Dance collective ELa FaLa takes up teaching residency, performs with students

“Therrrrrrrrrrrrrre’s hydrogen and helium….”

The melody of “The Periodic Table Song” rang through the Open Space studio in the basement of the PARTV building. But it wasn’t a science class Liana Dillon and Isabela Sant’Anna-Skites were rehearsing for, it was a dance performance.

As they belted out the names of scientific elements, two other dancers whipped out fouettés behind them. From a piano bench, visiting guest artist Barbara Lima sat watching as the scene descended into chaos. As their voices trailed, the dancers were met with giggles and applause.

It was March 31, the second day of a new week-long teaching residency with the University of Montana dance department that brought Lima and her dance collective, ELa FaLa, from Portland, Oregon, to Missoula. This type of residency is a first for UM and will culminate in a performance by the collective and student dancers this Friday.

The dance program regularly brings in singular guest artists, Heidi Jones Eggert, head of the dance department and assistant director of the School of Theatre and Dance, said. But the department wanted to try something different, like bringing an entire company to the school, to impact more students on a deeper level. In addition to six master classes the collective taught over the past week, seven dance majors, including Dillon, were chosen to rehearse and perform with the collective.

Lima, a dancer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and based in Oregon, has taught residencies before, but never like this with her entire dance company in tow. She didn’t come to Missoula with a solid plan for what the performance would look like, she said, and she wanted to get to know the dancers as people first.

“The only things that are planned are the way I operate, the system that I work with,” Lima said. She described how she brings the tools that she works with, like improvisations and other exercises, and works with the dancers’ responses to see how deep she can go.

“I just trust that whatever needs to come up during this time is going to be what needs to be expressed,” she said. Sometimes, that means the periodic table.

On the first day of rehearsals, before Dillon and Sant’Anna-Skites began harmonizing, Dillon said she recognized Lima but she wasn’t sure why. After spending a lot of time getting to know each other and a few exercises, Lima taught the students a movement phrase she’s used for eight years as one of her tools. As soon as Lima switched on the music and a dynamic symphonic melody filled the space, Dillon was filled with a feeling of familiarity.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, I have been here before. We have done this before,’” she said. “It was kind of wild.”

A group of UM dance students — most of whom have since graduated — and faculty first met Lima at an American Collegiate Dance Association conference in 2022 at the University of Oregon, where Lima was an adjudicator that year. Dillon, a 22-year old senior dance major from Missoula, was there, but hadn’t remembered meeting Lima or taking her class where she taught the same phrase until that music turned on.

It was at that same conference in 2022 that Jones Eggert met Lima for the first time and sparked the over year-long process to get her to Missoula.

“[I] just happened to meet her in the hallway, and I was like, ‘Pshhh, she’s just a normal person.’ She’s totally a human and a kind soul, and has these other qualities of being willing to speak vulnerably and passionately and unapologetically,” she said.

Lima founded the dance collective ELa FaLa, which means “she speaks” in Portuguese, in 2015. Lima is a dream follower, and had a dream 10 years ago where she was standing on the street where she used to live, unable to speak, her throat covered in red paint. When she woke up, “ELa FaLa” was in her head, and it stuck with her. The term is also emblematic of the collective’s collaborative creative process, a group of dancers of varying ages, she said, working to find expression and common ground.

The internationally acclaimed dance collective’s first evening-length piece was performed in 2019, and they’ve since done a few dance pieces for camera. The show at the end of its residency on April 5, featuring student dancers, will be the collective’s first live performance since the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s not the first time an ACDA conference has acted as a jumping-off point for bringing guest artists to UM. In 2023, the program brought in Noel Price-Bracey to create a piece for students after they talked about Price-Bracey year after year at the conferences.

There were a lot of reasons to try bringing a full company of dancers to UM with ELa FaLa first. They were a relatively new company, Jones Eggert said, and small, with just six dancers total including Lima. Plus they had a built-in UM connection; One of the collective members, Emily Running, is an alumna who graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Choreography and Performance in 2003.

Running, who grew up dancing in Missoula, started at UM in 2000 after a year of school in Arizona. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, she said, and just happened to enroll as a dance student after coming back to Missoula. It was never her big plan, she said, and she kind of stumbled into it.

“I wouldn’t have thought it,” Running said about coming back 20 years later as part of a teaching residency. “But I wouldn’t have ruled it out.”

