RECITAL | June 5-7, 2025 | $25 | Barriskill Dance Theatre School, Durham
The VHS tape would usually land in the mailbox in June or July, its arrival an organizing principle in Alyssa Noble’s childhood summers.
From there, she could pop the tape in and watch her end-of-year dance recital, scrutinizing her performance as well as those of idolized older dancers, trying out routines across her Illinois basement carpet. Incidentally, the basement in question had wall-to-wall mirrors installed by the house’s previous occupants, allowing for choreographies to be ambitiously projected at all angles.
“This is pre-YouTube and TikTok and all these things,” explains Chris Strauss. Like Noble, Strauss is a dancer with vivid memories of both performing recitals and reliving recitals. “The way to watch your peers dance is to watch videos of your own recitals.”
Ask any dancer: Recitals are a big deal. Even if you grow up and, technically, age out of them.
“People always ask me when my recital is,” Strauss laughs, “and I’m like—‘I’m an adult.’”
Strauss and Noble first worked together several years ago when Strauss participated in Noble’s show “Don’t Get Any Ideas Little Lady.” Later, riffing in Instagram DM’s, they bonded over memories of recitals.
“I said, as a joke, ‘What if we made a show and called it ‘recital’?’” Strauss remembers asking. “‘But it was actually just, like, working professional artists making the things that may not be considered, like, capital A art, but that brought them a lot of joy?’”
Thus was born RECITAL, a multidisciplinary variety show that had its nostalgia-filled debut in 2022. This year, the show returns for its fourth edition, featuring performances from more than thirty artists at Durham’s Barriskill Dance Theatre School.
The idea started small that first year: Strauss and Noble shared a call for proposals on Instagram; the show, performed at Mettlesome, featured less than ten acts. Noble recreated Britney Spears’ iconic “Oops I Did It Again” video; Strauss performed a ten-minute rendition of Taylor Swift’s melancholy “All Too Well,” a scarf thrown over their shoulder as they played piano, autumnal leaves scattering from above.
The show has grown in popularity every year since, and for this year’s June 5-7 show dates, Noble says that she expects a crowd of around 300 across RECITAL’s three evenings. Tickets are $25 with options for both sliding scale and sustainer-level payments.
Noble, who has lived in the Triangle since 2011, brings a production background, having served as a co-organizer of DIDA (Durham Independent Dance Artists), a support organization that helped artists produce evening-length shows, for four years. For this year’s performance, she estimates that she’s put in more than 50 hours thus far—with many more to follow—that include vetting and curating performances (there are annually more submissions than they can include), selling ads, coordinating technical aspects, and working out kinks.
In time, she says, she hopes the production can be even more self-sustaining and that everyone working on the production, including herself, can be paid a living wage.
Showbiz, after all, is a never-ending hustle, and here it’s worth noting that circumstances for working artists aren’t exactly bright right now. Five years ago brought a global pandemic that shuttered venues and productions, causing massive revenue loss on both an individual and institutional scale that continues today. Now the Trump administration is slashing arts funding from the top down.
Has there ever been a better time to remember why performing is fun?
“People are really clinging onto and excited about [this] which, to me, expresses some kind of need in the community for folks to come together for joyful art,” says Strauss. “It has been really exciting and something I’m really looking forward to, with this bigger than ever recital.”
On a recent rainy Sunday morning, Noble and collaborator Allie Pfeffer are rehearsing in a Barriskill Dance Theatre studio, where Noble is currently an artist-in-residence. They’re working on a piece that has them tumbling across the room while dialoging about multilevel marketing schemes (MLMs) and boss babe energy, the intro to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” doomily pulsing in the background.
“I wanted to make a dance where it’s all anticipation and nothing ever happens,” Noble explains. “We’re both fascinated by MLMS. I was working from a theme of intensity and cults of personality and blindly following things.”
Full appreciation for acts like this—the pair are framing it as a senior thesis, and referencing material from past collaborations—does require having some reference points in the performance world. But even if you don’t, it’s very fun to watch people let loose and try things out.
“What ties it together for me is that there’s a sense of reclaiming and embracing our creative childhoods and bringing that to the present.”
Dancer Gabriella Soto-Lemus participated in RECITAL’s first year and is returning this year with a piece exploring intimacy and shared space with a partner. She’s joined by her own significant other, Natalie, who isn’t a trained dancer.
“I was recently daydreaming about dance and the only place I could imagine bringing those ideas was RECITAL,” Soto-Lemus wrote in an email.
“RECITAL is definitely a bit niche, and I sometimes tell people if they didn’t grow up in performing arts, some of the jokes might go over their heads,” Soto-Lemus continued. “But what ties it together for me is that there’s a sense of reclaiming and embracing our creative childhoods and bringing that to the present.”
Besides their individual pieces, Strauss and Noble also emcee, playing Miss Vikki and Mss. Victoria, the event’s annual fictional co-hosts. Also: a pair of dance studio owners with elaborate off-Broadway backgrounds and a complicated working relationship. Think Lloyd Miller and Corky St. Clair in Waiting for Guffman, or basically any character played by Parker Posey.
“Do they love each other? Do they hate each other? We don’t know,” Strauss says. “Some of the feedback we got after that first show—I think we had an audience of maybe, between two shows, like 70 people—was like, ‘Miss Vikki and Mss. Victoria: We need their lore.’”
That lore has proved to be so convincing that not everyone has been in on the bit. After one show, Noble says, an audience member came up and said: “Just to let you guys know, we were like, three acts in, and I leaned over to my friend and said, ‘I don’t think Miss Vikki and Mss. Victoria are their real names.’”
“There’s equal parts pure reverence and love for characters, for the people in our own lives—studio owners and our dance teachers and people who cultivated our love for art,” Strauss continues, “and tongue in cheek satire about the seriousness of the thing that we do.”
“There’s equal parts pure reverence and love for characters, for the people in our own lives—studio owners and our dance teachers and people who cultivated our love for art and tongue in cheek satire about the seriousness of the thing that we do.”
This balance of professionalism and campiness is a draw. Dancer Laura Grant is performing in RECITAL for the second time. Getting to perform, she says, is a much-needed reprieve from the outside world.
“I think there’s the shame that I carried as an adult artist, as a dancer in the experimental dance world, of like, ‘Oh, but I actually also really enjoy jazz hands,’” Grant says. “I actually really enjoy dancing to the counts and making people laugh or whoop in the audience.’”
“It’s brought me back to why performing is so fun,” Grant, a mother of two young children, continues. “I think that they’ve done a really good job at capturing, at least for the performers, what it is about being in a recital is so pleasurable. Like, if you’re a kid, that’s enough—you do it because you like it and it’s fun and brings you joy and pleasure, right?”
This year’s show features drag performances, a salsa and disco “duel”, and a contemporary clowning/dance duet.
“We get to show up on stage in ways that we maybe weren’t allowed to,” Soto-Lemus says. “It’s therapeutic, in a way. It’s a really special thing, and I think that can be felt by anyone, even if you never had a recital growing up.”
Follow Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Bluesky or email [email protected].
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