The old Boston & Maine rail yard still dominates the eastern edge of White River Junction, Vermont—a rust-colored reminder of the town's industrial past. But on a recent Thursday evening, the action was two blocks west, inside the Briggs Opera House, where 34-year-old choreographer Aria Montgomery rehearsed her newest work. Dancers dragged wooden pallets across the marley floor, the scraping sound echoing off 19th-century plaster. The piece, scheduled to premiere in March, is about exactly this: a railroad town learning to move differently.
Thirty years ago, contemporary dance in White River Junction was virtually nonexistent. Today, the town of roughly 2,100 people supports three dedicated studios, a summer intensive that draws students from Montreal to Boston, and a growing reputation as a destination for experimental movement. What happened here was not sudden. It was built, deliberately and against the odds, by a handful of artists who chose an affordable post-industrial town over established dance capitals.
The Quiet Build
The transformation began in earnest around 2014, when the nonprofit Briggs Opera House reopened its second-floor studios after a $340,000 renovation. Prior to that, serious dance training meant driving 80 miles south to Hanover, New Hampshire, or 90 minutes east to Burlington. The Opera House added evening contemporary classes taught by visiting New York choreographers. Enrollment averaged eight students in year one. Last fall, the studio logged 147 unique students across its semester programs.
Two miles north, Off the Rails Dance Collective opened in a converted freight depot in 2018, followed by Riverbend Movement in the former Windsor County Courthouse in 2021. Together, the three organizations now employ 22 full- and part-time instructors and produce roughly 40 public performances annually, according to estimates from the White River Junction Chamber of Commerce.
"The question we kept getting was, 'Why here?'" said Marguerite Chen, executive director of the Briggs Opera House. "And the answer was: because dancers could afford to live here. Because there was space—actual physical space—to make work without losing money on every rehearsal."
Three Artists Shaping the Scene
What distinguishes White River Junction's dance community is not scale but approach. The most visible artists have developed distinct relationships to the town itself, treating its architecture and history as raw material rather than backdrop.
Aria Montgomery: Choreographing the Town
Montgomery arrived in 2016, fleeing what she described as "the resume panic" of New York. A Michigan native who trained at the Joffrey Ballet School, she spent three years in Brooklyn juggling restaurant shifts and unpaid company auditions. In White River Junction, she rented a two-bedroom apartment for $725 a month and began teaching at the Opera House.
Her breakthrough came in 2022 with Thaw, a 35-minute work staged in an empty Superior Flooring warehouse on Gates Street. Twelve dancers performed on poured concrete among stacks of maple hardwood, their footsteps amplified by the industrial acoustics. The piece traced the seasonal shutdown and restart of the rail yards, with movement vocabulary drawn from Montgomery's observations of maintenance workers—shoulder rolls, weighted squats, the gesture of throwing a track switch.
Thaw won a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and landed Montgomery a slot in the 2023 American Dance Festival regional showcase in Durham, North Carolina. She is currently the only Vermont-based choreographer in the festival's 47-year history to be invited twice.
"I stopped trying to look like what I thought New York wanted," Montgomery said. "Here, the work got honest because the pressure got lower and the stakes got higher in a different way. People in this town actually show up. They know your name."
Noah Thompson: Athleticism in Service of Narrative
Noah Thompson, 29, came to dance backward. A competitive gymnast through age 19, he tore his ACL during his sophomore year at the University of Massachusetts and began taking contemporary classes during rehabilitation. By 2018, he had abandoned physical therapy school and moved to White River Junction to join Off the Rails as a company apprentice.
Thompson's gymnastics background is visible in his work—clean aerials, precise handstands, a comfort with risk that reads differently from classically trained bodies. But directors and critics have noted his restraint. In his 2023 solo Carrying Number, performed at the Hopkins Center for the Arts in Hanover, Thompson executed a full twisting layout onto a crash mat, then spent the next four minutes lying still, chest heaving, as a recorded voice read from the 1912 B&M railroad payroll ledger.
The piece examined the relationship between immigrant labor and industrial injury in the Connecticut River Valley. Dance Magazine critic Siobhan Burke, reviewing the Hanover performance, wrote that Thompson "deploys virtuosity almost against itself, making spectacle feel like confession."
Thompson now tours *Car
