UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY Utah Valley University Library George Sutherland Archives & Special Collections Oral History Program

Utah Women’s Walk Oral Histories Directed by Michele Welch

Interview with Shirley Ririe by Fiona Nelson November 16, 2011

Utah Women’s Walk

TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET

Interviewee: Shirley Ririe

Interviewer: Fiona Nelson

Place of Interview: Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center Salt Lake City, Utah

Date of Interview: 16 November 2011

Recordist: Michele Welch

Recording Equipment: Zoom audio Recorder H4n

Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709

Transcription Equipment: Panasonic Transcriber RR-830

Transcribed by: Lisa McMullin

Audio Transcription Edit: Lisa McMullin

Reference: SR = Shirley Ririe (Interviewee) FN = Fiona Nelson (Interviewer) MW = Michele Welch (Director, Utah Women’s Walk)

Brief Description of Contents: Shirley Ririe discusses her love of dance—as a dancer and as a teacher. She begins by sharing how she danced and danced as a young child developing a lifelong love for the world of dance. She tells how she met her husband at the Grand Canyon where she worked and danced in mini-musicals. She expresses her appreciation for Louie Horst who was one of her most inspiring mentors. She talks about her decision to teach dance at Brigham Young University and then her subsequent decision to teach dance at the University of Utah. Furthermore, she relates how she and Joan Woodbury, with Betty Hayes’s support, built the dance department at the University of Utah and formed the Choreodancers. She ends by discussing the formation and ongoing work of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company.

NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as uh and false starts and starts and stops in conversations are not included in this transcript. Changes by interviewee are incorporated in text. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. Clarifications and additional information are footnoted.

Audio Transcription

[00:01] Beginning of interview

FN: Before we begin taping I want to let you know that the recording and transcription of this interview will be preserved in the George Sutherland Archives at Utah Valley University. The archives’ purpose is to preserve the history of Utah. The recordings and transcription will be available for future use for the purpose of the Utah Women’s Walk and for other students and scholars at UVU. I would like you to sign the release form giving your permission at this time. After the interview, we will transcribe and give it to you for editing before we place it in the archives. All right, so taping begins here.

My name is Fiona Nelson. Today is November 16, 2011, and I am at the Rose Wagoner Performing Arts Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. Today I’m interviewing Shirley Ririe as a nominee for the Utah Women’s Walk as a notable woman who has made significant contributions to life in the state of Utah.

Can you tell me about your life? Where you were born? Who your parents and siblings were? And where you went to school?

SR: Well I was born in 1929 in Saint Mark’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, and my parents were Genieve Allien Robertson Russon and Joseph Stanley Russon; they met doing theater under Maud May Babcock—a very famous woman at the University of Utah. She started the theater department, the dance department, and the physical education department at the University of Utah over a hundred years ago. I remember her. I took elocution lessons from her. My folks met in a touring theater group that she had connected with the University of Utah. So they loved the theater. And my father was really a very fine actor, so he was planning to go to New York to try to get into the big time, but I came along (laughs) So I stopped that, and my parents bought a small home on Fourth South, East Fourth South [Salt Lake

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 2 City]. They paid two thousand dollars for it. It was an adobe home. They stayed there all their lives. And they just kept adding. They added a basement and an attic and a dining room and a kitchen and another bedroom, and they kept adding to it. So we lived there all our lives. And I had a sister Diane and a brother Robb. Diane taught dance in California near Carmel [on the Sea] in Monterey and my brother Robb took care of three departments at Utah State eventually—audio visual aids, television, and history. He said that was the only way he could get a raise. (laughs)

FN: Where did you go to school?

SR: I went to school at Stewart School, Stewart Training School. It was on the University of Utah campus. I went there through the eighth grade, and it was a wonderful school. It was made for me. It was a creative school. It was a John Dewey-based school so they believed in children expressing themselves in the arts in many ways. I didn’t learn math. We never diagrammed a sentence. I never learned how to spell, but I loved school. And I loved everything that we did in that wonderful school. And then I went to Bryant Junior High for one year because we thought we needed to go to a bigger school before we went to East High School—the really big school. East High was very well known and still exists. Then I went to the University of Utah, then NYU [New York University] in New York.

FN: What were some of your most important memories you have of your parents and your home life, and what are some of the ways you feel your parents influenced you?

SR: Well my parents were very involved, as I said, in theater. My mother kept reinventing herself. She was first a secretary at LDS Business College and then she taught there in business. And then she went up to the University of Utah and taught there. She landed up being an MBA teacher, but she taught secretarial training. She taught shorthand, then office management, then psychology of business management. So she was a full professor at the U. And there was a time when there were eight professors at the university. My mother was one, I was one, Joan Woodbury was one—who’s my colleague—and Betty Hayes1 was one—who was head of the dance department—and then there were four other women. Of those eight professors, four of them were very close and dear to me. Now let’s see we were talking about school.

1. Betty Hayes was chair of the University of Utah’s modern dance division from 1940–1976.

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 3

I did theater as a major at the University of Utah. They did not have a dance major, although I love to dance. Betty Hayes confronted me in the hall in the women’s dressing room, which was the route from our offices up to the dance studio. And she said, “Are you trying out for Orchesis. And I said, “No I didn’t get a solo done.” She said, “You try out for Orchesis.” (laughs) So she kind of forced me into it. And I auditioned; I improvised my solo and I wasn’t prepared with the mazurka and the schottische and the things that you were supposed to do, but my friend Alice Horn did them in the back, and I followed her so I got through the audition. But everybody saw her doing it because there was a mirror in the dance studio. The mirror was behind her and so everybody saw her trying to show me the steps. They let me in anyway.

MW: Excuse me, Fiona, I have to ask, are you talking about Alice Merrill Horn?

SR: Alice Horn was the granddaughter of Alice Merrill Horn. She was one of my good friends. Yeah, Alice Merrill Horn was a great lady in Utah history. So was Maud May Babcock.

FN: That’s true. We’ve learned about both those people. That’s awesome.

SR: Did I fulfill all of those questions, Fiona?

FN: What were some of the ways you feel your parents influenced you specifically?

SR: Oh, well my parents were very supportive. Anything I did was good. They helped me in every way they possibly could. Many times they were both in a play at once, and so I’d be in charge of my brother and sister. I was five years older than my sister and ten years older than my brother. So I kind of lorded it over them, and I loved being in charge. I loved being the baby tender and being in complete charge. So my parents did plays at the University of Utah, and I saw all those plays. I remember when I was five years old I saw my first play that they had directed. It was a ward three-act place in the church. They were both in the play, and my mother kissed another man, and I cried and cried and cried because I thought that was just terrible because she kissed somebody else besides my father. So I was alone a lot, and I would dance in the living room. I’d turn on the radio, and I would dance, but never when anybody could see me. I loved to improvise. My mother put me in dance classes when I was three. I was at the

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 4 Mcune School. And I remember I learned to skip backwards. I had a watering can. I would water the chiffon flowers, and I’d skip around the flowers. I remember that. So it was kind of natural dance. Then I studied with Lillian Smith, who was a ballet teacher. She left when I was in fifth grade so I retired from dance, and I didn’t do any dance until I got to the university [University of Utah].

FN: Well you already started to answer my next question, but do you have any more vivid memories about dancing from your childhood and growing up?

SR: About anything else?

FN: Just specifically about dancing.

SR: Dancing. Well my mother saw that I had dancing lessons. She was a frustrated ballerina. She would’ve loved to have been a dancer she told me. But when I got to high school, I thought the dance was kind of dumb. There was a physical education teacher teaching it, and she wasn’t very good so I didn’t do it. And then Betty kind of forced me into it at the university. As I said I was a theater major, but then when I was a senior the dance major came into being. I had actually taken all the dance classes so I was, in a sense, a double major. And I remember when I was taking ballet I had a—it was in a Spanish dance and the costume had ruffles all the way down. I thought that was wonderful. And then I was in a Russian dance, and I had a hat that was like a piece of cardboard that was flat, and it fit, but it was all glittery. I loved those costumes, and I kept them for many years. My children used to play dress up in them.

So I had a lot of freedom as a child. I remember I walked to all my schools. I walked to Stewart School, and I walked to East High, and I walked to the University of Utah because we were on Eleventh East and that was really quite close so nobody ever had a car in those years.

[10:27]

FN: Is there one experience from your early beginnings that you think prepared you for your life’s work?

SR: Well, I think Betty Hayes really was the person who set me on the path. She saw something in me that I didn’t know I had, and she kept pushing me toward dance. And she was the one that said I should go away and do a graduate degree. So she wanted me to go to Wisconsin

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 5 where she had gone, but we had a friend in our neighborhood, Fawn Pickett was her name and she had studied with [Martha] Graham. And she said, “I know a man that will know where she should go.” It was Louie [Louis] Horst.

