Why Utah is a place ‘unlike any other in the world’ for dance, even as local companies see leaders change, funding cut

Linda C. Smith has been part of Salt Lake City’s Repertory Dance Theatre for nearly 60 of her 85 years and isn’t fazed about government cuts to money for the arts.

“When have the arts enjoyed an overload of funding?” Smith asked in mock exasperation in an interview. “Is this the first crisis?”

Leaders at pioneering modern-dance troupes RDT and Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, who share performance space at Salt Lake City’s Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, are watching with concern over the Trump administration’s move this year to cancel or pull back National Endowment for the Arts grants to hundreds of nonprofit arts organizations.

The cuts are happening as both troupes undergo major leadership transitions. What will it mean for the future of dance in Utah?

“The challenges change, year to year,” said Thom Dancy, executive director of Ririe-Woodbury.

Dancy recalled attending a recent arts conference, where he talked to dance legend Lula Washington, who in 1980 created her namesake contemporary dance company in Los Angeles. Washington told Dancy, “Oh, honey, these have been the same problems since the 1980s — it’s just a different flavor.”

What makes groups like RDT and Ririe-Woodbury keep going, Dancy said, is that “a history of appreciating the arts is deeply ingrained in the subconscious of Utah culture.”

Changes at the top

Smith, who has been RDT’s artistic director since 1983 and executive director since 1986, is retiring, effective July 1 — which is when the company is launching its “diamond anniversary” season.

She is taking the title “RDT director emerita,” but will stay involved with the company, spending time in the studio and digging into the archives.

Two longtime front-office leads and former dancers will become executive/artistic co-directors: Nicholas Cendese, who has been development director; and Lynne Larson, who has led the company’s educational outreach.

At Ririe-Woodbury, Leslie Kraus — who has been a performer, choreographer and educator — will become artistic director on July 1. She succeeds Daniel Charon, who announced in October that after 12 years he would leave at the end of this season.

When it comes to funding, this year, RDT saw a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts rescinded. Cendese said RDT was “quite lucky” that the performances covered by the grant were done before the cutoff date, so the company will still get its money.

Ririe-Woodbury had an NEA grant application in process, Dancy said, but that was “before the entire dance department at the NEA quit.”

RDT had annual revenue of $1,069,835 in 2023, the latest available figures on the troupe’s nonprofit 990 tax form. Ririe-Woodbury’s annual revenue for 2023, according to its 990 form, was $868,443. (Both group’s figures were available on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer database.)

Cendese said he’s putting together another application for an NEA grant for RDT. “We don’t even know if they’ll be around to fund it, but we’ve got to try,” Cendese said. “We have to remain flexible, facile and open to possibilities.”

Larson said they are seeing the restrictions placed on NEA funding by Trump’s executive order — a laundry list that includes celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026, and creating works that “foster A.I. competency…, foster skilled trade jobs [and] make America healthy again” — as a challenge.

“Sometimes barriers become creativity,” Larson said. “Some of the ideas we were coming up with, we never would have come up with had we not had this new barrier.”

The rescinded and withdrawn NEA grants have had a second-wave effect, because state arts agencies have lost money they would be giving groups like RDT and Ririe-Woodbury. In May, the Utah Department of Arts and Museums announced it would not be giving project grants this year “due to funding constraints.”

“Those are things that affect us indirectly,” Dancy said, adding that for Ririe-Woodbury, state grants are “such an integral part of our landscape.”

But as government money has dried up, Dancy said, “the philanthropic landscape has really started to open up.”

Utah’s history of dance

Many people associate dance in Utah today with Utah County’s ballroom dance culture — from private dance teachers to the competitive ballroom programs at Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University, where some of the pros on “Dancing With the Stars” got their start.

Smith said Utah’s history of dance goes back a couple of centuries before that.

“Our Native American population knew the power of dance to heal and give courage and unite the community,” Smith said. Then Brigham Young, she said, “saw dance as a way to have people socialize in a genteel way. … [The pioneers] opened themselves up to folk dance, community dance, social dance.”

