The Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company will perform in Slovenia in southern Europe, May 25-31. Highlight of the visit will be a performance for and to benefit the 70,000 Bosnian war refugees currently seeking shelter in 53 collection centers throughout the country. The company will also perform for the refugee children, who constitute 47 percent of all refugees.
Performance venues for the company will include the National Theatre in Maribor, and the Cultural and Congress Center Cankarjevdom, which hosts more than 900 domestic and international performances annually in the Slovenian capitol of Ljubljana.The performances in Slovenia will mark another first for Ririe-Woodbury in breaking cultural barriers. In 1977 the company was the first racially and nationality mixed performing group (African-American, Asian and Caucasian) to perform on stages in South Africa. For the first time, audiences in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg were also racially mixed.
The company was the first modern dance company to perform in Sibenik, Yugoslavia (1980), and in Karl-Marx Stadt, now Chemnitz Germany (1990) - just a month before the Berlin Wall came down; also, the first American modern dance company in Canton, China (1984).