By Tom Ayres , Senior Staff Writer
“Shell,” an intergenerational contemporary dance and performance project led by acclaimed Lebanon-based choreographer and dancer Ellen Smith Ahern, is taking shape during the artist’s residencies this spring and fall at the Artistree Community Arts Center in South Pomfret.
The new dance work is being developed with community-based arts organizations nationwide, including the Myrna Loy Theater in Helena, Mont., and the storied Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles, one of the nation’s most influential settings for the creation of cutting-edge contemporary theater, dance, and performance art. Here in the local area, dancemaker Smith Ahern and her collaborators on the “Shell” project — veteran New Hampshire and Vermont dancers Kate Elias and Jessie Owens — are showcasing excerpts from the evolving dance work, which is being created in consultation with local theatergoers in each community where Smith Ahern and her dance company will be in residency this year.
“Shell: Scenes from a New Dance,” a work-in-progress performance, is set for the Grange Theatre at Artistree in South Pomfret this Saturday, May 2, at 3 p.m. Admission to the contemporary dance showcase is “pay-what-you-wish,” with Artistree suggesting a minimum ticket price of $10. Audience members will be asked to reflect on nascent dance work and help shape the project as it moves toward national touring next year. The performance on Saturday is tied to the two-part artistic residency at Artistree by Smith Ahern and dancers. The dancemakers will return to the community arts center in Pomfret for a second round of residency activities in September.
A “community chorus” of movers joins choreographer Ellen Smith Ahern and dancers in a rehearsal at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles last year, building pieces of the emerging new dance work, “Shell.” Ellen Smith Ahern Photo
“I want to emphasize that the showing on Saturday is a very informal, open rehearsal,” Smith Ahern told the Standard. “We’ll share some of the scenes we’ve been building, break them down for viewers, and have a conversation about what we’re trying to do and what folks are seeing. All are welcome, and it will be a relaxed and informal peek into the creative process.” Smith Ahern offered a thematic overview of “Shell” and discussed the variations of the project that will be customized to communities throughout the country when the performance tours nationwide beginning in January of 2027.
“The project itself is built around a core of three dancers who will tour with each iteration of the work,” Smith Ahern said. “Each hosting partner venue [on the tour] will form a local community chorus of movers who will join us in the performance. It’s going to be a little bit different in each place, with this sort of iterative process over the course of making it and performing it. It will be building on this web of community relationships that will hopefully connect it to a wider community of viewers and participants. My goal with dancemaking is to make things that bring people both joy and challenges — to challenge assumptions, make people curious, and make them imagine, while actually being accessible and welcoming to a wider array of people than might typically feel welcomed into postmodern dance.”
“Shell” follows the dancers through a continually shifting scenescape of quilts and cardboard boxes, all enwrapping and layered around the movement artists. “I think that what we’re exploring in this project is all of the ways that we listen, communicate, and interpret one another through layers,” Smith Ahern offered. “Those layers can just be the layers of our different experiences as human beings. They’re also literal layers that we’re playing with in the performance with the quilts and cardboard boxes. We’re playing with this shifting landscape of quilt and cardboard and seeing how story and meaning can be communicated and received through layers.”
The development of “Shell” began in 2024 during an artistic residency that Smith Ahern undertook with the National Park Service, which included a live performance of the choreographer’s celebrated dance creation, “Vulture Sister Song,” at the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Woodstock. Smith Ahern’s newest creation, “Shell,” is taking shape in the local area in part through its connection with a related, community-based project that Smith Ahern has been organizing: “PatchWork,” is an ongoing series of public quilting bees that are being held throughout the Upper Valley communities of Vermont and New Hampshire. Quiltmakers of all ages, from children to elders, are continuing to engage with the project, which began last fall. Some of their local fabric art creations could make it on stage as part of the evolving visual panorama of “Shell,” both in residency activities this year and in full performances of the work in 2027.
Middle school students worked together last month at the Lebanon Public Library, fashioning a community quilt that will be part of the “moving landscape” of “Shell.” Photo Provided
“Through an eight-month series of quilting bees in which folks of all ages share meals, stories, skills, and resources, PatchWork is challenging norms of belonging and representation in both art and in our communities,” Smith Ahern offered in an email to the Standard on Saturday evening. The collective efforts of area quilters will be showcased at “PatchWork: Tunnel Arts Day” on Sunday, June 28, from 3-6 p.m. at the Artways Tunnel in Lebanon. “The culminating celebration will weave together murals, food, locally crafted quilts, performances, and a family-friendly dance party in Lebanon’s vibrant, accessible rail trail tunnel,” Smith Ahern noted. The Lebanon event in June will also feature creations from multigenerational artists from California who are also taking part in quilt-making processes within their communities. Selected quilts will then tour nationally as part of the full “Shell” performance series next year, contributing to what Smith Ahern terms a “cross-country dialogue” while “creating a full circle of making and sharing.”
Smith Ahern earned a B.A. in Dance at Middlebury College in 2005, where she studied with Penny Campbell, Amy Chavasse, Andrea Olsen, and Peter Schmitz. Over the past 20 years, the choreographer and dancer has worked with many luminaries of the contemporary dance world, including Jane Comfort and Polly Motley. With support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, and the Vermont Arts Council, Smith Ahern has shown her dance work in venues as diverse as the legendary Danspace at St. Mark’s Church in New York and the Rococo Theater in Prague.
Smith Ahern anticipates that the first full performance of a community-driven iteration of “Shell” will take place at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles in January of next year. “We’ll be back in that place and working with a community chorus [of dancers] from the Los Angeles area — and then we’ll bring it back to the Upper Valley and the communities of Vermont and New Hampshire,” she said. “I also have partnerships with Middlebury College and the Ava Gallery in Lebanon. I’m hoping to do a lot of touring to community spaces, whether they’re small theaters, galleries, or Grange Halls.
“That’s the kind of space this work is scaled for,” Smith Ahern concluded. “There’s a certain magic that a theater space with its lighting can really offer a piece, but I’ve also found that there’s another kind of magic that happens in a Grange Hall, community center, or gallery, where people might come into the space with a different kind of curiosity than they might bring to a theater.”