In the local dance community, SLO native Lisa Deyo is a legend. She trained under Lori Lee Silvaggio at the Academy of Dance and was a star of the Civic Ballet before moving to NYC to dance with Dennis Wayne’s Dancers, Jean Ann Ryan’s Gotta Dance at the Great America amusement park, the Los Angeles Chamber Ballet, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago before finally returning to her hometown to form DeyoDances.
In 2006, she won an Art Inspires! Individual Artist’s Grant for choreography and had commissions in Colorado, Virginia, California, and Barcelona. Her ballet Out of Water was one of six finalists in the International Competition of Classical Choreography at the Nouveau Festival International de Danse de Paris 1999.
Get free tickets!
DeyoDances is holding a free dance show at the Spanos Theare on Saturday, July 18 (7 p.m.) and Sunday, July 19 (2 p.m.). Reserve your free spot on eventbright.com or follow the link on deyodances.com. Tell your friends!
She’s an incredible choreographer and brings professional dancers to perform locally, and she’s giving away tickets for her company’s upcoming show.
DeyoDances will perform three pieces: What the Hell, Jacques from 2009, Non Troppo from 2009, and the world premiere of Ro-Sham-Beau.
When I attended rehearsal a few weeks ago, Deyo and her dancers were running through Non Troppo.
“The way I originally pictured it was like this agrarian community in the Middle Ages, or it could be a new community on Mars. Doesn’t really matter because the dynamics are basically the same,” Deyo explained. “There’re all different ages and stages of life represented. I have a matriarch, teenagers, village elders, two crazy aunts that are ‘the sky is falling, the sky is falling,’ but they’re usually right. It’s a whole dynamic about coming of age and that wonderfully horrible cloying feeling of being close with a lot of people that you love.”
What the Hell, Jacques is named after her husband, Jacques Deyo, son of Linnaea’s Café founder Linnaea Phillips.
“My family was over dying Easter eggs about 25 years ago,” Deyo explained. “My niece was 7 at the time, and Jacques’ artistic. He gets into it. We were all in the kitchen, and it was totally silent, and he was dripping hot wax onto his Easter eggs, and, and suddenly this little voice goes, ‘What the hell, Jacques?’ I thought it perfectly summed him up, because he’s such an out-of-the-box thinker. Sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes frustrating, sometimes amazing.
“I made the piece to express the different facets of our relationship. I brought it back this year because we’re grandparents now, and I had to add a grandparents’ section.”
The new piece, Ro-Sham-Beau, was inspired by Deyo’s worry that children today don’t understand civil society and decorum in uncomfortable situations.
“That’s so terrifying to me,” she admitted. “I thought, ‘How are young people going to learn that’s even a possibility or to aspire to that?’ I realize the only place it comes from is our earliest, most human-nurtured moments. None of us would exist if there hadn’t been someone who nurtured and kept that tiny baby alive. My hope is to tap into that through kindness or finding our better selves in the way we relate to others, no matter what situation.”
‘It’s a whole dynamic about coming of age and that wonderfully horrible cloying feeling of being close with a lot of people that you love.’
—Lisa Deyo, DeyoDances
In this dance, Deyo imagines strangers gathered in Central Park whose interactions begin benignly before devolving into violence.
“They’re hanging out in the same area, so they end up chatting like people do at a bus stop. And it turns into ro-sham-bo and then it gets out of hand. It gets ugly. And everybody disappears. Then the gods from Mount Olympus are looking down, laughing and going, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really bad. We’ve got to fix this. We got to figure out a better way.’”
Then the scene replays, but with a better outcome.
Some of the pieces include locally made music. What the Hell, Jacques has a song recorded by singer-songwriters Inga Swearingen and Jody Mulgrew.
“I’ve known Inga since she was a little girl,” Deyo said. “She and my brother were the leads in Mr. and Mrs. Bigfoot at Laguna Middle School. I love the whole family. I’ve watched her grow into this amazing musician, and she and Jody recorded a version of ‘Tonight You Belong to Me.’”
She’s also using Erin Inglish’s version of “Bésame Mucho.”
“She was singing to her daughter lying on the changing table, and she posted it on Facebook right when I was creating Ro-Sham-Beau. I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s the moment that I need people to be able to tap into in themselves, to find their better self. To find that person that was so loved.’ It’s amazing how perfect it is for this piece because it’s shot from baby’s viewpoint. It’s kind of grainy and dreamy looking, and so we’re projecting that during the performance.”
Obviously, it takes money to mount these shows, but Deyo wants to “remove the barriers for people saying they can’t go.” She started doing the shows for free three years ago and found her attendance rose. Some people donated more than she would have made had she gone through the added expense of ticketing. The first year the show was free, an anonymous donor gave $5,000.
Deyo pays for use of the theater and tech crew and all her dancers. She hopes people of means will help defray the cost of seeing a professional dance show for those who can’t afford it.
“I was able to start doing this after my parents died, and I got an inheritance,” Deyo explained. “It’s not huge, but it’s enough to cover my expenses of this performance after the donations, if I can keep it really tight. Jacques and I have agreed this is important for our hearts and souls and for the community.”
She has three professional dancers coming from NYC, and her daughter, Isabel Cary, a professional dancer from San Diego, will join half a dozen local professionals for the shows.
“They feel this compulsion to perform, and it’s important to honor our society. That’s why I do it. I know my mom and dad would be proud of that, you know? And I have the luxury of being able to do that right now.”
One of the local dancers is Katya Vasilaky, who started dancing at 11 and joined the San Francisco Ballet Company at 16. She danced professionally until an injury sidelined her career, but after two hip replacements, earning a Ph.D. in economics, and having a couple of kids who were also at rehearsal—“It’s usually not like this,” she said of dancing with her crying toddler in her arms—she’s slowly returning to her passion.
“This is the first time I’ve kind of been back,” she said, “and I love this piece [Non Troppo]. I love music, and I love that it has structure, form, but then it deviates from form—not that it goes loose, but that it has a lightness to it. I love that back-and-forth.”
Another local dancer is Brea Donlon, who started dancing at 2 and never stopped. She’s now 26.
“This will be my third production with Lisa,” Donlon explained. “I love her choreography. I would call it very eclectic. Even if you say it’s a ballet piece, there’re other genres mixed in there, so you’re not going to have one genre in any piece, and the whole performance is so versatile. It makes it really fun.
“I love dancing for Lisa,” she said. “It’s always such an honor whenever she asks me.” ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in July 2-9, 2026.