And so Louie Horst called my father, and he told my father that I should go to Connecticut College for the summer session and then come to New York and study with him as well as go to NYU. So Louie kind of took me under his wing. When I went to Connecticut College, which was a six-week summer course, I could only go to the last three weeks because I was in the summer festival.

I was in La Bohème and something else I can’t remember—another play. And we used to do those out in the stadium. It was an outdoor summer theater. C. Lowell Lees was the director; Bill [William] Christensen was the choreographer, and Maurice Abravanel was the music leader. So they were the three really important people of the arts in Salt Lake, and I had worked with them in the musical.

And then I went to Connecticut College, and I remember I took Louie’s preclassic forms class, and he had me do my gigue which was the first dance I did for him. He had me do it on the showcase performance that they had each week. So I came there in the middle of the course, nobody knew who I was, and I performed on the first show and everybody went, Wow who’s this girl? Cause it was very special to be able to perform on the weekly show. So Louie had me take preclassic forms again, and then he had me take modern forms twice, when we got back to the city. So the two years I was in New York I studied with Louie Horst. He said, “Do you type?” And I said yes. I wasn’t very good. I could do forty words a minute, but I was not accurate. He would correct my spelling and errors as we went; it was pretty intense. He said, “I want you to come and type for me on Saturdays and then I’ll take you to lunch after.” So I’d go and type for him for a few hours, and I would type personal letters to famous people. It was very exciting. And then I would also type articles for the Dance Observer because he was the editor of the only modern dance magazine we’ve ever had. It was called Dance Observer.2 And he got the articles and edited that as long as he lived.

The wonderful thing was he would get free tickets to all the dance performances. And so often he’d give me the tickets, or we’d

2. The Dance Observer was founded by Louis Horst in 1934; it was the first journal to be devoted exclusively to modern dance.

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 6 sometimes go together, or sometimes he’d give me the tickets, and I’d take a friend. So I got to see everything in New York, which is really wonderful education in itself. And then I went to NYU, and I studied with all the teachers who the next year went up to start Julliard. So I was there just a year too soon for Julliard, but I studied with all the same teachers.

[14:18]

FN: Were there any other women you admired growing up?

SR: Well, yes. I had three aunts that I loved. One was a very beautiful— she was my father’s sister. I would go and visit my grandmother and my aunt Marge would be there and she’d put makeup on me and fix my hair. And she was very beautiful so I really loved her. And then I had two very old—not maiden aunts—aunts in Moab where my mother was born, and we’d go there each summer, and I would stay with one or the other of the aunts. They both had kitchen gardens. One aunt had a cow and chickens so I had a sense of farm life. And I loved those aunts. They were really, really fun to be with.

And then Betty Hayes was really my mentor. She’s the one that really started me on my career and kind of pointed me to my direction.

FN: When and how did you meet your husband O. Reese Ririe, and how did that change your life? Did you have children? And tell us about your family structure now.

SR: Well Reese went to Grand Canyon [Arizona] to work the year that it opened up after the war, 1948. So he was there the first year. And the second year I went to Grand Canyon. My father had heard that it was a very good place for a summer job. They gave mini-musicals—they gave a musical. It was about, oh, twenty minutes long for the patrons that came to the canyon. There wasn’t much to do at Grand Canyon. You’d walk around the rim and look at the canyon, and then you’d come at night and the waitresses and bus boys and bellhops and cabin maids would put on a show. So I was hired to dance, and I did a dance called “Mr. Chipmunk,” which was a Vachel Lindsay poem. Mr. Chipmunk, Mr. Chipmunk. I used to be able to say it—he chatters, lifts, and jumps or something like that. Anyway it was a poem. My friend Janet Nelson did the narration on the night of the dance. People loved it. It was a dance that I had done at the university. Marge Merrill, my teacher, had helped me with it. And then we did a western show and a workers’ show—cabin maids and waitresses, and that was

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 7 fun. We would have a dance every night with a live orchestra. And we’d go to the dance and dance for a while, and then we’d have parties in the cabins. And we’d have sleep outs on the rim. And I met Reese there.

He actually—he took me out. My friend Midene Mckay, who was David. O. Mckay’s granddaughter, set us up for a blind date while I was at the university. He took me out, and he forgot that he took me out. He doesn’t remember that date, but I remember it. And he never took me out again, and then the next year when I was at Grand Canyon he took me out on his own. So I didn’t tell him this at first, but later on I told him. He wouldn’t believe me, but it was true. He took me out and wasn’t impressed at all, (laughter) but we were one of five couples—there were five couples at Grand Canyon who all met and were there the same years. And we all married each other. We’re still friends, and everybody’s still married, which is kind of amazing. So that was a wonderful group of friends that we met and went to the canyons together. I was there, I think, two years, and Reese was there four years.

So that kind of influenced me because I had a lot of performing experience, and then I was the president of the dance club, Orchesis, for two years. I was kind of the big deal. You know, I was the dancer at the university in Orchesis because there weren’t very many dancers. We were just a few. I remember my senior year; I was in sixteen dances. They were all two or three minutes long. We would choreograph to a recorded piece of music, and usually a record was only about three minutes long at the most. So I was very involved in dance and theater. I danced a lot in the theater plays; I had a few parts. But mostly I danced, and then I went to New York and got my master’s degree.

MW: Tell us more about your husband and getting married.

[19:39]

SR: Oh, yes. Well, we got engaged when I was a senior. Reese knew that I really wanted to go to New York so that was okay with him. So after we graduated I went to New York, and he got a job with JCPenney, and they sent him to Pasadena [California]. So we were about as far away from each other as we could possibly be. That first year he worked at JCPenney and was learning to be a retailer. And he really didn’t like it so he didn’t go on with it after. But he was drafted when he was in Pasadena. He decided he would come to New York and see

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 8 me before he had to go into the army. So he came to New York, and they lost his draft papers so he was there about four months. And it was just before Christmas time so he got a job at Macy’s. He was the ski consultant. They found out he could ski so they hired him on the spot. He was the ski consultant from Alta. They called it Alta, [pronounced] AHL-Tah, Utah; and he loved the job. He had a great time. So we would buy a Cue Magazine every weekend, and we’d find a great place to go to dinner on one night, like on Saturday; and then on Friday we would go to a play or a concert. We found a lot of free concerts in New York, but we also could go to Broadway Theater for a $1.80 stand-up. So we would go for a $1.80 and we’d stand, and we saw every great show. We saw Guys and Dolls, Annie, Get Your Gun, Oklahoma, Carousel. We saw everything. It was just wonderful Broadway Theater in those days. And then I had all the free tickets to the dance shows so we saw a lot of stuff.

I lived with two other girls in an apartment. And so Reese would come to the apartment and see me or we’d go out somewhere. He had a tiny room in the Hotel Walcott; it was just tiny. So we never went there. It was too little. But we had a great time together. And then finally the draft board found him so they sent him to Korea. So after I had gotten my degree—I got my degree in one year—I went back to New York for a second year, and I just studied in the dance studios. I studied at Graham, Charles Weidman, Merce Cunningham, Doris Humphrey. So I worked with all the greats. It was very, very wonderful. All of the what we’d call the second generation Jose Limón, Merce Cunningham. It was wonderful.

And then at the end of that year Reese called me, and he said, “I’m going to be sent to Fort Lewis [Washington]. I’m in the Finance Corp, and I think I’ll be there for a long time so let’s get married.” So at the end of that second year I came home, and we got married. He only had a week of leave. So I called my mother, and I said we want to get married in October. She said, “Oh.” She threw up her hands; oh I can’t plan a wedding! She was a wonderful businessperson, but she wasn’t domestic at all. So I came home, and I planned my wedding. And we got married, and then we went to Tacoma, Washington, where Reese had found a great apartment. We were there about six months. And [then] they sent him to Korea so I went back to New York. I was there another year.

MW: What year did you marry? What years are we talking about?

[23:31]

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 9

SR: We married in 1951. And in 1952 he was going to be released in January of that year so Ernie [Ernest] Wilkinson3 at the BYU called me in New York. And he said, “I want you to come to BYU and teach.” And I hadn’t even applied; I had actually applied a year before to teach in Santa Barbara. I got a job in Santa Barbara, but Reese called me in between when I was to go to Santa Barbara. So I called them up and said I was going to be married instead, and they were fine with it. They were very understanding. So the next year then Ernie called me, and I hadn’t applied for anything that year. So I thought, Well, Reese is coming home in January; I might as well go and teach. So I went in September, to BYU, and I got an apartment—a basement apartment.

I had bought this fabric in New York. There were great bargains in New York so I had bought a whole set of towels—yellow towels—for my marriage. And then I bought this fabric to make curtains, but it was black. It was black with very colorful folk figures, but the folk figures were about this tall. So I went to this basement apartment, and I covered one whole wall in this black fabric, black curtains. I love black. The fabric was really cute, but it was kind of dark for a basement apartment. So we lived there until June. Reese had gotten a job in Salt Lake at G.E. Electrics so he went back and forth for six months. And then I went back and forth in the summer because I had promised to teach summer school. Every day that I drove to Provo, I couldn’t make it; I’d fall asleep. I’d start falling asleep so I’d pull over to the side of the road and nap for about a half an hour. So I had to leave a half an hour ahead so that I could have my nap. (laughter) And I finished up with BYU, and then I taught for Virginia Tanner for two years.