BYU and the University of Utah adopted dance education early, Smith said. She pointed to Maud May Babcock, who became the U.’s first woman professor in 1892, for staging performances of “One Grecian Urn,” a classic dance tableaux dating back to around 1900 (parodied decades later in “The Music Man”).

“The community was open to culture,” Smith said, pointing to “heroes in the arts” including Willam Christensen, who founded what became Ballet West, and Virginia Tanner, who pioneered children’s dance education and founded the school program now called Tanner Dance.

It was Tanner, Smith said, who lured the Rockefeller Foundation to Utah in the 1960s, as the philanthropic organization was looking to spread seed money “to try to decentralize the arts. … They thought [Utah] would be fertile ground.”

Tanner pitched the notion of a modern dance company that performed repertory programs — works from a variety of choreographers, the way ballet companies do. Most modern dance troupes only perform the works of their founding choreographers.

“The originators, the founders, were dying off — and their works weren’t necessarily being preserved, and so we were losing our dance heritage,” Smith said. RDT launched in 1966, with Smith as one of the company’s eight original dancers.

Two years earlier, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company started as a collaboration between Shirley Ririe and Joan Woodbury, who worked together teaching dance at the University of Utah. The pair were famous for creating experimental dance works, such as Woodbury’s “Affectionate Infirmities,” where dancers performed on crutches.

The two companies’ histories have intertwined since the ‘60s; Woodbury was an artistic advisor to RDT when it began.

“[There is] a deep history of collaboration between two companies that do very similar work,” Dancy said.

RDT’s operations are egalitarian, with dancers represented at the table when making decisions about the company’s direction, Smith said. And many people in the company wear multiple hats.

“It’s my philosophy that if you’re in the office, you should learn what everybody’s doing,” Smith said. “If somebody gets hit by a bus, we don’t want to go under.”

Larson started as a guest dancer with RDT in 1995, and worked as an administrative office assistant. She was hired as a full-time dancer a couple of years later, she said, and performed until her body told her to stop in 2008. (She said she told Smith, “I don’t think I can be in pain any more.”) By then, she had taken on the job of education director, and also directed rehearsals.

Cendese was hired as a dancer in 2002, though he was a guest dancer before that. He started working in the office in 2012, and became development director — a nonprofit’s main fundraiser — in 2018, when he offered to backfill his predecessor.

Dancy joined Ririe-Woodbury in 2023, hired from The Rosin Box Project, a contemporary ballet company in San Diego. Kraus was teaching dance at the University of Oklahoma when she was hired, and was a former dancer for the Kate Weare Company and the immersive theater company Punchdrunk.

Kraus said she was familiar with Ririe-Woodbury’s reputation, mostly from others in the dance world, including her husband, Brandin Steffensen, who was born and raised in Salt Lake City and once danced for Ririe-Woodbury.

‘Why are there so many dancers?’

When Kraus was interviewing for the job, she took a walk from her hotel to the Rose Wagner, and noticed something unusual.

“I’m, like, ‘Why are there so many dancers on the street?’” Kraus said. “Dancers see their own. We recognize each other on the street.”

That moment, Kraus said, showed her that “there’s some sort of strange alchemy [in Utah], where dance is thriving.”

Cendese said he’s heard similar stories when choreographers visit RDT. “Their jaws hit the floor when they hear how dance is a part of Utah society,” he said. “That’s the story that state legislators need to remember: We have created a place unlike any other in the world when it comes to dance.”

RDT and Ririe-Woodbury, Centese said, “showcase unique stories, emotions, experiences through the art of dance.”

And while Kraus has worries about the current financial landscape of arts nonprofits, she also knows artists have the power to push back.

“Art, in many ways, is an act of resistance,” Kraus said. “This is just a moment where resistance is needed, maybe in a stronger way. … The work that we do is vital, and if you’re being told that it’s not, you have to resist. You have to do the work even more.”