RDT Announces 2018-2019 Season MANIFEST DIVERSITY

Repertory Dance Theatre has long recognized ethnic and racial diversity in our community and prioritized its value through its hiring practices, its artistic choices and its outreach programming.

During its 2018-2019 season, RDT will inflect its programming with a new initiative titled MANIFEST DIVERSITY that will celebrate the enriching contributions from different cultures and peoples that have made modern dance a rich tapestry of the American experience.

Our season will underscore the cultural threads from many lands that have been braided into the art form of modern dance over the past 100+ years.

This convergence of world dance will inform RDT's season of commissions, concerts, residencies, classes and workshops for adults and youth, the latter of whom now embodies a rapidly escalating global outlook and experience here in the Beehive State. Currently, four out of every 10 new arrivals to Utah are minorities and more than 100 languages are spoken in the State.

In addition to the three concerts featured below, RDT will present its annual choreographer competition & fundraiser, REGALIA in February and dancer choreographic showcase, EMERGE, in January.

SPIRIT | Oct. 4-6, 2018

Spotlights the work of 3 exceptional African-American choreographers plus the historic work of Michio Ito, a Japanese-American revolutionary choreographer.

Historical Classics

The late Donald McKayle's masterwork, Rainbow Round My Shoulder, created in 1959, is acclaimed as a modern dance classic. A searing dramatic narrative, it is set on a chain gang in the American South. The songs that accompany their arduous labor tell a bitter, sardonic, and tragic story.

RDT is committed to building an archive of American modern dance from its formative years to the present time. SPIRIT presents the work of the "forgotten pioneer" Michio Ito (1893-1961), a transitional figure in the development of early American modern dance who consciously sought to create art blending elements of "east" and "west," a synthesis of Japanese Noh and Kabuki and characteristic gestures drawn from Asian and Western cultures.

Two world premieres

Tiffany Rea-Fisher joined Elisa Monte Dance in 2004 as a principal dancer and is now the newly appointed Artistic Director. In 2007, Rae-Fisher was named Dance Magazine's "On the Rise" person and has since been featured in national and international publications for both her dancing and choreography. While well versed in the athletic and sensual texture of the Monte aesthetic, Rea-Fisher pushes the familiar tone further with off-kilter balances and moments of fury.

Teacher, director and choreographer, Natosha Washington has been a dynamic artistic force in Utah since graduating from the U of U in 2004. Originally from the South, Washington describes herself as a "voluptuous black woman raised in an LDS southern family, making her way in a white dance community." She has negotiated stereotyping, privilege and identity in her work and loves the challenge that these issues present.

MOSIAC | November 15-17, 2018

RDT hosts guest performers from Utah's ethnic communities

America is a land of immigrants, and Utah is home to a rich and diverse culture that can trace its origins to almost every country on earth. MOSIAC is a tapestry of music and movement from around the world. It is a cultural celebration featuring performers from ethnic communities that make the Salt Lake Valley their home.

We share our humanity with dances we learn and dances we create. Patterns and rituals from North and South American, Asia, Europe and the Pacific Islands tell our stories, our hopes and our dreams.

We celebrate our diversity in movement inspired by rituals, work and warrior dances, folk dances and steps that have been performed at gatherings for centuries. This production will include guest performers from select Utah dance groups representing a variety of cultures and will be enjoyable for both adults and youth.

VOICES | April 11-13, 2019

Four choreographers examine how we communicate, organize, and socialize; how we voice our opinions and solve our problems.

. . . A community holds in place our identity and our values.
. . . A community exhibits our ancestry and ethnicity, our idiosyncratic qualities and group memberships.
. . . A community is a social unit, a group of living things, who have something in common.

Historical Classic

Doris Humphrey's heroic Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, created in 1938, features RDT along with guest performers from Utah Valley University's Department of Dance. Inspired by the need for love, tolerance, and nobility in a world given more and more to the denial of these things, this masterwork asks, "How can humanity be saved and content in a world of infinite despair, be saved by love and courage?"

Two world-premieres

RDT is proud to present a world premiere by Bebe Miller, whose vision of dance and performance resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience, and beauty. Her new commission is an exploration into the relationships between people, and the differences among them.

New York City's Bryn Cohn, RDT's Regalia choreographic competition winner in 2018, will premiere Between Closed Doors, inspired by Robert Longo's acclaimed photography collection Men in the Cities. Thematically anchored in the rise of Wall Street during the 1970s, Between Closed Doors explores tensions and triumphs of how we relate amidst the complexity of our man-made world.

Return of a favorite

The return of RDT's commission "Theatre" (2016) by the Gaga-inspired Israeli choreographer Daniel Agami reminds us that dance is an amazing movement language capable of challenging our daily routine and awakening our senses.