Then Joan and I had met. That’s one of your questions. I’ll tell you that. Joan came to teach at the University of Utah while I was in New York studying. And I came home to teach at the BYU. Betty Hayes said, “Shirley, you’ve got to meet the girl I have—that I’ve hired. I know you’ll like her.” So Joan [Woodbury] and I met, and just clicked. We really liked each other; we really hit it off. So we made a duet together, and we did it on my concert at the BYU and on her concert at the U of U. And then when I came back up to Salt Lake we started a company called Choreodancers. And it was a company made of the people that I was teaching with, with Virginia.

3. Ernest Wilkinson was the president of Brigham Young University from 1951–1971.

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 10

This was a very special time with Virginia Tanner. She was given a studio in the temple bowling alleys, and they were located where the Church offices are now—where the Relief Society Building is—and it was a wonderful building. It had on the second floor this huge, big ballroom, and the ballroom was a sprung floor, perfect for dance. So it had a give. So Virginia made three studios: one big, huge studio, which was like a performance place, and two other. She had three teaching studios so she hired two young men from New York who were studying with Martha Graham. And they were Juan Valenzuela who was from Salt Lake and Bob Blake who was from California.

So those two very gifted young men came to teach for Virginia, and also a young man named Willis Ward who had taught with Barbara Metler in Arizona and then Janice Day who had been my year at the University of Utah. We had been in Orchesis together, and Janice had taught for Californa State in Los Angeles; she taught for Bella Lewitzky later, but she came and taught. So there was Juan and Bob and Janice and myself—four teachers. And we had lots of classes going for Virginia in these wonderful studios. But that building was only going for two years, and then they tore the building down. And so Juan and Jan and Bob and Bill—they all left, and Joan at that time [1955] got the first Fulbright [Fulbright Scholar Program] in dance with Mary Wigman. So she was to go to Germany, and she said, “Shirley, would you take over my classes at the U [U of U] while I go to this Fulbright?” I said, “Sure.” By that time, I had a daughter, and then Joan had a son in Germany. She went to her Fulbright eight months pregnant, (laughs) but she was bound and determined she was going to do this Fulbright. So Mary let her take classes while she was eight months pregnant, and then she had the baby and went right back to study.

In the meantime, I was living my dream. When I was at the university with my advisor C. Lowell Lees, he had us write a composition. It was just to dream about the thing that you would want to do more than anything else. Don’t consider anything—money or anything—just what you want to do. And I said I want to teach dance at the University of Utah. I want to choreograph a show—a musical—at the university, and I want to have a daughter—a child.

So that year I had a child; I taught dance, and I choreographed a musical, which was called Sing Out Sweet Land. Bob Wilson was the director, and I knew all the directors through my folks. I knew Bob

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 11 and C. Lowell Lees and Joseph Smith because my parents were still in shows.

So Bob asked me to choreograph. And it was a musical made up around folk music so you really chose your own folk music and you made up skits to it or songs. So I choreographed eight dances in this musical. It turned into a dance concert. Bob Wilson didn’t know what had hit him. (laughs) And I had all these people—Juan and Bob were still in town. We were still doing Choreodancers so I had these really great dancers in the shows. They were wonderful. I had my sister, Diane. I had Ray Kingston who later was to be head of the arts council and was named on the American Council of the Arts. We’ve only had three people on that, that’s the national council. Beverly Sorenson just got it this year, and Ray got in the fifties, and Marcia Price later. But anyway, I had a wonderful time teaching that year. And when Joan came back, she had a baby and I had a baby so she said, “Why don’t we job share?”

Now in 1953, ‘55—it was ‘55 by then. I taught for Virginia [in] ‘53 and ‘[5]4. I taught at the Y ‘51 and ‘[5]2. So in ‘55, we both came to teach at the U. And nobody had heard of that before so we had to go over to the vice-president of the university and tell him what we had in mind.

We had in mind teaching together and, really, adding some courses. Doing more than one person could do, and we would split the salary in half. So literally we taught full-time for half-time salary, and we built the university department that way. We—and the students were only taking technique three times a week so we insisted that they take five times a week, and they have class for an hour and a half—a double period. So the kids took that, and we taught it for one-hour credit. They knew that they should be taking five day a week and an hour a half, and we knew that we should be teaching it. So we taught it for years without getting the credit for it. And finally they gave us two credits, (laughs) and we built the department that way. So we added lots of courses, composition courses and improvisation. We had a great time.

Then we decided we needed to get two-thirds pay, so they made us march up to the president’s office again, and we talked him into giving us two-thirds pay. And then we marched up again and got full-time pay, but we always had to justify it ourselves. The head of the department—the physical education department—was a football player. He didn’t know what dance was! He said, “Tell me the

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 12 difference between American football and modern dance? What’s the difference? What will you do with it when you graduate?” So he wouldn’t give us anything extra, but we did it on our own and then later on when Ed Maryon became the dean of fine arts, he called us together and he said, “Girls, I don’t want you marching up to the president anymore. Now you come to me. I’m your head; I’m the person you should go through.” But by then we had everything we wanted. (laughter)

We also had Orchesis, the modern dance performing group, with the symphony orchestra performing for Orchesis. A friend of my brother, Harold Gottfredson, who was in the symphony, came to us and he said, “I can get you an orchestra made up of symphony players, and I’d like to conduct it and you need to pay them this amount of money.” We had to pay them, you know, what they were getting with the symphony. So he would get the symphony orchestra and it would be, oh, from twenty to thirty players. And then we would show them all the music that they should play for the show—for the performance. And for eight years we had that orchestra. It was wonderful, and we were able to commission scores and of course some of the orchestra players did commissioned music for us, and they were thrilled to be able to have their music played. So it was a really going thing and then what finished that off was RDT [Repertory Dance Theatre]4 coming, and RDT was to have a musician, and so that stopped our concerts because RDT became the group on campus that would have live music. So that was kind of a sad day when that happened, but it was great while it lasted.

[35:21]

FN: Could you talk a little bit more about how your relationship with Joan Woodbury developed?

SR: Well, we shared everything. We kind of decided who would teach what. Betty Hayes was the chair of the department. It really wasn’t a department; it was a division. We didn’t get a department until much later. But Betty kind of let us do what we wanted to do. She was great. She gave us carte blanche. And we, course, we had to teach a lot of P.E. things. I had to teach marching band and cheerleading and ballroom dancing. We did ballroom dance. We did it in the time when the very first dance, the twist, which was the first dance that you did without touching your partner. We taught mambo and bossa nova and

4. The Repertory Dance Theatre was founded in 1966.

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 13 cha-cha and waltz and foxtrot, but then all these dances came like the monkey and the jitterbug. So we’d have to get students, who knew these dances, who came from California. And we’d learn these dances—the Twist and then we’d teach them. So we had to work hard to teach ballroom dance, but we both taught ballroom dance. And we’d have Latin American dance or American dance. And then when we did American dance we had to do the watusi and the big apple and whatever else the new dance was. We had to learn new dances every quarter.

But we made Orchesis into something really special. And in the beginning we had to perform because we didn’t have enough dancers. We had to choreograph. We’d each choreograph several dances, and then we’d help our seniors choreograph. We pretty much choreographed for them in the beginning years, and then they got really good. And it got to be so that our students could fill all of the dancers spots; we didn’t need to dance anymore, and the students could choreograph really quite well.

And so at that time we started Choreodancers because we wanted an outlet. We wanted a way that we could dance ourselves. So almost from the beginning we had Choreodancers and we would dance on— the Granite Arts had a dance series so we would perform on that, and we then we would be guest performers on the university show, and we’d do maybe one dance on that. Then we started traveling, and we would travel to our friends. We had friends in California and Colorado and Wyoming who had dance departments and they’d hire us. And we’d go on spring vacation or when summer vacation first started and we’d perform. So we were building the department and we were building our little company at the same time. And then the RDT people came. They were people from the—shoot. What was the foundation? I can’t even remember. [The] people from the Rockefeller Foundation.

FN: The NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] and the Kennedys?

SR: No, it wasn’t the NEA. It was a private foundation. And they gave them money to start a modern dance company outside of New York. Virginia Tanner was involved with that. She had gotten the grant to come and do it, but they said the grant had to go through the university. So it had to go through Betty Hayes and Joan and myself. So we were going to be able to hire major dancers to come to Utah for, I think, it was six years. So we started out with Helen Tameris. Then pretty soon we had Alwin Nikolais. And Nik was the guru for Joan and

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 14 me. I [had] studied with Nik in New York for two years. I went there the first year; he was teaching for Hanya Holm so I went with Hanya. And the second year he moved down to Henry Street where he had his whole school. That was the first year of Henry Street so it’s really the first year of the Nikolais Company. So I went down there and I would study all morning. I’d study for three or four hours every day—every morning—with Nik and he would bring in people like John Cage and others. I remember John Cage particularly that was very, very much fun. And I danced with Nik in an augmented dance where he had extra dancers come at Henry Street, it was called [the] “Vortex” So that was very fun, and then I danced at the YMHA. I did a couple of solos that Louie Horst helped me do, and Louie really gave me a lot of encouragement.

