Ririe-Woodbury

Ririe-Woodbury is a professional dance company in Salt Lake City, Utah. However, you don’t have to be a professional dancer to gain valuable dance experience with them! Ririe-Woodbury provides many opportunities for master classes and just normal drop in classes. I went to a week long dance training with them, and it was incredible! They recommend that anyone who comes has a basic knowledge of ballet, even though they are a professional contemporary dance company. This is just so you don’t feel awkward because the instructors and master classes are taught by Daniel Charon, the artistic director, and the actual performing professional dancers who dance for Ririe-Woodbury.

As mentioned above, you can choose just an hour or two to attend a master class, but I chose the week long workshop. It was incredible! I took ballet, jazz, improvisation, contemporary, and even hip hop dance. I learned so much! My day started at 9am. I was to be ready to go in the Mezzanine Studio (one of the featured studios) and I was to start warming up. One of the dancers came in and had us do floor warmups. About half of the dancing with Bashaun was on the floor. He invited us to wear knee pads so that our knees wouldn’t end up being bruised. Then, we had a short ten minute break to get water and use the restroom. Our next lesson was with Daniel Charon. He had us work on a piece that he was currently choreographing. It was really fun to feel like a professional actually learning the real dances that would be performed later that fall. After about two hours with him, we moved on the Improvisation.

At improvisation, it is exactly as it sounds. We would all stand in a circle and a professor from University of Utah was in the middle. He would randomly select anyone on the sides to just start dancing. He would give us bits of stories to try to dance out as challenges. I did not like this class at first because improv is very hard for me. But, towards the end of the week, I learned to love it and improved a ton. Then we moved on to lunch break.

Lunch break was on your own, I mostly just brought my own lunches, some dancers would go out to eat. We had 45 minutes to eat, and an additional 30 minutes to stretch and be prepared for the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes, Ririe-Woodbury would bring in master class teachers from around the world to talk to us about dance technique and about how they came to be where they are today. We learned a lot about how to brand ourselves as dancers, and how to take better care of our bodies and improve flexibility. On the last day, we got to meet the founders of the company which was incredible.

After lunch, we got to dance ballet – my favorite of all. A world-renowned ballet dancer who danced for several professional companies (Natalie Desch) taught us. She is amazing and I had a total blast. Then, we got to learn dances from master class teachers from around the world. Lastly, we would end the day on company choreography for our performance that Saturday. I would end up finishing around 6pm each day, but it was totally worth it! Even just the hour or two hour dance classes are a blast.