Christensen joked.

So when Kranes pitched coupling dance with comedy, and suggested Phillips, whom he'd met through the Sundance lab, at first Boye-Christensen cringed. "My first thought was, 'I'm not funny,' and I'm really not funny, but I am all about a challenge," Boye-Christensen said.

At their first meeting, the reserved, Danish-born choreographer said she'd barely gotten in the front door when Phillips let loose a barrage of Borscht Belt one-liners.

"We talked and dissected comic themes — the abusive comic, the self-deprecating comic, (fat) jokes that are off-putting, crude jokes," she recalls "Then we talked about his life and why he became a performer."

In September, Phillips flew from Los Angles, where he lives with his artist-wife Patricia Cresswell, to see a Ririe-Woodbury's Dance Company performance to make sure it was the right fit. It was.

The next step in the process was to film Phillips, since his performance in this collaboration is viewed on two large screens at each end of the stage.

He was filmed telling jokes, capturing his expressions while he watched and reacted to dancers. "We had him do the performer who loses it on stage, the internal hysteria of forgetting the joke, and then getting angry at the audience, the kind of performer who pushes the agenda," Boye-Christensen said. "We were looking to explore those many layers of performers."

After Nathan Webster edited the four hours of material down to 20 minutes, Boye-Christensen and Kranes sat and argued about the effect of specific words, particular words that might be considered offensive.

Beyond language, the theme that eventually surfaced was examining one fear that all performers share: the onstage moment of forgetting — your next line, the punchline or a dance movement.

"Reacting to that fear can either paralyze you or create an opening where you are outside the experience and have a incredibly creative moment," Boye-Christensen said.

In his longtime performance career, Phillips has developed techniques to tap into those moments, letting intuition take over. In the video, Phillips talks about his experience as a performer and the unfolding or opening up of the different sides of himself. The arc from joke-teller to performer is touching.

The choreography for the six company-dancers' solos was created out of their experience with similar fears. "The dancers' solos are a reference to what they feel on stage," Boye-Christensen said. "Onstage, you are several things: You are one among many, and one of many. But it comes down to you as a solo performer — a singular form."

The score for this collaboration is meticulously married to the content and carries the material from one section to the next. Boye-Christensen said she dislikes crude humor —"it's just too easy" — but she recognizes it's one way that comedians push boundaries. So the collaborators worked to add "musical accents" to mask offensive words, hoping those cues would also trigger the imaginations of audience members.

At the beginning of the collaboration process, Phillips recalls, he asked Boye-Christensen how "dark" she wanted the humor in the piece to be. "She told me it could be as dark as I wanted," Phillips said. "So I told her a very mean, cold, ugly joke. She said 'not that dark.'"

The audience will have to see if his observations and her movements form a cohesive statement. A difficult challenge, perhaps, yet part of Boye-Christensen's ambition to marry dance and originality at the center of every collaboration.

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The humor of 'Prism'

Ririe-Woodbury's concert will feature a debut performance of "But Seriously...," an exploration of performers' collective fear of forgetting, as well as revivals of "Push" and "Touching Fire," and excerpts from "West," which will be performed in its entirety in April.

When • Thursday, Dec. 8-Saturday, Dec. 10, 7:30 p.m., with a 2 p.m. matinee Saturday matinee.

Where • Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 138 W. 300 South, Salt Lake City.

Tickets • $30, $15 (students/seniors), at 801-355-ARTS or visiting bit.ly/prismtix.

Special • $5 off tickets for five food items to be donated to the Utah Food Bank.