BY KAREN BOSSICK

Footlight Dance is celebrating 40 years of pirouettes, tap dances and other moves in the Wood River Valley with a special dance performance on Saturday, July 27.

The performance titled “Many Voices” will feature Footlight alum and guest artists from Idaho Dance Theatre in Boise, Chicago and elsewhere who have been touched by Footlight Dance education, as well as a few current Footlight Dance dancers.

It will be held at 7 p.m. Saturday, July 27, at The Community Campus in Hailey, and tickets are just $10 at Iconoclast books in Hailey and at the door.

The performers;

Adrienne Kerr, principal dancer from Ballet Idaho and Lydia Sakolsky-Basquill, from the dance center’s summer faculty Project Flux, will dance a duet.

Lem Regan, a former Footlight Dance Center alum now dancing with Idaho Dance Theatre, and Libby Schmoeger of Idaho Dance Theatre will dance a piece commissioned by choreographer Kaley Pruitt, a Footlight alum who now is the artistic director of Kaley Pruitt Dance.

Mackenzie King, a current Footlight Dance faculty member, will team up with Megan Rhodes from Moonwater Dance Project, Footlight Dance teacher and alum Robyn Fox and alum Hayley Allen, who recently earned a BFA in dance at New York University.

Footlight alum Shea Slanetz, now a senior dance major at the Berlin Dance Institute in Germany, will team up with alum Dakota Barth, now pursuing a dance minor at University of Utah.

Several students—the next generation of dancers--will perform short workshop pieces that they are learning this week at a five-day Dance Tapestry Workshop intensive for advanced, intermediate and junior dancers at the Footlight Dance Center studio at the Community Campus.

Footlight Dance Center alumni will also come together to perform in a “family of dancers” improvisational piece.

“The five-day workshop allows our students the opportunity to share with professionals this art form of dance, the movement expression of our human spirit,” said Hilarie Neely, founder and artistic director of Footlight Dance.

Hundreds of Wood River Valley youth have danced their way through Footlight Dance classes since Hilarie Neely founded the dance company in 1984. Among them, Isabella Boylston, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre who served as Jennifer Lawrence’s dance double in the 2018 feature film “Red Sparrow.”

The dance company concludes its winter classes with a lavish spring recital featuring a hundred students from 4-years old to high school performing such classics as “Peter Pan,” “Mary Poppins,” “Firebird,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Star Wars” and “Sleeping Beauty.”

And high school dancers get a taste for the intense rehearsals professionals are subject to as they perform a week’s worth of shows at Wood River Valley schools. The dance-on-tour performances always offer a message of some kind, such as the importance of saving endangered species, conceived of and choreographed by Neely.

Footlight Dance Centre has also supported organizations that bring professional dance companies to the valley, including Ballet Sun Valley, the Sun Valley Museum of Art and the Argyros Theater.

“We hold master classes in conjunction with the presenters, encourage dancers to see live performance to enrich their studies and help support whenever we can,” said Neely. “The arts are all about teamwork, collaboration, problem solving and, ultimately, joy in expressing or exploring ideas in our lives.”

Want to learn more? Visit www.footlightdance.com.

#2#Yurek Hansen is the artistic director with Idaho Dance Theatre in Boise. COURTESY: IDT