WINNEMUCCA - Seven dancers from The Utah Repertory Dance Theater (RDT) came to Winnemucca recently as part of a community engagement program that ended up touching a total of 841 community members, from pre-schoolers to senior citizens.
The dancers were brought to the northern Nevada communities of Winnemucca and Elko through a sponsorship from the Barrick Mining Company.
In Winnemucca, Great Basin Arts and Entertainment head Bill Sims worked to advertise for the group's community program, set up their schedule while they were in Winnemucca, and did all of their promotional and program materials.
Sims was contacted by Susan Boskoff, executive director of the Northern Nevada Arts Council, who offered his organization the opportunity to help bring the dancers to town. Sims jumped at the chance.
Sims said Barrick expressed interest in sponsoring the dancers, but the company didn't want to sponsor them to go to Reno or some other large city. They wanted to sponsor them to come to the communities where their employees and families live - so the dancers came to Winnemucca and Elko. While Great Basin Arts and Entertainment was the local partner in Winnemucca, the local partner in Elko was Great Basin College.
One of the opportunities offered was for local advanced dance students to learn and practice to perform as extra dancers in some of RDT's dance numbers. Three local students, Jayci Hill, Chaslynn McAllister and Nicholas Ingle, performed with the group at the Friday night public performance at Lowry High School's auditorium
The three advanced dance students who got to perform with RDT were from Sara Filippe's Encore Dance Academy. Nine other Encore Dance Academy students also had the opportunity for some instruction from the RDT dancers.
Sims said that two members of RDT came to Elko about a month in advance of the program dates to work with the advanced dance students from Elko and Winnemucca who were interested in being part of the performance.
The Winnemucca dancers traveled to Elko and spent the night to learn their parts, then practiced their parts for the next month. They had time only for a dress rehearsal with the RDT dancers on the night before the public performance.
In addition to working with just those three local dance students, the RDT dancers did not stop moving from the time they hit town at noon on Thursday until they pulled out of town at noon on Saturday.
The RDT dancers performed at the Pleasant Senior Center first, then went straight to a performance for all of the students at French Ford Middle School. They then went to Lowry and worked with nine other local students interested in getting some dance practice and instruction. On Thursday night, they did the dress rehearsal with the three local students who would be performing with them at Friday's public dance program.
On Friday morning they went to Sonoma Heights and Winnemucca Grammar schools and worked with individual classes of third graders doing movement instruction.
On Friday afternoon they worked with dance students at Lowry and Friday evening was the public performance.
Sims said it took a lot of cooperation and work from the staffs at the schools to make it all come together, but they did it, and the students had a great time.
The amount of energy and enthusiasm exhibited and generated by the dancers was phenomenal. Their Friday night public performance lasted nearly two hours and had only a short intermission; and that performance came after an entire day of performances and working with students in the community.
The RDT dancers, who are based in Salt Lake City, had just come from teaching and performing during a three-week tour of communities in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, according to Boskoff, who added that travelling community engagement projects are a big part of what the dance company does.
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