After graduation, she danced in Los Angeles and then moved to Paris, France, where she couldn’t dance without the proper work papers. A hip dysplasia diagnosis led her to rethink how she thought about a career in dance. Now in Portland, Running runs the non-profit Dance Wire, a hub of resources for dance in the city. She first joined ELa FaLa in 2018.

Running said she was grateful for the opportunities the UM program afforded her, like time, space and resources. But she remembered feeling unprepared when she left the safety of the college program and those resources weren’t right down the hallway. When she went to college in the first place, she didn’t know a lot about other options available to make a career in dance.

That’s part of the work she does with her nonprofit now, helping dancers with the business side of things, and something she hopes she can impart on students during the teaching residency. She’s also looking forward to visiting her favorite Missoula spots, like Rockin’ Rudy’s and Sushi Hana, the latter of which she worked at during her time at UM, and she’ll probably show her fellow company members around town a bit, she said.

While Lima said there isn’t anything she “hopes” the dancers involved take away from the residency experience, “It would be delightful for the students to really see that dance as a profession can happen in so many different ways,” she said.

Before the collective even arrived in Missoula, current students involved, like Sant’Anna-Skites — the other dancer who sings the periodic table with Dillon — said they were looking forward to the opportunity to be part of the process that may inform their dance goals in the future. It’s a chance for students to experience quick rehearsal processes and turnarounds, like what dance opportunities might look like after college and outside of Montana.

Sant’Anna-Skites, a 20-year-old dance and wildlife biology major from Evanston, Illinois, said she was excited as an American-Brazilian to meet and work with Lima.

“I think the dance program is very lucky to have faculty that value bringing in guest choreographers and teachers, because it brings diversity of work to the program,” Sant’Anna-Skites said. “It makes us more versatile dancers, and fosters our own creativity as artists.”

Sant’Anna-Skites remembers when the dance faculty showed a documentary featuring Lima in class one day, “Believe the Beat” by Jocelyn Edelstein, about a hip-hop group Lima danced with in Brazil. Her jaw dropped to the floor, she said, blown away by Lima’s powerful movement.

When the cast list came out, Sant’Anna-Skites texted her roommate and friend Taylor Ferguson, a 20-year-old dance and wildlife biology student from Wichita, Kansas, to tell her the news that Ferguson was cast as well to perform with ELa FaLa.

“She’s like, ‘You’re gonna be really happy,’” Ferguson said. Both sophomores, they were the only two underclassmen cast in the show. Ferguson said she’s excited to learn from someone new and participate in the fast rehearsal pace, something she got used to when she danced at intensives with the Rockettes in high school. “We were both freaking out, doing a happy dance in the living room.”

Julia Duarte, a 21-year-old senior dance major, had heard of Lima before the residency was announced, though not from the ACDA conference or watching “Believe the Beat” in class. Duarte is from São Paulo, Brazil, and had heard Lima’s name in the dance circles she grew up around.

When she heard Lima and her company were coming to visit UM, Duarte didn’t think it was the actual Barbara Lima coming to Missoula — she thought it must have been someone else. Duarte could cloudily picture Lima dancing in her head, and she wasn’t sure why, but somehow she knew who Lima was and that she was another Brazilian choreographer making work in the U.S.

“Lima understands the experience of living your entire life in Brazil and, out of nowhere, having something that brings you up to the United States,” Duarte said. “I think that it’s just gonna be so good to dance with somebody that has those experiences well.”

Jones Eggert hopes the ELa FaLa performance will be an event for the whole community. They scheduled the residency to coincide with the Montana Dance Arts Association spring conference, hosted in UM’s studios, so young dancers from across the state would be around to see a professional dance performance from a company outside Montana. Some of the ELa FaLa master classes were open to the public.

“We’ve kind of taken it on as part of our responsibility to advocate for dance for everyone across the state,” Jones Eggert said, “and to make sure that younger dancers, especially in high school, they know they can keep dancing after high school.”

Jones Eggert said she hopes the dance program can bring more residencies like this to UM in the future, but it’s an expensive endeavor and doesn’t know when the next one will be.

For dancers like Dillon, who will graduate in the spring and has her sights set on New York in the future, experiences like these offer “external touchstones,” broadening the idea of what dance can be outside the UM program.

“That is why I love this. That’s why I do this,” Dillon said, reflecting on the rush of emotions she felt during a moment of stillness at the end of the movement phrase Lima taught the dancers at the very first rehearsal. “It’s the whole meaning of dance to me.”