So when this grant came, this Rockefeller—it’s Rockefeller, excuse me, not Guggenheim—Rockefeller grant came we could bring people to come do these big, full evening dance works [for] the university students. And of course Joan and I were still dancing. We were in our thirties then. And so when they brought Nik we were just so thrilled. He did his whole Totem with us, which is a full evening piece, and we danced and I got to partner with Murray Louis because he brought Murray to perform. And Murray was an awful tease. We were doing this dance called striped celebrants. And it had this, you know, up and down movement that you’d do, and Murray would talk to me while he does this, and he’d say, “Hey kiddo. What’d you do today? Did you go shopping?” I was so mad at him because I was trying to concentrate, and it was hard for me to do this. It was hard movement, and of course Murray had done it a million times. He’d do that just to get my goat. (laughter) But anyway, Murray was a lot of fun, and Nik was really wonderful with us. So we brought him back five summers to work for a three-week summer workshop, and Joan and I really got to know Nik during those years.

He taught us—the first year he did—he would do a composition class, then what he called production, and he would take the compositions that worked and then we’d make other dances. And we’d make a whole evening production. And he would do the music, and he would do it on the reel-to-reel tape recorder, and he would cut and splice. He would play the tape recorder backwards, and then he would cut that music and hang it up on the wall—a strip of tape. Then he’d go “uhuhuhu” in the microphone. And he’d cut that in; then he’d play something real slow and then he’d play it very fast. And then he’d put all these different strips of sound on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and then splice it together with a matt knife. And he’d show us how to

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 15 splice it together, so he showed us how to make his concrete music. He was making concrete music. This was 1962 when he came to do totem. And so he taught us how to do the music, and then he taught us how to do his lighting, which he created side lighting for dance.

No one had ever done side lighting before and now every dancer does side lighting and he’d put a light head height, midheight—midbody height, and foot height. And he would put it off the floor so it would come directly straight through. And it would highlight the body and mold the body very strongly, and he’d use intense color. He’d use the primary colors: red, yellow, and blue—red, yellow, and green is primary colors in light. Red, yellow, and blue is primary in pigment. So we would learn how to mix those colors. And he would do different colors in the wings, so the back wing was blue, the next wing would be red, and maybe the next wing yellow, so you’d change colors when you go back and forth so it would give a heightened depth perception, kind of feeling. He was a genius. We idolized him. So I need to go back to my story.

[44:22]

When RDT came they wanted—the Rockefeller people wanted to create their own dance company, and they didn’t want Joan and me to be involved because we were already teaching at the university. We’d already started our own little company, and they didn’t want it to be part of that so they made a rule in the Rockefeller creation of this new company, Repertory Dance Theatre, that you couldn’t be in it if you were thirty or above. So that cut Joan and I out of it completely, and they made that rule in order to cut us out.

So you have a question there, what was the worst thing that ever happened? This was the worst thing. This was very, very difficult for Joan and me because we had built the department; we had built a company. The company was beginning to get known in other states, and they came and made a new company and cut us completely out of it.

So they put Linda Smith in charge; Linda was one of our students. And they took students from the University; they took three students, and they took people from our company—Dee Winterton, Loa Clawson, and the third I think was Kay Clark. So they took those four people, and they made this new company. They made it with the same amount of dancers that we had had. And they took four of our dancers, and then they said we couldn’t be involved. They hired a manager from

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 16 New York, and in the first six months that company was ready to go belly up. He did not manage it well. So they took Joan out of the university and put her in charge of this new company, Repertory Dance Theatre, made her the leader of it. And she pulled it back together and got it back on its feet. She was the company director for a year and a half. She was head of RDT so we had to stop our company because four of the six dancers were gone and now Joan was gone. So I stayed at the university and taught, and Joan went to run this Repertory dance theater. And as soon as she had it on its feet, they brought two new guys from a management course that, I think, was at Yale, and it was Don Andrews and Don Michaelson. And they were two really great guys. They put Joan back in the department, and they put these two new guys head of RDT. Joan had gotten it going, and then they, the two guys, kept it going, and they were very good. They were excellent. Don Michaelson eventually went to be the head of the National dance division. Don Andrews stayed in Utah and eventually became a gardener. (laughs) He quit the business entirely, but anyway, it was difficult for Joan and me to have this new company with 350,000 dollars given to it each year to run, as competition and we had to stop what we were doing. It took away the live music from the university program that we had built up, and so we were left with the university program to be in competition with this company that had a lot of money.

It was pretty tough, but not to be daunted, we started Ririe-Woodbury up again; we started Dancers Company. We started another company and then in 1964 we did Ririe-Woodbury, and this was before RDT so we called it Ririe-Woodbury in 1964. So we had had two companies before that and then RDT came in ‘66. So we had Ririe-Woodbury going for ‘64 and ‘65, and ‘66 we had to stop it for a couple of years. And then we were able to start back up, and both companies got on the National Endowment list for arts in the schools and dance-touring program, and this was in 1969.

In 1969 I was put on a special—it was a special grant with the National Endowment. It was for dance, visual arts, music and theater. And it was called IMPACT; Inter-Disciplinary Program in the Arts for Children and Teachers and it was the first grant ever that had been made for those performing arts, and actually the National Endowment for the Arts started in 1964 the same year that we started our company, very interesting. So by 1969 it was going pretty well, and Betty Hayes was the head of the National Dance Association that year. She was president of it twice for several years. She was a wonderful organizer, and she knew how to take care of things. She asked Gladys Andrews

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 17 and Ruth Murray if they would be—she was asked to get a spokesperson for dance to be on this grant, so she asked those ladies because they were textbook authors. They had both written textbooks in dance for children. So she came to me, she said, “Shirley, out of default I’ve got to ask you to do this.” She said, “They both turned me down because they were too busy.” And she says, “You would be good, but the reason I shouldn’t ask you because it’s nepotism for me to ask somebody from my own department, but I’m up against the wall. There’s no one else to ask, and you are an expert in children’s dance.” That was my favorite thing to do. I love dance for children and I’ve always taught it.

So I went back to New York. They had a theater person, a dance person, a visual art person, and a music person. We all met together, and the visual art person was head of our group, and Charles Reinhart came into the meeting one day with Bud Arberg who was head of education at the National Endowment. Charles Reinhart was in charge of the dance part. Nobody knew who Charles Reinhart was, but now they do because he’s been terribly important in dance forever since. But they came into our meeting and they said, We have an idea for dance. We want to bring a dance teacher in for weeks—into a site, and then we get them ready for the dance company to come. Then they want the dance company to come for two weeks and then we want another dance artist, a dance movement specialist, to come in and tie everything up. And we’ll be in elementary schools because there’s no dance in elementary schools in this country, and this is where it should be starting and where it should happen. So they left, and this man, that was the head of the art department, said, “We don’t want artists in our classrooms. Artists don’t understand education. They’ll wreck it. You bring an artist into this school it’ll be bedlam.” And I raised my hand, I mean I was so nervous being in Washington D.C. my first time and being in this big grant project and oh my gosh—oh actually I have to go back.

Charles Reinhart had mentioned twelve companies who would be good for this and out of the twelve companies he had mentioned Bella Lewitsky, Murray Louis and Lucas Hoving. They all had companies. I said, “Three of those companies that you’ve talked about, I have seen them teach children.” Because I had seen them, those companies come to Salt Lake, and they had taught Virginia Tanner’s children. She would always have them come. And I have personally seen Murray teach children, I’d seen Lucas teach children and I’d seen Bella teach children. I said, “They’re fabulous children’s teacher.” I said, “I’m an expert on children’s dance. They are wonderful teachers,

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 18 so you hire those companies you’ll get great education.” So they did. They hired those three companies that I had seen. I mean there were other great companies. There was the Black, not Alvan Allie, Mitchell, which Mitchell? David Mitchell. Anyway he had a company and they would’ve been very good, and they had a company in North Carolina that would’ve been very good. There were other companies that would’ve been good, but because I had seen them and I was in the meeting, those were the ones chosen—that just shows you, you need to know people. It’s who you know; it’s not what you know. It’s who you know, and that was my perfect example of being very influential.

[54:19]

Well, those three companies did the pilot program. Virginia Tanner was the teacher the first year, and they had five pilot sites. Then I was the teacher the second year so I had to get a—I got a sabbatical at the university. And for six weeks each I worked with the teachers and the coordinator that was at the site. And we started to then I went to the five sites and taught. It was Troy, Alabama; Temple University in Philadelphia; Glendale, California; Eugene Oregon; and Columbus, Ohio. Those were the five sites. So I went to all five sites do the pilot work for this program. It turned out to be heaven, heaven for dancers.

