Madeleine Award winner's courage an inspiration

Intermountain Catholic

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Madeleine Award recipient Anne Riordan sits surrounded by photos of her students in her Salt Lake City home. Struck with rheumatoid arthritis in her mid-20s, Riordan continued to dance and teach.IC photo by Barbara Lee

SALT LAKE CITY — The late Bob Fosse said to dance is to express joy.

Anne Riordan, who accepted the Madeleine Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts and Humanities June 11, has used dance to express joy, passion, love, and compassion all her life, perhaps most powerfully after her body had failed her.

"Ironically, I never felt I fit the description of handicapped," Riordan told the Intermountain Catholic just days before she received the Madeleine Award. Struck "virtually overnight" with rheumatoid arthritis in 1959, when she was in her mid-20s, Riordan said she didn’t know which way to turn. The excruciating pain of the crippling disease meant she would no longer breeze lithely across the stage. It meant she would have to rehearse in tennis shoes while everyone else danced barefoot, and performances, while she could still participate, could only be accomplished with the assistance of increasingly higher doses of codeine.

"I danced for another three years," she said. "I was not going to give up dance. My dance cohorts were so kind. They let me impose upon them. I had danced since I was five years old."

Riordan’s mother had put her daughter in a dance class, hoping to help her overcome shyness so painful her mother had to go to kindergarten classes with her. The plan to socialize Anne began to work as Anne discovered that when she danced she literally became someone else.

"I found myself in dance," Riordan said. "It was as if I was not being who I was when I was dancing. It gave me freedom."

After one especially painful concert, Riordan said she locked herself in the dressing room and, still in costume and make-up, "I had a serious talk with myself in the make-up mirror. I decided I couldn’t impose on the people I loved any more. I had to stop."

Days after that heartbreaking night in the dressing room, Riordan said, she simply disappeared. She confined herself to her home and spent every minute with her three children. She stayed away from the haunts she’d shared with Shirley Ririe, Joan Woodbury and other dancers with whom she’d performed at the University of Utah and on stages throughout Utah.

"It was Joan Woodbury who was my most pesky friend," she said. "She would come to visit me and try to drag me out. I would turn her down, but she always came back. Joan believed in me from the get-go. Finally, she insisted that I do her a favor. She asked me… no, she insisted that I substitute teach a class for her. It was a dance class for special education students. And when I first met the special education students, I discovered again that dance took me to another place."

Faced with students with down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and various degrees of mental retardation, Riordan said she once more found herself stepping into that near-spiritual experience that dance offered her.

"In a sense, dance has been my religion," she said. "When I was diagnosed, I couldn’t imagine living without dance. When I began working with the special education students, some of whom never got out of their wheelchairs, it saved my life."

Riordan’s collection of black-and-white photos shows her and her students fully engaged in the joy Fosse spoke of – and something else – courage.

Some days teaching from a chair, Riordan added classes for other students, a dance class for non-dance majors, technique classes, and more classes for special education students. For her own sake, she added teaching classes with the goal of earning a master’s degree.

"I learned how to teach dance without moving," she said. "Talking students through movement using words instead of my body taught me a lot. On the days I could move, I did." Most important, though, she said, "My students taught me so much. They taught me to live with this disease with humor and grace, and to deal with what’s before me, and how to move on."

Riordan has taught dance at the University of Utah and at Work Activity Center, where she led the Sunrise Dance Group and the Sunrise Wheels, off and on for 38 years.

Today, it isn’t just physical pain Riordan is coping with. Thirteen years ago, her middle child, her son Merritt, then 31, was murdered as he worked as a waiter at the Green Parrot, one of Salt Lake City’s private clubs. Although the murder suspect was apprehended, he was never prosecuted due to lack of evidence.

"I decided I could live out my life in hatred and despair or not. I chose not to. I threw myself into teaching again. I’ve taught almost every population."

Riordan talks of an imaginary box she carries on her shoulder. In the box she puts her suffering – the shyness, the pain, the loss. When she is interacting with others, she closes the box tightly and moves forward.

"I’ve done a lot of teaching with that box closed, and sometimes I pay for it dearly," she said.

Now retired, Riordan and her husband, Mike, to whom she has been married for 38 years, spend time working on their house on South Temple and spending time in a small "love nest" in St. George. Still practicing her strong work ethic, she sometimes overdoes things, and spends the next day or days in bed.

Their remaining two children, Christian, 48, and Stacia, 34, help keep Riordan grounded.

She’s also rediscovered an interest she shared with her late father – drawing and painting. She carries a sketchbook wherever she goes and has a workroom filled with her pen-and-ink drawings, oil paintings, and acrylics.

Being given the Madeleine Award took her completely by surprise, she said. Her friends, including Woodbury, Ririe, Anne Decker, and Ray Kingston, all former Madeleine Award winners, and her daughter Stacia, gave her the good news at lunch several weeks ago, and two days after, she had already selected and purchased her award-night banquet outfit.

"I am so honored," she said. "I think I’m in a state of shock. Every award I’ve ever won has been a surprise, but this came right out of left field. What an incredible honor. I feel both special and unworthy."