Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company set to open its 61st season with Re-Play, including two world premieres, 28 guest dancers from six Utah universities

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s 61st season will open with Re-Play this week, featuring two world premieres and a reprise of a 2022 dance theater piece that was tapped as one of The Utah Review’s Top 10 Moments of the Utah Enlightenment that year. The production features the first regular season performance of two new company dancers … Read more

Plan-B Theatre’s 12th annual Free Elementary School Tour production for 2024-25 academic year features EllaMental by Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin

Within a few days after third grader Martin Richards from Boston was killed in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, a photo which showed the boy holding a sign he created that read ‘No more hurting people. Peace’ went viral. He made the sign a year before, when an activist who was protesting the handling of … Read more

Ballet West is staying in its blockbuster groove, as it prepares for its 61st season

Ballet West is staying in the blockbuster groove for its upcoming 2024-2025 season. After a 60th anniversary edition that brought record attendance not only for the season but also for three major productions, Ballet West is poised to continue the momentum with four Utah premieres, the return of Cinderella, and the 80th anniversary of The … Read more

Great Salt Lake Fringe 2024: Festival marks 10th anniversary with 22 shows, 2nd year at Trolley Square in Alliance Theater campus

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is Part 2 of a two-part feature about the Great Salt Lake Fringe (GSLF) festival’s 10th anniversary, This year’s festival will comprise two weekends of performances (July 26-28 and August 2-4) at the Alliance Theater, connected to the Utah Arts Alliance, at Trolley Square. See Part 1 here, for a feature about … Read more

Meanwhile Park set for world premiere of Thomas Misuraca’s gay romantic comedy In Dogs We Trust

The splendid Meanwhile Park outdoor theatrical venue will be the site for the upcoming world premiere of Thomas Misuraca’s In Dogs We Trust, a gay romantic comedy set in a West Hollywood dog park. The play by Misuraca, a Los Angeles-based playwright whose short- and full-length plays have been produced internationally, was selected by a … Read more

Backstage at the 2024 Utah Arts Festival: Emerging Artists will be at Wordfest, The Round,Festival Stages; Artist Marketplace; Fear No Film program

For the third year in a row, the Utah Arts Festival is highlighting its Emerging Artists program, which has institutionalized broadly the experiences of newcomers to UAF and how their presence is adding to and reshaping the next chapters of Utah’s arts and cultural evolution. This year’s representative artists are in the Artist Marketplace, dance, … Read more

Backstage at the 2024 Utah Arts Festival: 21st edition of internationally known Fear No Film returns with 73 short films from around the world

Next to the Sundance Film Festival’s tremendous short film program, the 21st edition of the internationally acclaimed Fear No Film program at the Utah Arts Festival is the second most distinguished short film slate in Utah. Coordinated by Derek Mellus, who also is the film production manager for the Utah Film Commission, Fear No Film … Read more

Backstage at the 2024 Utah Arts Festival: Meet some of the artists in the Artist Marketplace — Part 3

Found, reclaimed and upcycled materials, the confidence of flexing and fusing traditional and digital media and an acute sensitivity for representing nature, its  cycles and rhythms are just some observations about this year’s Utah Arts Festival’s Artist Marketplace.  Approximately 32% of the artists who applied this year for the festival were accepted. With a jury … Read more

Backstage at the 2024 Utah Arts Festival: Street theater returns on a large scale, with Voodoo Productions

Before the pandemic, street theater, roaming stiltwalkers, and aerial artists were part of the Utah Arts Festival  experience and audiences scrambled whenever there was a performance either along the south-facing glass wall of the City Library or along the crescent arch or in the heart of the festival grounds. In 2014, Australia’s Strange Fruit using … Read more

Backstage at the 2024 Utah Arts Festival: Kids’ Art Yard to feature impressive array of hands-on activities focusing on the Great Salt Lake

In recent years, many artists and creative producers have been building a critical mass of public awareness about the Great Salt Lake and its existential crisis. In 2023, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company premiered an evening-length dance theater piece, To See Beyond Our Time. Earlier this year, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art presented an impressive multidisciplinary … Read more