They chose twenty companies to be on Artists-in-Schools they called it. And this is the one where we’d have two weeks of a movement specialist, two weeks of a company and two weeks of a specialist. Because Ririe-Woodbury had two teachers at the helm, Joan and I were both university teachers. We were the only company out of the twenty who really had teachers as chairs, as heads. So we taught everybody else how to teach. We would have a week of preparation. First, it was at Connecticut College, where the American Dance Festival was, and then later the American Dance Festival changed to Raleigh Durham, and that’s where it was after that.

So every state could choose one art education project—one impact project—and they could do dance or music or visual art or whatever. So quite a few of them chose theater—excuse me—chose dance, and since we were the ones that knew how to do residencies. Residencies were an integral part of it. The dance company would come in and they would teach in the school every day. And they would do a children’s concert and an adult concert as a part of their two-week thing. Often times we would be in a town that had never had—not only a dance performance—never had a live performance of any kind. It was pioneer work. It was very exciting. So our company—all we’d

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 19 have to do was pick up the phone and they’d say, We want you to come to Philadelphia in March. And we’d say, We can’t come in March, how about April? We didn’t have to do booking. We didn’t have to tell people who we were—the phone calls just came to us, and as soon as we had enough, we’d quit. Well, in the beginning, one time we took forty weeks of residencies. Forty weeks. That’s more than a full-time dancer should do. We barnstormed around this country for forty weeks. We were exhausted. Our dancers didn’t even have apartments. They said, Why have an apartment. We’ll just go live on the road. They were gypsies. And then Joan and I would trade off. So she’d go half the time and I’d go half the time.

So in order to do this, we each had to take a quarter off from the university. We were full-time at the U by now. So Joan would take fall quarter off and I’d do all the traveling for fall and she would take winter quarter off and I would teach and she would do all the traveling for winter. And then eventually we had to both take spring quarter off because we had too much touring. So we literally only had one quarter that we were teaching at the U, but they let us do that. And we did that for like twenty years. We taught for one quarter each, but we had the connection with the university. And we were bringing students to the university. They would see us dance and they would say, Oh we’ve got to go to the university; those are wonderful dancers. So we started having people from all over the world come, and it was very, very exciting.

So on this one week that we had—we would tell all the principals and all the superintendents—most of them were men—that they had to take a technique class every day, and they had to take an improvisation composition class every day. And they would just go—they’d kind of freeze, and they’d come in their suits and ties and so then we’d say, Go to the bookstore and get a warm-up suit and that’s what you can use. So they’d dutifully go to the bookstore and buy the warm-up suit. And they would take technique every morning and take composition and improv every afternoon. And then we would have meetings with job alike. All the principals would meet together and all the superintendents would meet together. These were all the people, all over the country, that were having us come, and there were twenty companies there so at least a company would have one or two residencies, and then we would have five or six. I mean, they’d be so mad at us, and Hawaii—Hawaii had two companies that didn’t work out because they said they had a howlie5 attitude, and that means your

5. A howlie is Hawaiian slang for “foreigner.”

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 20 attitude that you think you’re better than the people in Hawaii. Howlie—you’re better than the Hawaiians.

So this gal Barbara Furstinberg came from Hawaii; she came to Salt Lake to meet with Joan and me. She said, “We’re going to try this program once more in Hawaii, but we want to be sure it works. Now the thing that these people would be upset, we don’t have really good theaters in some of the places in Hawaii, you might have to teach in a lanai.6 You might have to perform in a gym.” We said, We’ll make it work. And they sent a man with lights with a whole truckload of lighting. And we’d get on these little planes and fly from one island to another, with all the lights. We’d make theaters out of gymnasiums or sometimes outdoor lanais, and we made it work, and they loved us. So they had us for eight years; they had us come. Only Ririe- Woodbury. And everybody wanted to go to Hawaii, I mean everybody. That was the prime site, and we would get it every year. And we went to all five islands, and we went back to Oahu many times. And we had great friends in Hawaii. It was so fabulous. We loved to go to Hawaii.

And you know, I counted all of the dance movement specialists that were on the list. There were about a hundred dance artists from all over the country who could do these preparatory and follow-up two weeks, and then the company would go for two weeks. And I counted up and over fifty out of those hundred were Utah trained. They had either gone to BYU or University of Utah or studied with Virginia Tanner or somebody in Utah. Isn’t that amazing? Then RDT and Ririe-Woodbury were both on one of the twenty companies.

Then they had another thing that the National Endowment started, and it was called Dance Touring Program. That was going to colleges and communities. And we were on that too, and we got a lot of those as well because those were residencies. The National Endowment was trying to teach people how you can do dance in the schools, in elementary schools particularly, but high school and colleges as well. So that put us on the map. That put us full-time immediately. I remember putting our dancers in front of us. Now we had been going on spring vacation and then summer vacation doing a little bit of touring. And we said, How would you like to be full-time? And every one of those dancers said, Yes! And Joan and I looked at each other. We were full-time University teachers; we didn’t know if we wanted to go full-time, but our dancers really wanted to do it. And we

6. A lanai is a veranda or roofed patio.

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 21 thought, Well let’s try it out. And then of course it was wonderful. We never looked back because it really made our company. It put us full- time immediately, and it gave us a lot of money. I wish we’d known in those years, that was about thirteen years that that program was going, I wish we had known, and we would’ve put money aside in an endowment because we were making too much money to be non- profit. We had to think of ways to spend it, and we should have put it in an endowment, but nobody was there to counsel us on what to do. And it was about 1983 that that stopped. So it was all through the seventies to about 1983 that that program was going, and it was just really wonderful. So after that we had to reinvent ourselves.

[01:03:23]

In the eighties, education dance didn’t have a very good name. They weren’t interested in funding education—dance education. We kept doing it, but we gave our grants to the endowment only on performance. And then in the nineties another program came back which was Dance on Tour, and it was a great program. We had eight weeks in South Carolina. Eight weeks of touring in South Carolina. Joan went on that one. We had five weeks in New Mexico. I went on that one. We had four weeks in Montana. We had two weeks in Kentucky. I went on all those. We had a month in Hawaii, and I went on two of those. We went to a different island each week. We went to Kodiak [Alaska] which is out, you know, it’s an island. We went to Homer on the [Kenai Peninsula] and several towns there. We went to Fairbanks, and we went to Anchorage, a week each. And those were wonderful residencies and very pioneering because they’d never had a company in Kodiak, and they’d never had a company in Homer. Homer’s kind of a granola place; it’s very—a lot of homesteaders lived there. It’s the peninsula that’s kind of near Anchorage, so it’s not terribly cold. And we loved Homer and they loved us. We had such fun there, and then Fairbanks, when we went there it was—you know the sun just barely came up over the horizon. It was in November; you saw the sun for about an hour and then it was dark. And they would have little twinkly, white lights everywhere, all over Fairbanks. Every house, every church, every business, and it was like a fairyland; it was very beautiful. And then they’d make ice sculptures, and they’d color the ice sculptures and light them. So it was like a fairyland. Then we went because we were so well known in the U.S.—we began getting foreign tours, wonderful ones.

Of course, I told you one of the exciting ones; it was South Africa. We were invited to go to a convention for girls’ and women’s sports in

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 22 South Africa, and our company was invited to come. And we performed in the great opera hall in Cape Town. It was the most beautiful place I’ve ever performed. It was just a gorgeous, big opera house. And we were doing a lot of slide work then as we had our ten slide projectors, you know, that Nik had taught us how to do, and we were doing our slide things and, oh, the people in South Africa loved it. We went to Johannesburg and performed. We went to Seweto and performed which is an African city, you know, that’s kind of a black ghetto. We went to Port Elizabeth so and then we performed in Cape Town. That was very, very exciting. In those years it was—what was the word? It was when Carter was president. And they had a program that you shouldn’t go to other countries, Apartheid. You shouldn’t go to Africa—South Africa—Africa because Apartheid was happening. And politically we weren’t for Apartheid, but we said, We don’t want to give up South Africa. So we said, We’re going to go anyway and even though the government says don’t go. So we went.

We had an African fellow. We had Dennis; [he] was dancing with us and he was black. When we went to South Africa, we were the first company who had performed in several of those sites with a mixed company because we had a black African and whites dancing together. So that was very historical, and it was very, very interesting. When we were in Cape Town the boys, the men, had met a gay flight attendant on the plane. He invited them to these parties in the best homes in Cape Town because these gay guys were in high society and they showed us—one of my guys showed me a home magazine. He said, “Look at the house on this cover, I’ve been there.” They didn’t invite Joan and me; they just invited the three boys. But they went to all these fancy parties, and we got to go to some things that were kind of nice, but they treated Dennis—they treated him like royalty in Cape Town. He was high, high on the club.

