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Shirley Ririe and Joan Woodbury: pathbreakers.

Article Excerpt
How do you create a dance company? You put two impassioned women together--Joan Woodbury (right) and Shirley Ririe--at the right time, some forty years ago, and let them go at it. Voila! The Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company. The pathbreaking twosome from Utah shared stages, jobs, desks, and most important, the philosophy and the passion that "dance is for everybody." They even managed the births of their children on alternating years so that they could cover for each other.

* Yet as conjoined as they are on a professional level, they are very different in their personal lives. "Our differences give us balance, and our similarities keep us on the same path," explains Ririe. "I was born in Salt City in 1929, the height of the Depression. My parents were both actors," she continues. "My father was extremely talented, and my newly married parents thought they were beaded to New York City when I came along and stopped the plans. My mother reinvented herself several times and became a professor in the MBA program in business at the University of Utah She wrote seven textbooks, two still being printed after her death fifteen years ago.

"Because my parents were always rehearsing at night, I became the baby-tender of my younger brother and sister, I remember spending many hours...

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