By Steve Sucato

Entering the penultimate season before its 25th Anniversary, Cleveland’s Inlet Dance Theatre is already looking back on its repertoire history this summer in its annual performances at Cleveland Heights’ Cain Park and at the Heinz Poll Summer Dance Festival in Akron. 

But this summer’s offerings are not all a trip down memory lane. Thanks to Inlet’s annual Summer Dance Intensive, there will be several new works and new faces onstage at the company’s free Cain Park performances this weekend. 

The Summer Dance Intensive actually pre-dates the company, says Inlet Founder and Executive/Artistic Director Bill Wade. It was begun in the 1990s when Wade was an Artist in Residence at Cleveland School of the Arts, where he founded the YARD (Youth At Risk Dancing), a nationally recognized and awarded after-school program.

“The Intensive was the first thing we did as Inlet Dance Theatre in the summer of 2001, and culminated with our very first performance at Cain Park,” says Wade.

According to Inlet’s website, the Summer Dance Intensive offers student dancers a brief experience of working with a professional company. It annually attracts not only students aged 16 and above from Northeast Ohio, but also from around the country and, on occasion, internationally. Students from diverse racial, skill, and socioeconomic backgrounds come together to create a unique ensemble, offering them the opportunity to perform onstage alongside Inlet’s company, trainee, and apprentice program dancers at Cain Park.

This year’s SDI, which began in late June and ran for a total of 4 ½ weeks with a 2 ½ week attendance option, attracted a half dozen students from Northeast Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, and Maryland, plus several local individual class drop-in students.

While SDI’s number of attendees fluctuates from year to year, one constant, says Wade, is the organization’s willingness to remove obstacles to its accessibility, financial or otherwise. 

This summer, Inlet made it possible for two students who could not afford the full 4 ½ SDI experience to do so. 

Says Wade, “If you’ve got someone who is talented and loving every moment of this, for me, a lack of personal finances is a stupid barrier not to be able to do the whole thing,” says Wade. “The world is hard enough. Can we have grace and figure out other ways for those who cannot afford the entire intensive to do so?”

Inlet, along with the SDI students, will present two free shows at Cain Park’s Evans Amphitheater. The first, this Friday, July 25 at 1 p.m., is billed as a “Kids Matinee” but could really be for anyone interested in knowing about Inlet’s creative process. The hour-long show will detail, through dance and narration, the use of improvisation, space, time, and speed in creating and performing movement.  

The second, on Saturday, July 26, at 8 p.m., will feature a mix of new works created for and performed by the SDI students, Inlet apprentices, and company members, as well as pieces from the company’s repertoire. The performance will kick off with the first two movements from 2012’s Easter Island Memoirs, choreographed by Wade and company dancers. 

Movement one, “Hotu Matua,” explores the idea of a healthy, interdependent community and how the Rapa Nui’s original king, Hotu Matua, traversed the ocean on canoes with his people and founded the island of Rapa Nui. The second movement, “3 (Women),” reveals how community, culture, and gender roles on Easter Island are immediately recognizable. 

Next, the SDI students take their turn in the spotlight in Inlet company dancer Lauren Satink’s new work “When Hope Whispers,” which incorporates sculptural elements into the choreography. 

It is followed by Wade’s 1993 solo “Soon I Will Be Done.” Performed by company dancer Emma McBride to music by American DJ and record producer Frankie Knuckles, the solo, says Wade, “Examines how faith gives us hope despite any harrowing circumstances in our lives.”

Closing out the performance’s first half will be audience favorite, Inlet’s “Collaborative Performance Improvisation,” a sort of dance version of the TV show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” where prompts gathered from attendees at a pre-show reception are improvised in movement by the Inlet and SDI dancers.

After an intermission, the program’s second half will open with company apprentice dancers Bird Thurman and Joel K. Linebach’s “Cairn.” A term for a mound of rough stones built as a memorial or landmark, “Cairn,” will be performed by Thurman and Linebach, who both have backgrounds in engineering and will act as the stones in their cairn equation.  

The SDI students and Inlet apprentices take the stage again in Inlet Assistant Artistic Director Joshua Brown’s lively ensemble work, “Prismatic,” danced to music by Beats Antique, a U.S.-based experimental world fusion and electronic music group. 

The evening will conclude with Wade’s Ascension (2006), set to an original score by Ryan Lott of Son Lux. The work centers on the idea that human beings ascend to higher places when relationships are based on trust, balance, and respect.

For Inlet’s free performances as part of the Heinz Poll Summer Dance Festival, August 1 & 2 at Firestone Park in Akron, it will be all about a repertory retrospective and celebrating Inlet’s history.

As in the Cain Park performances, the company will present excerpts from Easter Island Memoirs, Soon I Will Be Done, and Ascension (program subject to change). Joining those on the program will be 2004’s BALListic, a work that was inspired by a storage closet filled with red physio balls. Danced to another original score by Lott, the work is a whimsical 3D cartoon that captures the color schemes of 1960s pop art while exploring themes of coveting and envy in a playful manner.

Also on the program will be 2021’s Hiding and Revealing, a work that explores the remarkable life of Holocaust survivor Ruth Kropveld, and Wade’s B’roke (2004), a piece that gets its title from a time when the company was financially broke. The work draws inspiration from a combination of artist Frank Stella’s postmodern baroque paintings of the 1990s and Antonio Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in C Minor, which serves as the music for the dance.

Inlet Dance Theatre and students from its Summer Dance Intensive perform at 1 p.m., Friday, July 25, and 8 p.m., Saturday, July 26, 2025. Cain Park’s Evans Amphitheater, 14591 Superior Rd, Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Free Admission.

Inlet Dance Theatre performs at the Heinz Poll Summer Dance Festival, 8:45 p.m., Friday, August 1 and Saturday, August 2, 2025. Firestone Park, between N. and S. Firestone Blvd., Akron, Ohio. Free Admission.