‘Born and Raised Utah’ brings pro dancers home
Lindsay Arnold (left) and Witney Carson will return to their home state to perform in "Born and Raised Utah."
The dance careers of Witney Carson (right) and Lindsay Arnold began at age 9 in a studio in Utah County.
When children dream big, they might imagine achieving great success, their best friends at the time having achieved the same success right along with them. For professional dancers Witney Carson and Lindsay Arnold, who both grew up in Utah County before joining shows like “So You Think You Can Dance” and “Dancing With the Stars,” real life happened to play out exactly like that fantasy.
“Lindsay and I started when we were 9 years old together at the same studio with the same director,” Carson said in a phone interview this week. “We grew up together our entire lives until we were 18 years old. We both tried out for ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’ we both made it, then ‘Dancing With the Stars’ called us both. So for best friends to be together throughout their entire careers is pretty rare. It’s really rare.”
Now, the two friends and colleagues are returning for Utah to put on an original — and somewhat biographical — evening of dance called, “Born and Raised Utah” at the Capitol Theatre in Salt Lake City.
“We just thought it was a really cool thing for us to kind of come back to where it all started and kind of show people where we came from,” Carson said, “and that, you know, it’s possible, even if you come from a small town in Utah, you can make it big.”
The show will feature Carson and Arnold and other Utah-born dance professionals, as well as visiting celebrities Alfonso Ribeiro and Alek Skarlatos. It will include video segments that depict life in Utah for young dancers and a selection of new and favorite dance numbers for Carson and Arnold.
Working on “Dancing With the Stars” has given the two friends a taste for putting on a show, but putting on this show has required more of them in terms of directing and choreography.
“We get a little taste of that on (‘Dancing With the Stars’),” Carson said, “because we have to choreograph, we have to do costumes, we have to produce pretty much every single week, but we have so much help from the producers, we have a whole team with us, whereas here it’s just Lindsay and I, so we really have to depend on one another and depend on our instincts.”
Those instincts were nurtured in the Beehive State, and part of the inspiration for the show was coming to realize how much of an impact Utah has on the professional dance scene throughout the country.
“There’s tons of talent that comes from Utah, and everybody always asks us, they’re always like, ‘I feel like every good dancer is from Utah, like what are you guys drinking?’ ” Carson said. “I don’t know what it is about Utah, but I just feel like everybody is really determined. Everybody has this drive to fulfill their dreams. I just feel like they have this drive and inspiration to do bigger and better things.”
It’s not just inspiration or determination, though, that makes Utah a haven for budding artists, she said.
“I was lucky enough to have amazing directors who just kind of pushed the limits and taught me every single style,” she said. “In Utah, they really focus on training in every single style, not just focusing on one style. My horizons were really broadened, and that really helped my dancing career.”
Carson said that in other ways, broadening happened outside of Utah, which also added to her success.
“I mean obviously Utah’s kind of like a little bubble,” Carson said. “You have your own ways, everybody is set in their own ways, and, you know, they’re very biased to what they know and what they grew up with. They’re just very traditional. … Growing up, I was always kind of exposed to ‘the world’ in a sense, because we did a lot of competing, a lot of performing in different countries and different states. So from a young age, I was able to kind of see the world as it is and kind of experience life a little bit more outside of Utah.”
Also instrumental to her success was the support Carson received from family and friends, which she considers to be a characteristically familiar aspect of Utah culture.
“This community is all about helping each other and supporting each other, and I think that’s what helped me too,” Carson said. “I had amazing family and friends that supported me through everything.”
In speaking with Carson, she was not hesitant to describe her fortunes — as well as her setbacks — in terms of “destiny” and fate. She describes her friendship with Arnold that way, as well as when talking about getting on “So You Think You Can Dance” at age 18 (she and Arnold are both now 22). She also used the phrase “meant to happen” when describing her experience with melanoma, which hit just as her career was on the rise.
“It was on my foot, and it had spread all the way up to my hip, so we had to do surgery,” she said. “It was a terrible, terrifying time. You don’t realize how important your body is — I mean we take it for granted every single day. We walk, we drive, we do so many things with our bodies that we just forget that it’s even important, but of course it’s important. … I was just in the middle of getting promoted as a professional so I really wanted to do that, but my health was obviously more important, so I had to take care of that and luckily I was able to do both. I was able to get the surgery and just in the nick of time, I was able to go to ‘Dancing With the Stars’ rehearsal. … I just realized that life is so precious, and it almost gave me more of a drive to do what I love. So it was kind of meant to happen.”
Now completely healthy, Carson has moved on to less life-threatening-but-still-all-consuming challenges — like putting on “Born and Raised Utah.”
“It’s gonna be a crazy week this week,” Carson said. “But honestly, I think we’ve learned so much about our friendship and so much about what we want to do, and I think we’re making it work. This has been a tough time, and it’s a lot more work than you think, but I think it will pay off, and it’s been fun.”
”BORN AND RAISED UTAH”
WHAT: Dance show featuring Witney Carson and Lindsay Arnold
WHEN: Friday at 7 p.m.
WHERE: The Capitol Theatre, Salt Lake City
TICKETS: $35-$160
INFO: bornandraisedutah.com