[When] we got to Port Elizabeth, Joan and Dennis were walking down the street, and they were kind of arm in arm. And people would look at them and they’d just jump away and they’d have hateful looks on their faces. And then some little kid was roller-skating. He saw them and he fell off his skateboard; he fell off his skateboard. Dennis walked into the hotel that we were to be in, and some woman in the hotel screamed at the top of her lungs, “What’s he doing in here? What’s this black man doing here? He should not be in this hotel.” Screamed, top of her lungs so he started to get a lot of ostracism out in these other cities in Johannesburg and in Port Elizabeth and, oh my gosh, he got so low. It hit him so hard; he got so low. And it took him weeks after we got

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 23 home to get over that because he found out what real—what’s the word that I want?

MW: Discrimination or—

SR: When you don’t accept someone from another color? Racism.

MW: Racism.

SR: Anyway, he got that full blast, and he never felt it before because he moved in white society here, you know.

[01:09:52]

MW: I have to ask you as I listen to all these fascinating stories that you’re telling, was your husband going along with you? Did you have children? How did you manage that?

SR: My husband one day sat me down and said, “Do you have any sexual feelings when you’re dancing so close to these other guys?” (laughter) And I said, “Honey, they’re all gay.” (laughter) But no, you don’t. I mean, it’s your coworker; you just work with your coworker and okay so he puts his hand all over you, well he has to do that in order to lift you or that’s what the choreography— you don’t even think twice about it. So my husband, he was okay with it.

MW: Did he travel with you?

SR: No, we worked too hard. Also, he had to be home and take care of the kids. When we got onto this full-time stuff. I was having to go like for a month or six weeks at a time. And so I said to Reese, “Is this going to be okay? Let’s talk to our kids.” So I talked to the kids, and I said, “You know”—my oldest daughter was sixteen by then, so I had six to sixteen, four girls. And Robin said, “Well, you know, I could help Dad with getting meals and we could do grocery shopping. I’ll do that.” And the other kids said, We’ll help. And I had a cleaning lady, and I had an ironing lady that came once a week so that helped out with the house. Then about a year later or so the ironing lady quit. She did the washing and the ironing. And my daughter, she was about sixteen then, my next daughter came to me and said, “Mom, if I do the same good job that Mrs. McComb did in washing and ironing will you pay me the same amount of money?” And I said, “Sure!” And she did. She did a great job. So then we passed the ironing/washing down the line, and then we paid the one that did the cooking/grocery shopping.

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 24 Reese was great; he was great with them. You know, I had to give a talk for the LDS Church they had a women’s thing happen—

MW: A women’s conference.

[01:12:09]

SR: It must’ve been in the eighties or nineties, or something, because all of the women’s movement was happening, you know, and they were getting some flack being such a patriarchal church so they started reaching out and doing things with women. They asked me to give an hour-long lecture. They were asking a lot of women to do it. So this was after I was traveling a lot, you know. After the traveling was over, I interviewed my kids and this was when I was going so much, and I asked, “How did you really feel?” And they said, Oh it was fun! We got to meet all these dancers; you had all these dancers come stay at our house. We got to meet these famous people and then we got to go to Connecticut with you. They went to Connecticut College with me for six weeks. I went to teach—teach at the American Dance Festival. And we lived in two dorm rooms, and I took one of my dancers with me, a guy, to kind of help baby-sit, and the kids had freedom. They’d ride up and down the dormitory halls on the laundry carts. (laughs) They felt like they owned the dorms because they’d be there and nobody would be there because everybody would be in classes. And my oldest daughter, she was just going to start college the next year, I think, and so she could take classes and then my younger one was able to take a ballet class, I mean my next one, and then the other two just played around and they had a Walden Pond there—a beautiful place; it was like a Walden Pond. It was a natural preserve, and it had frogs and lots of birds in it and lily pads and fish. My ten-year-old loved that place; she just stayed there for hours, just hours, and played. So they loved it, and then we went six weeks to Hawaii, oh, they loved that.

We stayed in a high-rise apartment, and I took them with me. I had to teach. I just had to teach in the mornings, so I was through teaching by 11:00 AM. So I’d take them with me, and they’d kind of be in one of the classrooms there for the morning, and then we’d go play. We’d have from eleven o’clock till nighttime to go explore Hawaii and go to the beach; we went to the beach almost every day. They loved it. And there was a big pool in this high-rise; they loved to go to the pool too. And we had an outdoor lanai that we could look over the ocean, and we had a barbecue. This had been a theater department, I think it was the chair’s apartment; it was a very posh apartment. My ten-year-old

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 25 had to sleep in a study. And it had masks all over the walls; the walls were covered with masks and they were these awful—you know how masks are. Sometimes they were kind of gargoyle kind of type things, and she said, “Oh, I’m okay here.” And she said she was so scared she’d just lie there at night, but she didn’t dare tell me. She wanted me to think that she was okay. So that poor little kid, she went to bed every night with these masks staring at her. (laughter)

But anyway they had some wonderful experiences, and they said no. They said what it taught them was it taught them responsibility, and it taught them how to do the things around the house. You know, they had to be fully in charge of cleaning the house. The cleaning lady quit eventually, and so they did that too. And they did it without me nagging them. They did it feeling responsible and their father saying, “Oh, you did such a good job.” So they did it happily, and when my oldest girl got married—she got married very young—when she was twenty. I was very upset, but you know, you hold your tongue and don’t say anything. And people would say, Oh you’re so young to be married. How are you going to be able to be a housewife and take care of your husband? She’d say, “Oh this is nothing. I’ve been taking care of five people; one’s going to be nothing.” (laughter) So anyway, they were okay with it. They really did learn a lot of responsibly and a lot of good traits. My husband is a perfect housecleaner. He had a perfect housecleaner mother, and he’s a perfect housecleaner and I’m not. So he would teach the girls how to be perfect housecleaners, you know. He’d teach them all the things that you do. So they learned that from their dad. If I’d been teaching them, they would have learned messy housekeeping.

MW: What did he do for a living? I’m sorry I’m just—

FN: No, go ahead.

SR: I can’t hear you quite.

MW: What did Reese do for a living?

[01:17:05]

SR: Reese was a banker, and he was quite high up in banking so he had a lot of demands in his job, but he was wonderful to somehow be able to take care of all of this that was going on, I don’t know how he did it. Then when he was age fifty-five, and I was still touring at that time, he was supposed to create a golden umbrella. He was in charge of

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 26 personnel in the bank. It was—what was before Key Bank— Commercial Bank, Commercial Security so he made a golden umbrella [parachute] plan to get rid of top management and then he put himself at the top of the list, and they couldn’t say anything. They had to accept his resignation. They didn’t want him to retire, but he said, “You know, if I put my name here, it’s gonna help people know that it’s a good thing to do and they’re going to get rid of more”— which is true. So he retired at age fifty-five, and he started making beautiful furniture.

So he became an artist at age fifty-five. He was much happier as an artist than he was a banker. He didn’t make any money, but as a banker he’d been good with investments, so he made good investments, so he could retire. And he loved his life. He loved being a fine furniture maker. He won lots of prizes. He won lots of purchase prizes in museum shows. And he did a lot of commissioning work, and he loved doing it. So he made several pieces for each of my girls, and my house is full of beautiful furniture that he’s made. So he had two different careers and he loved his last one best. And he had better friends when he was an artist. I use to think that the bankers were kind of stuffy. We’d have to go to all the Christmas party because he was head of personnel so we’d have to go to everybody’s Christmas party and I’d get so bored sitting at these tables, hearing these bankers talk about finance. Then when he was an artist, we’d go to parties with the people that were in the galleries, and they’d be talking about really interesting things and they were much more fun.

FN: Well, I’m going to ask you another question. You actually answered three of my questions without me even having to ask them. So I’m going to jump to number eleven. What advice do you have for younger women and specifically artists in Utah?

SR: Well, my advice to my college students and my children was always, choose a major that you love to do. Choose something that you love. Don’t choose it because you’re going to make a lot of money or it’s going to be secure. Don’t choose it for that reason. Choose it for love because if you choose it for love you’re going to be able to find something to do with it, and you’re going to love doing it. You’re going to enjoy your life.

There [were] a lot of boys that I had to advise in college who loved to dance and were very concerned about going into dance because there’s a real stigma about it, you know, for men. There’s the gay thing, and there’s the you think that dance is a female thing—it’s not for men; it’s

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 27 not for real men. Course all of the shows the Sure I Can Dance and the movies—that’s helped a lot. It’s helped the image, and I think that men are more likely to go into Dancing with the Stars. You know, football players do it so it must be okay. And so that’s my big advice.

