What has become a worthy New Year’s tradition in the Salt Lake City performing arts scene returns this week, as Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT) presents Emerge, an annual showcase of original choreography by company dancers, along with Nicholas Cendese, associate executive and artistic director.
A community focus has been evolving in recent Emerge editions but the 2025 offering goes deep into Utah’s superlative dance ecosystem, with at least 117 dancers, ranging in age from the teens to 83 and including many who have never performed on stage at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts. Three performances (Jan. 10 and Jan. 11, 7:30 p.m. and Jan. 11 at 2 p.m.) will take place in the Leona Wagner Black Box Theatre.
Now in its 59th season, RDT was founded with a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1966, which included a commitment that the company’s artists would develop choreography. Emerge has blossomed accordingly within its first decade as part of RDT’s annual season.
Short choreographic pieces by Trung “Daniel” Do, Alexander Pham, Lindsey Faber, Caleb Daly, Caitlyn Richter, Megan O’Brien and Kara Komarnitsky will be on the program. Do set choreography on five dancers who participated in last month’s RDT Winterdance workshop. The first section comes from a previous price that Do created with Mar Undag for Brine Dance in 2019. Do also collaborated with O’Brien on a piece highlighting the skills of 13 dance instructors from across the valley. Alexander Pham has set a work on 33 dancers of the Davis High School Dance Company, where he has worked four years.
Faber will present a dance film, in which she collaborated with Milena Overstreet, video editor, and dancers Sasha Rydlizky and Bayley Smallwood. Komarnitsky, RDT archivist and frequent guest artist, will present a new work, also featuring local community dancers, most of whom rehearse and practice at Dance Class for Humans at the Westminster University Dance Studio. Komarnitsky‘s work is the third in a series exploring the power dynamics of relationships, including consent and vulnerability as well as how each person in a relationship sees the other along with who decides what is revealed.
Photo Credit: Sharon Kain.
Daly has set choreography on a trio of community dancers while Richter has set a duet. Inspired by the fabrics other artists have used in their choreographic compositions, Daly has set their work on Kiya Green, Mads Ward and Cooper Sullivan, three dance students at the University of Utah. In an email interview, Richter, who is in her second year with the company, explained her creative process which exemplifies a similar broad approach that many company dancers follow in creating works for Emerge.
She said the springboard for the piece is a quote from C. S. Lewis’ book Till We Have Faces: “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing – to find the place where all the beauty came from – my country, the place where I ought to have been born.” She added, “I began noticing all the little, everyday gifts that I usually take for granted such as color, sunshine, smiles, laughter, wind in the trees, etc. and found myself thinking about how all these beautiful blessings in life remind me of a God more beautiful than I can imagine and of a home far better than this world.” As for the opportunity, Richter explained, “One thing I appreciate about RDT is the variety of choreographers we have the opportunity to work with. I have been a part of building many diverse worlds and experienced a wide variety of choreographic processes. This has helped me learn more about how I would like to explore my own movement ideas and what works or does not work for me.” Richter and Miche’ Smith, a member of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, will perform the duet, set to the music of Empty Space by Sean Dougherty.
Putting the emphasis on how broad and deep the bench of dance activity is found along the Wasatch Front, Cendese has set four short pieces. One will feature participants from RDT’s Dance Center on Broadway’s Prime Movement class, designed for dancers aged 40 and older. My Mother Told Me, the piece for the Prime Movement dancers, is the creative product of springboards not only from Cendese but also by poetry and memories the dancers recalled about things their mothers told them. The title of the piece refers to the song of the same title, which King Harald and his brother Halfdan sang in a fourth season episode of the TV series Vikings. Cendese has selected Rachel Hardy’s hard rock cover of the song, which is based on a Norse poem from Egil’s Saga.
This piece will become a part of an evening-length work that the Prime Movement dance class will present next December in an RDT Link show. The program has become a solid component in RDT’s mission emphasizing that dance movement can be a lifelong pursuit. “It has shown how we can shake up the choreographic process because while the dancers might not be able to move like me, we can focus on crafting movement that fully embodies the creative prompts we use to set the piece,” Cendese explained. An indicator of what Prime Movement has accomplished came in a fall 2023 performance, which featured Meghan Durham Wall’s Poetics of Aging. It was elegant, poignant and sagacious, which also included music by her husband (Michael Wall) and Dom la Lena. The performers, between the ages of 55 and 82, communicated the touching mood behind the poetic text that framed the work, Breath by Mark Strand.
The second work for Emerge that Cendese created in collaboration with 24 students from Weber State University will also be showcased in that university dance program’s spring performance. The piece featuring Weber State University dancers is the result of a residency which was facilitated by Joseph ‘jo’ Blake, who is on the university dance faculty, in conjunction with Cendese and Lynne Larson, associate executive and artistic director and education director for RDT. Created in two days of intensive studio work, All the Things I Cannot Say features movement developed in part upon sociopolitical dynamics surrounding the difficult divisions in American politics as well as the counterpoints of antisemitism and anger at the genocidal atrocities committed against the residents and families in Gaza. However, while it was created before last fall’s presidential election, Cendese said the piece has now taken on a more profound meaning about standing up for what we believe and articulating it with responsibility and impact.
The third work will feature 10 students from Tanner Dance, where Cendese once trained as a dancer. The Tanner Dance students will perform About Laughter, which is set to a sound score taken from clips of WNYC Studios’ RadioLab podcasts about the science of laughter and its abstract and literal forms. The fourth is a duet performed by students from South Valley Creative Dance in Sandy, Utah, a studio which Cendese owns. The work will be performed by Leah Ahlander and Grace Messenger from Utah Valley University. Cendese used an AI to set the choreography on paper and then translated it to movement on stage. For the sound score, Cendese recruited his brother, Alexander Cendese, American/Canadian film and television actor, writer and producer who is a Salt Lake City native and has appeared both on Broadway and Off-Broadway, along with narrating nearly 700 audio books. His brother recorded a score, with him providing color commentary for the piece as if he were covering a game in football, soccer or basketball, for instance.
For tickets and more information, see the RDT website.