Utah dance company is in Beijing for Booking Dance Festival 2008

"Another problem was the fact that the (airline) ticket prices jumped to $5,000 a pop," Yeager said. "When we first looked at the prices, they were only $1,400. At that point I nearly bagged the whole thing."

However, Yeager, who formed ODT on a shoestring budget 13 years ago and watched it become one of Utah's premier contemporary dance companies, took some time to solve the problem.

"It's my life," Yeager said with a laugh. "I've always tried to find ways to do things without money. And we cut the budget down to $15,000 and decided to take seven of our dancers."

Yeager also went on the Web to find discount tickets to Beijing.

"We found some for $2,500 each and jumped to buy them," said Yeager. However, because of the expense, the troupe couldn't take a technical crew or costume staffers. And Yeager is acting as stage manager.

Those restrictions helped in choosing which works the company took to Beijing.

"We had to submit a video and send it to the Chinese government for approval. As I thought about it, 'The Factory' can be seen as a worker uprising. But that wasn't the idea at all. In fact, it was just about some people on break who dance hip hop."

Yeager said in the e-mail that the troupe has attracted a lot of attention by just taking pictures.

"Sarah (Aezer) got mobbed," he said. "Random people wanted pictures with her — all that red hair. We were doing a group shot, and some guy sent his kids over to take the picture with all the dancers — in the middle of our own personal pictures."

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E-mail: scott@desnews.com