Modern moves

Dance company shows off its best work in upcoming performance

A trio of women launched into a modern-dance experiment in a big way five years ago, renting the O'Shaughnessy Center in Whitefish for their inaugural show with no real idea how they would be received.

AzureVision Dance Collective nearly sold out the first show, which featured the three local dancers, a jazz band and a dance group from Missoula. The next year the company, with a fuller complement of local dancers, gave standing-room-only performances, and the last two years the shows have been sold out or nearly so.

"We were stunned at the reception," said Kay Izlar, one of the company's three original members. "But we recognize that there's not a lot of dance up here, and I think we're fun."

For those who missed out on the first four years, AzureVision Dance Collective presents a compilation of its favorite pieces, with a few modifications here and there, in "Retrospective," with one show at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 7 in the O'Shaughnessy Center.

AzureVision is a modern-dance company of professional-level dancers, founded, along with Izlar, by Stacy Jacobsen Burgard and Jennifer Walker-Wyatt.

Izlar, 51, is a former professional dancer who danced and instructed throughout the world before settling into her current career as a botanist.

Jacobsen Burgard, 31, studied modern dance at the prestigious North Carolina School of the Arts. Walker-Wyatt, 34, has a ballet background but earned a degree in modern dance from the University of Montana.

To flesh out the troupe, they recruited a number of the area's high-profile dancers from a variety of dance disciplines.

Marisa Roth, owner and director of the Northwest Ballet School in Kalispell, and Natalie Molter, an instructor at the Northwest Ballet School who also studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts, are former professional dancers.

Other company dancers are Amy Arriaga, who instructs hip-hop, jazz and tap at the Dance Arts Center in Kalispell, and Sam Rice, a local yoga teacher. New to the company this year is Melissa Dawn, a local dancer who studied with the legendary Merce Cunningham in New York. And Arriaga's 5-year-old daughter, Bella, will make an appearance in the show.

Guest dancers for "Retrospective" are Whitefish's Lindsey Schwickert, known for her ballet work with the Northwest Ballet Company and currently a student at the University of Montana, and Missoula's Anya Cloud and Jess Roulette.

Because many of the dancers have careers outside the dance world (Jacobsen Burgard and Izlar met while they were both working in the Two Medicine area on resource conservation projects), AzureVision dancers create and rehearse for about half the year. They make the most of their time together, though, putting in about five practices a week at the Dance Arts Studio in Kalispell in preparation for the upcoming show.

All of the choreography is done by members of the company. The pieces often are created with a social statement in mind, but the audience doesn't have to recognize the message to appreciate the beauty of the work, Jacobsen Burgard said.

And the pieces aren't all politically motivated, Izlar stressed.

"Because this is modern dance, we present something we feel from our hearts, what we feel strongly about," she said. "It's up to the audience to interpret."

Jacobsen Burgard said there is one overriding goal for each production.

"Our intention is to make people feel," she said. "With real art, you make people feel something they don't normally feel in day-to-day life."

Walker-Wyatt said this five-year anniversary show has special significance for the dancers of AzureVision, especially its founding members.

"We've made it five years, which is really significant," she said. "There's a whole transition we want to take. We want to make it bigger, but we need help to get this business off the ground."

They would love to be a professional company "for the dancers to get a real paycheck for all the time they put in," Walker Wyatt said. "We're all working three jobs to sustain our love of dance."

Although it would be a huge undertaking, Izlar, who danced professionally until she was 40 in cities such as New York, Amsterdam and London, said that even if the logistics of creating a professional company would be tricky, the dancers are worthy. She said she believes the group is talented and polished enough to tour to even the bigger capitals of dance, such as New York City, San Francisco or some European cities.

"This is one of the best groups I've ever worked with," she said.

Tickets for "Retrospective" are $15 for adults, $10 for students or $5 for children 12 and under and are available at all Montana Coffee Traders locations. All seats are general admission. Call 471-0086 for more information on AzureVision Dance Collective.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com