It Takes One to Tango: Vermont Dancer Patty Smith looks back on her life in a new solo show about moving and memory

Vermont is not exactly the dance capital of the world. But Patty Smith has never let location get in the way of her art. Her rural recitals suggest the same visionary obsession that makes Bread and Puppet a reality every summer. With equal parts talent and persistence, Smith transforms dairy-farmer daughters into winged sylphs and bearded old hippies into Danskin-clad danseurs. She also makes costumes, paints sets, scrubs floors, arranges chairs and accepts donations. “She does it all,” says Judith Olinick, whose 13-year-old daughter performed last year in a carefully reconstructed version of Les Sylphides. “And she is not always saintly about it.”

For Smith, dance is more of a religion than a career. “I was born to do this,” she says with an expressionist flair that makes her look bigger than she is: 91 pounds, four-foot-10-and-a-half-inches. The community dance projects satisfy her directorial drive. But she tries out most of her own stuff at home before an audience of two black cats. Maybe boyfriend Michael Corn. Barefoot even in winter, she judges her living room by the number of consecutive grand jetés she can pull out without shattering glass. At 46, she is still kicking — higher than anyone else.

Age has not crimped Smith’s style. But it has made her more reflective. Her latest work — inspired by the death of her mother — is a series of musical collages that pay figurative tribute to her past. Smith gets choked up talking about the series of solos she will perform Friday night at Burlington City Hall Auditorium. Still-Life, she reads from the program to make sure she gets it right, is a “tribute to the family, teachers, colleagues and audiences who led me to — and supported me — on this most fortunate of paths.”

It didn’t take much analysis to figure out Smith wanted to be a dancer — “I was a performer from the word go,” she says, recalling she was pre-ambulatory when she first felt compelled to move to music. Her parents played all kinds of music and were big social dancers — Cab Calloway called her father up onstage at the Cotton Club. But they couldn’t afford to give Patty dance lessons until she was seven, which she now believes was a benefit. She found her inner choreographer in the living room. When visitors interrupted her solo sessions, she’d freeze in place until they left.

Smith got most of her dance training at the Boston Conservatory of Music. But her first lessons were at one of those neighborhood ballet schools which Smith insists was “not rinkydink.” Her first teacher — who gets credit in a couple of tap solos Friday night — was a June Taylor dancer who taught Smith to “ball-change” and pas de bourée. The soup-to-nuts approach to dance appealed to Smith and ultimately made her more marketable. When she left Boston for New York, Smith had no trouble finding work on Broadway — especially in family-oriented shows. Even Chorus Line choreographer Michael Bennett was impressed at one particularly grueling audition. Smith recalls, “He came right up onstage, out of the blackness, and said, ‘You are incredible, but you are so tiny I wouldn’t know what to do with you.'”

Smith eventually left New York for love — or lack thereof. “All my friends were gay. I was in love with all of them.” She did a brief stint with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company in San Francisco before heading back east, where she made a connection that brought her to Middlebury College. What set her apart in Vermont — and in some cases inspired the scorn of hard-core post-modernists — was her unabashed acceptance of all dance vocabularies, from ballet and Broadway to tap. When most concert dancers in Vermont were presenting music-free works celebrating the simplicity of pedestrian movement, Smith was bumping her expressionist butt to Weill tangos and dancing the can-can. She won two back-to-back fellowships from the Vermont Council on the Arts for it.

Burlington dancer Karen Amirault immediately understood where Smith was coming from, and upon seeing her dance for the first time “was so blown away I sent her flowers, even though I hadn’t met her yet,” she says. The two later collaborated on a series of technically demanding duets. “Patty and I really respect the more traditional choreographic forms, where the improvisation happens during the creative process,” Amirault explains. “Then once it’s created the dance is very much in sync with the musical accompaniment.”

Smith definitely has an ear for music and for rhythm in particular. She calls music her “first love,” and notes “dance is my way of expressing it.” Like choreographer Mark Morris — who broke the post-modern mold with his own anything-goes approach — she’ll choreograph to Brahms or Tony Bennett. The works of Kurt Weill, the Flamingos, Scriabin and Robert Johnson all figure in her Friday program. Smith is as libertarian in her musical tastes as she is about dance.

She shares a few other things with Morris, too, who was pegged as an “enfant terrible” by the Belgian press for dissing a fellow choreographer. Smith pirouettes a whole lot better than she negotiates. She left Middlebury College in a huff after teaching there for two years, and parted ways with the administration at the prep school Northfield Mount Hermon under similar circumstances. Amirault chocks it up to “living her life as dramatically as she performs on stage.” Smith puts it more even more succinctly: “Got a bridge? Give me a match. I always say the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

At times, Smith has felt underappreciated by the dance community in Vermont. And by parents and students who may take her dedication for granted. She felt so discouraged several years ago that she left Vermont for New York City, where she studied and performed with Lori Bellilove of the Isadora Duncan Foundation. She also auditioned for the Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast. “Big kicks, pirouette turns to the knee — it was my kind of dancing,” Smith recalls. But the seven-hour experience was oddly similar to her Broadway encounter with Bennett, 25 years prior. “I made the first cut, second, third, all the way to the sixth cut,” Smith says, “They said they would call, but they didn’t.”

Smith knew what to expect from the cutthroat world of big-city dance. But she was not prepared for the widespread homelessness she found on the streets of New York City, or the discovery that a “whole generation of male colleagues had been decimated.” Seeking out dead friends, and teachers she found working in closet-sized studios, was disheartening. But it gave her new appreciation for her mentors, which further inspired her memorial project.

Chief among those teachers is Jan Ween, a German-accented disciple of Mary Wigman, who taught modern dance at the Boston Conservatory of Music. “He called us cookies,'” she says, imitating his accent, “and did some of the most outrageous things. Once when we were all lying on the floor he didn’t like the way I was holding my back. So he came over and sat on my stomach. I thought something was going to break.”

Smith uses milder methods with her 100-plus students in the Middlebury-Bristol area, some of whom perform with her children’s company, Leap of Faith. But she does have a reputation for being a taskmaster. “She is very demanding,” Judith Olinick says, conceding the Les Sylphides performance was “stunning. She really demonstrates the rewards of sticking with something.”

Smith passes on the credit. “I love teaching because of Jan,” she says, switching on the German Expressionism for a moment to convey his flamboyance. “He taught me to be absolutely unafraid to express myself. Kids really pick up on that.”