And then my other advice is you can do anything you want to do if you want to do it enough. If you really want to do it and are willing to make some sacrifices. And you know, I had to make, with my kids—I didn’t get to see all of their recitals; I didn’t get to see everything that they did because sometimes I’d be gone. But their dad went to everything, and their grandparents went to everything. My family kind of supported me in that way, but I think, I think, if you want to do something and you set your mind to it and you really work hard at it, you’ll be able to do it. So my children, they all did dance in some way in their lives. They all ended up being full-time mothers; they were lucky enough to marry men that had good enough jobs. They didn’t have to work, but they’re wonderful volunteers, all of them. They’re all PTA presidents and you know, doing things in the community and school. Things that I never did. So my kids were able to be the PTA presidents for me and be able to be fully behind their own children— mothers at home for their own kids, but I never did. But my kids understood me, and they understood that I had to do it. And my husband he was the best. He was the best supporter.

[01:22:25]

FN: No, it sounds amazing. How important do you feel college education is for women and why?

SR: Oh I think it’s very important. You know, you never know what will happen to you in your life, and a college education will prepare you to work if you have to and if you choose not to, it prepares you and gives you a wonderful background for everything else you do. But I think a women needs to have at least a college education so that she has her ground expanded, has her possibilities opened up to her. She needs to discover things that she can do and in college you do that. You discover things that you have an aptitude for, things that you like to do, things that you want to pursue farther. So I think a college education is very important and graduate degree too if you can do it.

FN: We live in a word where technology is in everything we do. What is the most significant effect these advances have had on your career in dance and in education?

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 28 SR: Well, I struggled through all—we were talking about this earlier. My technology when I started was as a MD 8 RP record, and if it started skipping grooves, you put a quarter on top of the arm so it had a little bit heavier weight to it. And I remember breaking a record before a performance and not having a backup and that was pretty horrific. Then we went to 33s and 45s, and then we went to reel-to-reel tape recorder, and then we went to cassette, and then we went to DVDs. And every change I would have a huge, vast collection of music that I taught with and that I used for choreography, and I’d have to completely junk it and get it into the next format. It was so depressing. I still have cassette tapes that I like to play. I’ve got some great music on cassette, and it’s not on DVD. And they stopped making the cassette tapes for us doing Nikolais work. Nikolais did all his wonderful projection work with slide projectors; you can’t buy those anymore. So we beg, borrow, and steal. We buy on the Internet, and we try to find people who’ve got them so we can—because those slide projectors have a different look than laser does. They have a different look than a computer has, and it’s a richer look so we’ll stay true to Nik and work with those projectors as long as we can still find them. But the technology you have to be up on it. You have to be able to move forward. Streaming music now, being able to put your iPod onto the speakers and have your class work to that music that you just found over the Internet. What a gift that is. I’m not teaching full-time anymore, but what a gift that would be. So if you’re with technology it can certainly help what you’re doing. And of course all of the wonderful theater look that comes out of technology, you know, the wonderful lighting things you can do with the lasers and with electronic equipment running things and being able to get split second timing on things. It’s wonderful, but it’s not bad to have gone through all the pioneering either because it makes you appreciate and understand the technology.

You know, one thing I’d like to talk about, I found a new kind of goal in my life twenty-seven years ago. And you had down on your paper that I had been lobbying twelve years; I’ve been lobbying twenty- seven years. I’ve been lobbying for POPS, which is Professional Outreach Program in the Schools; it’s for the professional arts organization—symphony, the opera, the ballet, the three modern dance companies, the art museums. And early on I decided we needed—here they were giving this money nationally to us to go to schools all around the country, and we weren’t doing it in our own state. We needed to be going into these elementary schools in our own state. So I started lobbying and Haven Barlow who got Maurice Abravanel, his outreach program to help the symphony—what happened is the arts

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 29 council dumped the symphony from their giving list because I think the arts council was cut. This was early, early on. And Abravanel went to Haven Barlow who was just a new senator; he was just a young senator. He said, “We have got to have some more money coming on. We will go out and do symphony concerts in the schools if you can get some money from the legislature to help us do this.” So Haven did that. And the symphony had outreach for years. And then Glade Peterson came, and Glade got it with the opera. So the symphony and opera did it. And then Bill Christensen said, “We want this for the ballet.” So they got with the ballet. And I said, “Gee, here modern dance is doing far more nationally than any of those other groups with outreach and here we’re not in our own state.” So I went to try to get modern dance onto the outreach and we did it. We got on. Then the next big thing was they were telling us that we weren’t statewide. You’re all Wasatch Front people. The ballet, and the opera, and all you modern dance, you’re all Wasatch Front. So we got Shakespeare Festival in Cedar [City], Utah Festival Opera in Logan, and Springville Museum [of Art] in the middle of the state. They wanted to come on. So we got them all on in one year. We also got the children’s museum that year because we used to be a museum and arts group organization. So we got them on and then we were statewide. Then the legislators couldn’t say anything to us. We’d tell them how wonderful this program is. It goes statewide. We go into all your rural districts. This is the schools we’ve gone to in your district. So we’ve done very well, so we’ve gone from nothing up to about four and a half million dollars with the museums, the natural sciences, and the arts. Then a few years ago, they bifurcated so they have the arts now in just one lobby group and the museums in the other. The Museum of National History is opening up tomorrow; I’m going to the gala. And Ann Hanniball and Sarah George [who] made that happen, used to lobby with me early on trying to get the Museum of Natural History, get that outreach. So those two gals used to lobby with me. We’ve come a long way, baby, from when we’ve started.

[01:30:03]

FN: Since the passing of your husband, what are some of the things you have come to feel are most valuable in life, and do you have any more advice you would like to pass on?

SR: Well, I really miss my husband, of course. He was so wonderful and he was so supportive of me. So everything we did, we did together. We loved traveling together; we did a lot of traveling together. And we liked the same kind of movies, so I miss all of that. But he also made

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 30 it possible for me to have a career and so now that career is still going, and I still have all of that part of my life that I’m still heavily involved in.

I’m still doing the lobbying; I’m still helping with the education of the company, and anything else I can help with. Fundraising is mostly what we do now, which I don’t like, but it’s important; we have to do it. I have many, many friends from my university involvement. I still work with national dance education organization and the Utah dance education organization. I have wonderful friends in those places and do things together. I care a lot about all those hundreds, and hundreds of students I’ve had over the years, when they’re doing things I want to go see their concerts. They always email me and saying I’m doing this, I’m doing this; can you come? It feels like a family.

So I have my own family and my daughters, I have three daughters here in Salt Lake, so they’ve been wonderful to me. They take care of me. They call me up; they all call me every week and ask me how I’m doing. And they come and clean my cupboards. One family came this week and cleaned up my whole yard; they cut down all my bushes and pulled out all my annuals and got me shipshape for winter. So they’re taking care of me. I have a lot of people who care for me, so I’m doing okay.

MW: How many grandchildren do you have?

SR: I have fifteen grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and three more on the way; so have lots of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, lots of great-grandchildren to come. I’m expecting at least fifty before we get done.

FN: In your short biography, you say that your favorite places to visit were South Africa, Edinburgh Festival, China, and Paris. You’ve already talked a lot about South Africa, do you want to share any other memories about the other places?

SR: Well Edinburgh was wonderful because Edinburgh invites you to come and be on their festival. You can’t apply; you’re just invited. And the wonderful thing that happened the year they invited us, they invited Ballet West as well. So Ririe-Woodbury and Ballet West were both invited to go to Edinburgh. It’s a great festival. They have the main festival, which we were on. And we did, oh I think, five different performances. So people from all over the world come. So people from all over the world see your shows. And then they have the fringe,

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 31 which is other people, can be on that. And so Edinburgh is full of people. And Reese usually didn’t come with me when the company went out because we don’t ever have time to sightsee; we’re in the theater, we’re working, we’re rehearsing, then we go to the next town. [But] he came to Edinburgh, and I didn’t have any real job because Charlotte Boye-Christenson now is taking over the artistic stuff that Joan and I used to do, and Jenna Woodbury takes over the tour managing which we used to do.

So we’ve turned it over now to other people, so I was free. And he and I discovered the art museum in Edinburgh. Oh my gosh, it’s in two huge buildings, and we spent a whole day in there; we just loved it. And then we decided we’d have a day when we’d both go do what we wanted to, our own things because I wanted to see some dance things and he wanted to see some woodworking things, and we both ended up at the Edinburgh museum again and we saw each other. So we might as well gone together. But then we traveled all over Scotland, he and I. We went everywhere in Scotland. We went all over and out of the Outer Hebrides, which are the islands out way north of Scotland. We saw a lot of wonderful old ruins. Reese loves to see anthropological sites so we saw a lot of those. And we had a wonderful time in Edinburgh. We saw a lot of the other festival offerings; it was really exciting.

