wow.... i am a slacker!!

I am such a blog slacker... sorry all!!   Life has just been too crazy lately with work, school, etc. 

Someday things will mellow out, I promise! 

In the meantime here are a few fun photos from the recent CABARET OF FOOLS event that I am the Chairperson of... it was our most successful event to date!  Raised over $43,000 dollars!  :)

Latest post for Salt Lake Magazine....

I recently became an Arts Contributor for Salt Lake Magazine... check out my latest story...

Click in the title of this post, or on the link below:
http://saltlakemagazine.com/blog/2012/02/backstage-access-to-classical-music-dance-with-vivace-studio-d/

Hope you enjoy!!

   

Holiday craziness!

Well the holidays are off to a very crazy start....

First a whilrwind trip to California for Thanksgiving, then a long list of holiday parties and holiday shopping (including Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company December show and the Utah Symphony/Viviace December concert and party).....    next is finals and the end of an exhausting semester....

....and then hopefully some time to relax and enjoy the season!

 

Cabaret of Fools... first look...

Wow!  What a fun party!  The Cabaret of Fools is always a ton of work, but we had a ton of fun too!!  Here's a few of the first photos...

 Polaroids... Haha!  Troy and I at the top, our friend Matt and I next, and then me with Matt, Robert and Mark.

 Check out my handsome husband!  XOXO

 

 Robert and I with our Emcee, Angie Larsen from Channel 4

 Erica has volunteered at the event for 3 or 4 years in a row now... such a trooper!

 

 My friend MaryEllen... another awesome volunteer

 Robert from Channel 4, who happens to be married to my friend Kristen, with Angie (Channel 4) and her date.

 The Art Gallery section of the Auction.  Mom, your painting was right behind the photos of the dancers sitting on an easel in a very prominent location.  :)

 Robert and Mark being silly while we were setting up....  they crack me up!

 Tracy pretending he's a vase... haha! 

 Matt Bryner a new friend and hopefully future Board Member, me, Robert and Mark.  :)

 I don't know why this is sideways, but here you have Mark, Mark, Me, Robert, Troy, Cole (Production Manager) and Charlotte (Artistic Director)

Cole is the greatest to work with!  He is sweet, fun and so professional too!

Cabaret of Fools...

The Annual Cabaret of Fools (Ririe-Woodbury's Fundraiser) is coming right up.... I am working on gathering auction items and trying to keep all the planning straight.  At our show in January we decided to have a table with information about the Cabaret and we all got dressed up to promote the event. Here's a little preview... 

If anyone is up for donating a painting (hint hint) or jewelry (hint hint) or anything else.... we would love it!!

Arts Festival

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company performed at the Utah Arts Festival in June. We had a couple dancers leaving the company this year so we presented them with thank you gifts after the performance. Since I had just completed my term as Board Chair they also had a thank you gift for me. So sweet! :)Troy and I with Dallas Graham (TJ's partner). Dallas and TJ are moving to New York in August. And just after the Kauai trip there was a going away party for one of the dancers (TJ and his partner Dallas)... here's a photo of Troy and I with Lehua, who is also leaving. Lehua and her family are moving to Maryland where her husband, Graham, will be attending graduate school.

Conjuring a Conjurer of Movement and Light - New York Times

Ririe-Woodbury was performing in NY last week... and had a great article in the NY Times! So fun! Complete with a picture of Caine. Hooray!

Conjuring a Conjurer of Movement and Light

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Caine Keenan and other members of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Alwin Nikolais’s “Tensile Involvement” at the Joyce Theater in a celebration of the choreographer’s work.

By ROSLYN SULCAS

Published: May 5, 2010ixx

• • MySpace
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Permalink
  • 
    

Alwin Nikolais was the magician of dance, the forerunner of now wildly popular companies like Pilobolus and Momix and a pioneer in multimedia effects. From the 1950s to the 1990s his work was celebrated both in the United States and internationally (he was particularly popular in France), and his company continued to perform for several years after his death, in 1993.

In 1999, Murray Louis, Nikolais’s personal and professional partner of 40 years, disbanded the troupe, and since then his work has been little seen in New York. On Tuesday night at the Joyce Theater, the Alwin Nikolais Centennial program continued a celebration of his birth that began last week at the Abrons Arts Center at the Henry Street Settlement, where Nikolais first began to create work in 1948.

For a whole generation of dancegoers it might now be hard to comprehend just how original Nikolais’s early experiments were, with their amalgams of bodies, light, sound and props. The evening began with Mr. Louis reading a proclamation from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg explaining exactly why this was so, and proclaiming that Tuesday was Alwin Nikolais Day. (Not exactly a long-term commitment.)

The mayor’s note invoked Martha Graham as a contemporary, which probably made Nikolais pirouette in his grave, since his work emerged out of a firm rejection of the kinds of psychologically inclined dance dramas that Graham was creating in the 1940s. Like George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham, he turned toward pure form and abstraction and away from narrative and emotion.

But unlike Balanchine and Cunningham, Nikolais was interested in sleight-of-hand and eye, in visual illusion rather than the expansion of a dance vocabulary. And unlike those choreographers, he was a one-man band, inventing not just the movement, but the lighting and sound too.

In one of his best-known pieces, “Tensile Involvement” (1955), which opened Tuesday’s program, the dancers are tethered to long elastic bands and create cat’s cradles of crisscrossing lines as they run on and off the stage. In “Crucible” (1985) tiny wiggling forms, reflected by angled mirrors, grow into larger abstract shapes and finally into strange truncated beings, apparently floating in space. (That the dancers’ upper bodies are eventually revealed as naked also both prefigures a contemporary dance trend and suggests the hippie counterculture of the “Hair” era.)

