Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company

Dance Magazine
Cover Story
Jannas Zalesky

Shirley Ririe and Joan Woodbury: pathbreakers - founders of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company - their role in supporting arts and dance in Utah schools - Interview

How do you create a dance company? You put two impassioned women together--Joan Woodbury (right) and Shirley Ririe--at the right time, some forty years ago, and let them go at it. Voila! The Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company. The pathbreaking twosome from Utah shared stages, jobs, desks, and most important, the philosophy and the passion that "dance is for everybody." They even managed the births of their children on alternating years so that they could cover for each other.

* Yet as conjoined as they are on a professional level, they are very different in their personal lives. "Our differences give us balance, and our similarities keep us on the same path," explains Ririe. "I was born in Salt City in 1929, the height of the Depression. My parents were both actors," she continues. "My father was extremely talented, and my newly married parents thought they were beaded to New York City when I came along and stopped the plans. My mother reinvented herself several times and became a professor in the MBA program in business at the University of Utah She wrote seven textbooks, two still being printed after her death fifteen years ago.

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LEFIGARO
By Rene Sirvin PARIS- Alwin Nikolais left us in 1993, and his company was kept alive until 1999 by his friend and collaborator Murray Louis… Today it is Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company from Salt Lake City (founded and directed by two dancers-choreographers close to Nikolais) that dedicated an entire program to the inspired American choreographer. A creator unique in his genre, he composed the music for his performances, designed the sets and the costumes, adjusted the lighting, and painted the slides that are projected on the bodies of the dancers.

Since his beginnings at the Theatre des Champs Elysees in 1968, he performed more than 30 ballets at the Theatre de la Ville with his company. And it is with the same excitement that we rediscover some pieces created more than 50 years ago, interpreted by ten young, enthusiastic dancers, whose arms, through Nikolais’s magic, become swan's necks and whose feet become giraffe's heads, (such as in "Crucible”) with irresistible mirror games.

Restored by the faithful Murray Louis and Alberto del Saz, all of his pieces astonish the same as they did the first day.

Le Monde
By Rosita Boisseau
February 26, 2004

ALWIN NIKOLAIS, ABSTRACT CHOREOGRAPHER, CELEBRATED IN PARIS BY HIS HEIRS.

Seven pieces are danced at the Theatre de la Ville, and his former students pay him tribute.

Alwin Nikolais (1910–1993) is back. Eleven years after his death, 25 years after his nomination to the head of the school of the National Center of Contemporary Dance (CNDC), this American master of the abstract, choreographer, and teacher, whose pedagogical method still influences many dancers, is the center of one week of festivities at the Theatre de la Ville. Seven of his pieces are interpreted by an American company, the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company.

Lyon Figaro
By Agnes Benoist
March 6, 2004

Nikolais, Always

Few, if any, wrinkles; only those belonging to great works. To the masters whose style is identifiable in the first seconds. The tribute to Alwin Nikolais, designed by the Ririe Woodbury Company, is a delight of an evening. An enchantment composed of seven pieces or excerpts created by the choreographer, painter, musician, costume maker, Alwin Nikolais between 1953 and 1985. We knew that the choreographer Alwin Nikolais had the sense of imagery. But above the seduction, the rigorous construction, the almost architectural sense of space, and the graphic movement, the malice and the humor astonish with their modernity, sometimes fifty years later. The cleverly composed program let us catch the facets of the prolific artist, who created the first multimedia masterpieces.

The Dance Insider
By Paul Ben-Itzak
(excerpts)

After a 12-year absence, Alwin Nikolais returned to Paris last night, and he couldn’t have found a better vehicle for his resurrection on the stage of the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt than the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company…..If the late Nikolais’s life and work partner Murray Louis and celebrated Nik-Louis dancer Alberto del Saz get the credit for crystalline reconstructions of five works and extracts from two others, then the Utah-based company of Joan Woodbury & Shirley Ririe, two devoted pupils of Nik, gets the credit for completely embodying the work in an emotionally and artistically invested performance that singularly reminded of the work’s contemporary relevance….the R-W dancers definitely gave this work as it absolutely needs to be given.

These Utah kids are involved dancers. Judging from the involvement of the Paris audience - in a rare occurrence, they didn't wait until the end of the show but responded with rhythmic clapping even at the intermission curtain - French audiences want more of this. I hope and pray the presenters are listening…….The Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company has not only delivered Nikolais intact, but sends a dispatch, if you will, from a more contemporary American dance community that is ready to thrill and delight French Audiences and that, notwithstanding their dour, studious expressions, this audience is crying out to be engaged.

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