And then China, we’ve been to China twice, and we’re working on a third time. There’s somebody in China who’s working to get us—the first time it was kind of touring the bigger cities, the second time it was in the south. So he said we’re going to go to small cities, one or two million people. This is a small city in China; two million people is a small city. So we went in the south, and it was fascinating to go on that second tour, and every time we’d come to a city they’d have a welcome banquet. They’d have a big banquet; they’d have these tables—big huge turntables—and they’d put a new dish on the table, and then it turns around to everybody and everybody takes a little bit with their chopsticks. So they might have twenty or thirty different dishes. They’d have swan wings and pig snouts and blood tofu, oh my gosh, they had the wildest stuff, but I figured I had to at least taste everything. I wish I had written it all down. One of my grandson’s went to Taiwan on a mission, and I said, “Write down everything you eat, because you’ll forget about it.” So he did; he did it. He has pages. But we would go and then people would want to take us to the tourist places, so we went mountain climbing to the Purple Mountain. And it was in China, they make wooden paths up and down the mountains. If it’s a cliff, they make a cantilevered path that goes around the cliff and

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 32 then they make stair steps that go up the mountain and stair steps that go down the mountain. So you’re walking on a wooden path. Oh my gosh, anybody could go climbing the mountains. My granddaughter went to China this summer, and she went to the Yellow Mountains and they’re scarp mountain, and they go up like this—so she said she would like a staircase for seven hours, up and down a staircase to hike on this mountain and all it was, was stairs. But we went all over China; we went to Guailin, which is beautiful scarp mountains and gorgeous, misty—you go on a boat. We went to the Great Wall, of course. And everywhere they’d have a closing banquet [where] they’d feed us more food.

And on that tour we would go to a new place every three or four days. The trouble with that one, was that the stages weren’t fixed up for us like were on the first tour. On the first tour we were in more places who were used to having a dance company come. So Joan and I would go early in the morning and help scrub the floor of the stage; it would be filthy. We would scrub the dressing rooms, the—in some of these towns it would be dirt steps; dirt roads to walk into the theater; so you’d track all the dirt into the theater and into the dressing room; so we’d try to get it clean enough so our dancers could perform. And the lights were big huge lights, like this, they would be all yellow or all red or all green at once. So you couldn’t get any variation, so we had to try to figure out how to light our concert with these crazy, big stadium lights. And we were able to find ways—and our lighting guy, he had not a word of Chinese, and they had not a word of English, so we had a real experience. But we got the stages to look pretty good, and the Chinese people who had saw us on that, had never seen anything like us. You know the Chinese dance is all spectacle; it’s very much lots of people on stage, lots of scarves going, and lots of bright color and so it was very new to them, and I think, some of them, the people didn’t know what had hit them, so they didn’t know if they liked it or not, but the young people loved it. All the young college age kids, they’d crowd around us; they loved to talk English, and they wanted to be with us. And we saw some wonderful things because they were showing them to us. We saw things that you wouldn’t see being a regular tourist.

[01:39:29]

FN: What are some of your goals in life now?

SR: Well, my goal is to go to everything my grandchildren do—all the things I missed my children doing. One of my grandchildren last year

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 33 won the doubles championship for the state in tennis, in doubles. And a lot of them are musicians so I go to a lot of recitals. Then some of the email me—not all of them, but some of them—and I’ve got one granddaughter; she’s in Boston now, she just got married, but she emails me almost every day. Of course, she’s emailing a lot of other people with me, but she always answers me back. I love to email my grandchildren, it’s so much fun because you know you get on their Facebooks, and you get to see their pictures with their friends and I love that. That’s very fun. And I love my great-grandchildren there; I’ve got one who is in fourth grade and one who’s in second grade and all of the rest are toddlers. I’m going to have a lot of great- grandchildren coming pretty soon. One thing I do is I got to the main library when they have their book sale and I buy children’s books, and I’ve got Reese’s shop, which used to be full of machines to make woodwork and things, now full of books to give my great- grandchildren. So on Christmas I give a stack of books that are according to age range to my great-grandchildren and that’s one of my pursuits. And another thing is to get together with dinners with all of them, and now I’m going to all—my children have grandchildren of their own so now I’m going to all their houses for their dinners with their grandchildren so I have a very busy social life. And I love to garden and I love to cook, so I always cook something fancy for the parties.

FN: Is there something specific who would like to accomplish in the future?

SR: I would love to accomplish having dance programs in all the schools. This was one of my loves all my life because I know how important it is for elementary children to have that experience, to learn that their bodies can be expressive, to learn that their bodies can do things, that their minds can create, and they can create just what they are themselves. And Beverly Taylor Sorenson is maybe going to get that to happen for me.

I’ve worked with Beverly ever since she started her wonderful programs for the schools. She’s doing mostly elementary too, and she’s getting good money from the legislature, I’m hoping to help her get her more money. She was just given the American Council of the Arts award, the biggest award in this country. I’m so pleased for her because she’s worked very, very hard for many years without much recognition so I’m hoping through Beverly that I’ll get my—to my goal of wanting dance in elementary schools. Did you know it’s already happening in middle schools? We’re getting a lot of dance

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 34 teachers in the middle schools. We have them in this state, I think, in every high school, and now we’re getting them in almost all the middle schools, and the middle school kids are good! This is a great time to start them in dance because they’ve got younger bodies and more facile, so this is very exciting, but I want it down there in the elementaries.

FN: How can dancers and educators preserve and contribute to your legacy of working with legislature.

SR: How can they contribute—

FN: How can they contribute to what you’ve already accomplished?

SR: Oh. Well, you know, letting your own legislator know what’s happening in his district is very important. Just if you’re a teacher if you could write to him, say, we’re having this performance, and we’re doing this, and we’re having this in the schools, and this is happening, I’d love you to come. Just keep writing and letting him know and tell him how important it is, and give them invitations to visit because once they see it, they get it. They get what it is; otherwise, they’ve had no experience. They don’t know what you’re talking about. Dance? What’s that? Is that more than little frilly tutus? They’ll go like this. But we have a lot of educating to do, so we can all educate.

FN: What would you like to be remembered for?

SR: Oh, I’d like to be remembered for those few students I had who I was able to really change their lives, give them a new direction. And I’ve had a few. And the wonderful dancers who’ve been in my company— there had been almost seventy now—who’ve danced with us, and I hope they’ll carry on the legacy. A lot of those students that I taught who went on into teaching, and I know they are because I’ve seen what some of them have been doing, so I just hope they’ll carry on the legacy, and that there’ll be more performances and more classes and more dancing because our motto is “Dance is for everybody,” and we really mean that. Every single body in this world needs to know what dance is and needs to be able to do it.

FN: That was my next question. Are there any words of wisdom, axioms, or mottos that you’ve lived your life by?

[01:45:06]

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 35 SR: And the other one is “Dance is life.” Havelock Ellis who was a very early, early psychologist, and he knew the importance of dance through anthropology—know how primate cultures used dance—and he thought that dance was life. That dance is—I always said dance helped me express my livingness. It made me sense and feel my livingness and that’s why I want people to understand that dance is life or livingness.

FN: Is there anything additional you would like to have recorded about your life?

SR: I think I’ve done it.

FN: Is there anything else you would like to ask, Michele?

MW: I have one question; is there a recording, a video of you and Joan Woodbury in your early days as partners, any film on that?

SR: Nothing, much of nothing. There’s a little clip of Helen Tamaris —the songs of Walt Whitman in which we were both dancing, that was in the sixties so we were both in our forties.

MW: But that’s the earliest recording that you know of?

SR: We had some but they’re gone. We had—there might be—I have a film of seasonal episodes that I did and I haven’t seen if that’s still good, and we both danced in that, and that was very early on. That was choreography I did. The duet that we did, we have nothing of it. We were talking about trying to redo it for our fiftieth, it’s coming up to be our fiftieth anniversary with the company in 2014, and we’re going to do a fiftieth anniversary celebration for two years, ‘13, ‘14, and ‘15. And maybe we’ll scare it up. We can remember some of it, but there’s not much because when the good video came in, we were not dancing anymore—any longer. We have some of the one-inch; the one-inch is all gone. It’s disappeared; we might have a couple of films, but—I started going in—I found a video that we did in New York. We did a children’s show in Central Park, and there’s a little bit of it, but it’s a real poor video. But that exists and then we did a nighttime concert at the Riverside Church so we got a video.

MW: I’ll go looking, see if I can drum up, see if there’s anything I can find. I’ll see. Thank you so much. This was a delightful interview; you’re remarkable, much more even than I knew.

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 36 SR: Yeah, well I’m a blabbermouth; I go bluh, bluh…

MW: No.

SR: You have to start me on something, and I have lots of stories.

MW: Wonderful information that Fiona is very privileged to have. Will you sit by her let me take your picture?

FN: Yeah.

SR: You have my spectacles.

MW: I do. I will give those to you right now.

SR: You’ve taken better care than they’ve ever been taken care of in their lives.

MW: Well, I’m honored to know that your glasses were in my glass case. Now if I can find my glass case—I just pulled it out because I pulled my glasses out; let me give those to you before we forget.

SR: Thank you.

[01:48:37] End of interview

Utah Women’s Walk: Shirley Ririe 37