by Jennifer McNally   .   photo by Rimas Zailskas

Head to the Diana Wortham Theatre box office at Asheville’s Pack Place, take the elevator to the third floor, step out, stop and look to your left. “Welcome to my broom closet,” says Heather Maloy, founder and one-woman managerial team of Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance. She’s not kidding. The tiny space once served as a janitorial room for Pack Place. Now painted slate gray and lit by the pulsing glow of an Apple computer, the old cleaning room looks positively chic. Maloy loves it. “It’s taken a lot of time and work and energy to get here,” she says. She’s not kidding about that part, either. 

For years, she worked out of her apartment on Terpsicorps, the professional ballet company she started in Asheville in 2003. She and her dancers had no regular rehearsal space until they moved into a large, un-air-conditioned second-floor room in the River Arts District’s Wedge building in 2007. For a dance company that rehearses and performs mostly in summer, the workout can be brutal. But Maloy, a 37-year-old who grew up in Winston-Salem, has been determined to bring her own brand of contemporary dance to Asheville, hiring professional dancers from around the country to perform in Asheville during summer breaks from their regular companies. It’s a model that’s worked well and kept costs low for the nonprofit Terpsicorps for six seasons. Maloy and her crew were planning to expand their schedule to include traveling summer gigs.  

But then came last fall’s stock market crash, followed by what some now call the Great Recession. Maloy, who choreographs shows quickly and often chooses timely topics, started pondering the Great Depression. For months, she sequestered herself in her stylishly modern broom closet to plan for this summer’s performance, The Recession Blues & Other Works. During a time of financial struggle for everyone, but especially artists, Maloy felt it simply wasn’t the right time to fund-raise as aggressively as she might have in the past. Instead, she wanted to scale back, get creative and reach out to others who might need money more than she did. 

Though the group usually performs two shows each summer, this year, Terpsicorps will perform only The Recession Blues. And for this show, Maloy has rolled out a special deal with four Asheville-area nonprofits—Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry (ABCCM), Manna FoodBank, Mountain Housing Opportunities and Green Opportunities. Anyone who donates $45 or more to their causes before May 29 will receive a buy-one, get-one-free ticket voucher to see The Recession Blues.

Dance performances don’t usually have characters and plots like plays, but Maloy says there is a main “character” in The Recession Blues—a sad lonely figure who represents America’s uninsured. “It’s one of the worst things that’s happening in our society,” Maloy says of the swelling ranks of uninsured people in the current downturn. In the show, the other dancers ignore this character as events happen all around her.   

Poignant and solemn as that may sound, Maloy promises it’s not a whole show of doom and gloom. Set to upbeat music by Asheville’s Firecracker Jazz Band, who will play several songs from their new album Red Hot Band, the show might call to mind speakeasies or lively back allies during the Great Depression. With The Unemployment Kick Line and satirical numbers like The Dance of the Fat Cat CEOs, the idea is to deal with serious issues in a fun, over–the–top style.

A dancer since age six, Maloy understood her life’s calling early on. For high school, she was accepted into the North Carolina School of the Arts, a prestigious arts conservatory in Winston-Salem. After graduating at 17, she was hired to dance with the North Carolina Dance Theatre—and was the youngest performer ever employed by the company at that time. For 13 years, she toured with NCDT, performing in pieces by famous choreographers like George Balanchine and Paul Taylor. The group also occasionally got a chance to work directly with superstar choreographers like San Francisco’s Alonzo King.

But by 2003, Maloy felt it was time to hang up her dancing shoes—at least long enough to pour her energy into launching Terpsicorps and to focus on her true passion: choreography. “As a dancer, your artistic responsibility is to interpret. You’re given the work, and it’s your job to fulfill the choreographer’s vision. You are creative but not with the same kind of freedom you have as a choreographer,” she says. 

But with the good comes the bad. Maloy operates Terpsicorps on her own, which means more creative freedom comes with an equal helping of responsibility. Still, she believes her original business model—as a summer company—will keep her dancers on their toes during a period of economic instability. Because larger dance companies make longer-term financial commitments to their dancers, hiring them for between six and nine months, they also have a more rigid set of obligations. With Terpsicorps, Maloy has more freedom because she hires dancers per show and only for a few months at a time. 

Christopher Bandy, a full-time dancer with Dance Alloy Theatre in Pittsburgh, has joined Terpsicorps every year since its inception (minus the year his daughter was born) and he plans to return this summer for The Recession Blues. “Heather always does unique kinds of things—things I’ve never done before,” he says. “She always creates at least one new work. As a dancer, it’s so nice to have a work made for you.”

Maloy says starting Terpsicorps is the hardest thing she’s ever done. But raising money for it during a nasty recession may prove even harder, and this year is likely to be one of Terpsicorps’ most challenging to date. “I knew raising money would be difficult, but I didn’t really have a concept of how difficult it really is,” she says. “I have come to learn that the key to success is being flexible. And that’s just what we’re going to keep doing.”

 Pass the Hat

Terpsicorps will perform The Recession Blues & Other Works June 25-27 at 8pm at Diana Wortham Theatre in Pack Place. For tickets, contact the DWT box office at 828-257-4530 or go to dwtheatre.com. For more on the dance company, visit terpsicorps.org. Patrons are asked to bring canned goods for an ABCCM food drive on show nights. Cash donations for Terpsicorps’ nonprofit partners should be sent, along with a note mentioning Terpsicorps, to:

Manna FoodBank, mannafoodbank.org

Mountain Housing Opportunities, Inc., mtnhousing.org

Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry, www.abccm.org/crisis

Green Opportunities, c/o The Clean Air Community Trust, greenopportunities.org, (Make checks payable to The Clean Air Community Trust with Green Opportunities in the memo.)