Both of these dances, like the excerpts from “Liturgies” (1983), were meticulously staged by Mr. Louis and Alberto del Saz, a former Nikolais dancer, and were performed with exemplary precision by the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company from Utah, the principal keeper of the Nikolais flame.

But for the sake of that flame they should all lay “Tower” (1968), from the longer “Vaudeville of the Elements,” to rest. Perhaps Nikolais’s original dancers could carry off the hectic shouting and posturing that “Tower” demands as its 10 dancers carry around metal frames that are eventually built into said tower. But as it appears now, the performance by the suffering dancers is unconvincing; there is no dance interest, no visual suspense or drama. The wait for the tower to topple — you know it will — is excruciatingly dull. Nikolais, whose currency was wonder and magic, shouldn’t be remembered for this.

The Alwin Nikolais Centennial program continues through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-0800, joyce.org.

Great article on RWDC's last show of the season...

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company: Four dancers say their goodbyes Dance » 'Propel' offers a showcase for the strength of the current company. By Kathy Adams Special To The Tribune Updated: 04/23/2010 01:42:18 PM MDT The final curtain call on April 24 of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company won't just signal the end of its 2009-2010 season, but a change in the company profile. With four of the six dancers leaving, "Propel" offers the last chance to see this uniquely talented ensemble -- a group who has used its considerable training to inform the contours of the choreography, and just as often, push us to examine and reflect ourselves. Dancers come and go from companies, moving outward and upward is the nature of the competitive beast. And although auditions have been held, and there will be replacements, it's unusual to have 66 percent of a company leave at the same time, particularly at the peak of their success. Watching their last performance as a group in Salt Lake City was particularly poignant, and highlighted their strengths. Erin Lehua Brown, in her fourth season with R-W, is one of the longest standing members of the company. She is an amazing dancer with a clarity of line and fluidity, who gathers and unfolds the movement with gentle command. Her solo at the end of the last piece of the evening, "If My Right Hand Would Say What My Left Hand Thought," was particularly captivating on April 22, as she weaved around her own body, as if lost in her thoughts, yet wholly present. Brown will be moving with her dancer-husband, who has been accepted to a highly regarded graduate school, University of Maryland, College Park. Andrea Jane Dispenziere, one of the newest company members in her second season, is a dancer who makes her movement not just accurate but necessary. She owns the stage with her intensity. In Charlotte Boye-Christensen's opus, "Lost," Dispenziere's fulfills the work's underlying emotional quality with her utterly novel technique and punch. She will be leaving to join the New York City dance world. T.J Spaur, also in his fourth season, is moving to New York City to pursue musical theater. And if Artistic director Charlotte Boye-Christensen is correct in her assessment, Spaur's charm and sense of humor will have him on Broadway in no time. This season, Spaur's stage presence elevated to the level of his skill as a dancer. Spaur's noticeable strength and physicality made him an energetic tango partner in Joan Woodbury's reconstruction of her piece "L'invasion," as well as a restrained equal in John Jasperse's "Spurts of Activity Before the Emptiness of Late Afternoon." In his first -- and now last -- season with RW, Prentice Whitlow is returning home to Washington D.C. to support his ailing mother. Hopefully, Whitlow will find a place to continue to demonstrate his marvelous dance talent. Although his presence in Salt Lake City was brief, his authority on stage will be missed. And as for the dancers who are staying, Caine Keenan and Betsy Wilberg, the company is lucky to be keeping two strong dancers to build on. Keenan takes the movement to the edge of the music and then slides right over the top of it as if the music were following him rather than vice versa. Wilberg has a cleanliness of movement (which must make her a dream to dance with in ensemble pieces) and precise ballet technique without looking fussy. Jasperse's piece "Spurts..." was the only new work performed in the concert. It's a delicate and complex piece, with sophisticated spatial relationships and subtle changes in theme and variation. And although it begins as an application of an idea, the abstract concept is fulfilled and clarified emotionally. The lighting design by Cliff Wallgren was more like a painting, creating an onstage environment. This review wouldn't be complete with mentioning the virtuosic, classical guitar performance by Todd Woodbury and Tully Cathey which accompanied Joan Woodbury's entertaining "L'invision." It was hard to take your eyes off the technical wizardry and magnetism of the two musicians and watch the dance.

A few more photos...

Troy and I :) The guests have started to arrive.... we had an amazing team of volunteers that checked everyone in and out... they did a wonderful job!
The Mystery Boxes are always a hit.... the bid sheets just have a little hint and the bidding starts pretty low. Everyone seems to love the surprise.
The gorgeous flowers..... designed by EBT, of course!
The auction tables looked great, thanks to all the help from volunteers, board members, and especially Robert and the whole team at Every Blooming Thing!
Before...
After...
The Company's Founders, Shirley Ririe and Joan Woodbury, with Gigi Arrington (Education Director) and Charlotte Boye-Christensen (Artistic Director). Crystal and Betty.... Betty was all decked out in a ballerina outfit, complete with toe shoes (socks with toe shoes on them)..... so cute!!
Some of our amazing Board Members.... DawnAnn, Jeff and Robert.
Robert and Jessica practicing their "hip shake" for the "flash mob"
Not a great picture of me.... but it's the only one where you can see my whole dress... Haha!
We had our own little "Flash Mob".... it was quite disastrous since we were all out of sync, but the audience seemed to love it anyway. It was fun to see the board members, step-up kids and dancers all work together. That's us on the stairs... The Stage... The Company Dancing...
We had the biggest crowd ever... about 270 people in attendance. We had the most auction items, and it looks like we have raised the most money! Hooray! The numbers aren't final yet, but I think we will net about $27,000 raised. I couldn't be happier!