Ririe-Woodbury Dance CompanyRE-ACT

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company
presents
RE-ACT
April 18th & April 19th, 2025 at 7:30PM
Leona Wagner Black Box
Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center
Salt Lake City, Utah

Packages on sale: 6/26/2024 at 10am.
Single tickets on sale: 9/23/2024 at 10am.

Breaking Ground and Closing Curtains

RE-ACT Presents The Inaugural Year of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s Choreographic Canvas and Daniel Charon’s Last Performance as Company Artistic Director.

[Salt Lake City, UT, April 18 & 19, 2025] – Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s season finale, marks a powerful moment of transformation, featuring Daniel Charon’s final work as Artistic Director and the company’s first Choreographic Canvas commission. From Code to Universe, choreographed by Charon and co-created with theater director Alexandra Harbold is a haunting meditation on memory, identity, and technology’s grip on human existence. Sharing the program is the world premiere of a bold new work by Choreographic Canvas Selected Artist Annalee Traylor, bringing fresh vision to the company’s legacy of innovation. A night of endings and beginnings, RE-ACT is a celebration of dance’s ever-evolving future.

Premiering in RE-ACT, From Code to Universe is a dance-theater piece choreographed by Daniel Charon in his final work as Artistic Director of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company. It is co-created and co-directed by long time collaborator, Alexandra Harbold. This world premiere will feature a new play written by playwright Connor Nelis Johnson which will be entwined with the movement sections. This piece will feature Charon as a performer alongside the company and guest actors Nicki Nixon, Ben Young, and Mack Barr. From Code to Universe invites audiences into a world where the past is reconstructed in fragmented recollections and the future is coded in uncertainty. Intimate moments unfold like half-remembered dreams: the warmth of a shared breakfast, the weightlessness of a life-altering event, the tender paradox of knowing and unknowing. Interwoven with ancient myths and the origins of storytelling itself, From Code to Universe unearths timeless questions of existence, love, and what it means to be truly human in an era where even memory can be reprogrammed. It challenges us to consider—if we could preserve ourselves in data, in code, in story—would we ever truly live forever? 

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company is proud to present the first-ever Choreographic Canvas Selected Artist, Annalee Traylor. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Traylor will travel to Salt Lake City to create an original work for the Company Dancers. Choreographic Canvas, now in its inaugural year, is a bold new annual initiative dedicated to fostering innovative choreography and supporting the creation of new dance works. Each year, the program will commission a choreographer through a juried selection process to develop and premiere a fresh, original piece as part of the company’s regular performance season. Traylor’s highly anticipated world premiere will bring an exciting and dynamic new dimension to RE-ACT, marking a thrilling milestone for both the artist and the company.

RE-ACT

Two Nights Only!

April 18th – April 19th, 2025 / 7:30PM

Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center / Leona Wagner Black Box 

Ticket Info

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Daniel Charon (Choreographer, Co-Creator/From Code to Universe)

Artistic Director of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company since 2013, Daniel Charon has been active as a choreographer, teacher, and performer for over twenty-five years. While based in New York City, Daniel maintained a project-based company and primarily danced with Doug Varone and Dancers (1999-2010) and the Limón Dance Company (1997-1999). He is a BFA graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts and an MFA graduate of the California Institute of the Arts in Choreography and Integrated Media. As Ririe-Woodbury’s Artistic Director, Daniel has created over 20 original works for the stage, gallery installations, and has designed video for his and other choreographers’ works. As an independent choreographer he has presented multiple full evening concerts in New York City, has been produced by various theaters, and has been commissioned to choreograph new works for many companies, universities, and festivals around the country. Daniel has choreographed The Pearl Fishers, Aida, Moby-Dick, and La Traviata at the Utah Opera. Daniel has taught master classes and workshops nationally and internationally and has taught at the Metropolitan Opera, the Bates Dance Festival, Salt Dance Fest, North Carolina School of the Arts Summer Comprehensive, Varone Summer Dance Workshops, and Limón Summer Workshops. He has been a guest artist and adjunct instructor at numerous universities. Daniel has staged the works of José Limón, Jirí Kylián, and Doug Varone at schools and companies around the world.

Annalee Traylor (Choreographic Canvas Selected Artist)

Annalee Traylor is a creator, choreographer, director, and educator based in Atlanta, GA.Traylor’s choreography has been commissioned and performed across the United States and internationally, reaching audiences in Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands, among others. Her work has been supported by Dance Lab NY, the UNCSA Choreographic Institute, Highways Performance Space, Kennesaw State University, The Dance Gallery Festival, Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, and Emory University, where she was awarded the 2023/24 inaugural Emory Arts Fellowship in Dance. Recently, she directed Theater Emory’s production of The Other Shore. This spring, she is premiering original works with Kit Modus, Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre, and Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company as the inaugural Choreographic Canvas recipient.

Traylor is a high school graduate of UNCSA. She received her BFA cum laude from Point Park University and MFA in Choreography from the California Institute of the Arts with the S. Disney Lund Scholarship in Dance.

Alexandra Harbold (Co-Creator, Co-Director/From Code to Universe)

Alexandra Harbold (co-creator/dramaturg) is a theatre director, actor, dramaturg, and intimacy choreographer. Harbold and Robert Scott Smith founded and share creative leadership of Flying Bobcat, a Theatrical Laboratory which produces and creates performance-based work. Previously, she collaborated with Daniel and Ririe-Woodbury on To See Beyond Our Time, Allegory and The Live Creature and Ethereal Things. Upcoming projects include directing Western Minerals and their Origins (Footpath Theatre), The Cherry Orchard (Babcock Theatre) and the world premiere of Very Like a Whale (Flying Bobcat in partnership with UtahPresents and the University of Utah Department of Theatre) She is an Associate Member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a member of Actors’ Equity Association and LMDA, and an Assistant Professor of Directing in the University of Utah’s Department of Theatre. www.alexandraharbold.com

Connor Nelis Johnson (Playwright/From Code to Universe)

Originally from Salt Lake City, Connor Nelis Johnson is a co-founder of Footpath Theatre Company, a roving band of intrepid adventurers. With Footpath he has developed and produced three plays, Ronald and Edith, The Wreck of the Queen Thomasina, and Western Minerals and their Origins, and performed them in Salt Lake City, New York City, and Edinburgh, winning multiple ‘Best of Fringe’ awards. His play, The Quiet Rule, was recently selected for the Theater Masters ‘Take Ten Festival” in New York City, and will be published by Concord Theatricals. He is currently working towards an MFA in Playwriting from the University of Arkansas.

Run time: TBA

Recommended for ages 8 and up. Infants not admitted. All patrons require a ticket regardless of age.