Ballet and Modern Dance Associate Prof. Susan Douglas Roberts was in a cyber cafe in Spain last winter when she read the e-mail. Tamara Barrington ’97 had been killed in an automobile accident on Jan. 21, leaving behind her husband of three weeks, Chris.

She had received the “most outstanding choreographer” award her senior year at TCU. At the time she died, she was the artistic director and master teacher of Believe in Me, an organization using the arts to engage and motivate children to succeed.

“We don’t just teach our kids, they become part of our family,” said Douglas Roberts, still moved by the event nearly a year later.

“We see them every single day, and often for hours at a time. Tamara was serenely beautiful and at the same time mysterious, mischievous and silly. “So we wanted to say goodbye in a way that would be meaningful to her ‘dance’ family. We were all her friends, and we all wanted to remember her.”

Remember, they did. In October, a makeshift altar in the Ed Landreth Hall reception room was the first sign that this performance would be no ordinary dance concert. A young lady, smiling and laughing in picture after picture. A prom dress. A photo of a fiancé. A cross. A gingerbread brownie with chocolate chips. This ofrenda, a time-worn tradition in the Mexican D’a de los Muertos celebration, sought to revive the memory and spirit of a loved one, if only for an evening.

Choreographed by Douglas Roberts, the tribute piece opened before three full Ed Landreth Hall crowds, with dancers dressed in white setting candles at the front of the stage. Then, the troupe performed a series of “movement memories” based on conversations, dreams, letters, visions, improvisations, photography, videos, poetry and intuition. Two of the sections Barrington herself had choreographed.

At the conclusion, dancers blew out the candles, but the flames were replaced by “fireflies” lighting up the back stage. “Tamara was like a firefly,” Douglas Roberts said. “It lights up for a moment and then it’s gone, but for that brief moment it can spark a child’s imagination, and they can ride it forever.”

The event playbill may have summed up best the message that Douglas Roberts and company hoped to transmit to the audience — and in the tradition of D’a de los Muertos, to Barrington: The creation of our ofrenda re-enlivens Tamara’s presence in our lives and reaffirms for us that she is, was and will always be with us, entre azul y buenas noches, between blue and goodnight. And the message Tamara herself wrote to her class of young artists before a 1999 Believe in Me performance could have equally applied to the TCU dancers who remembered her:

You have affected my own heart and the hearts of others for all times and I shall never forget you. You are all birds — some are doves, some are parrots, some are sparrows — and you all shall take flight; you will never fall.

Tamara’s parents, Carol and Irvin Barrington, capped the weekend tribute by announcing a one-time Tamara Barrington Scholarship Award, given to Nicole Meyers, a current dance student.

“During the performance, I wanted to curl up and get lost in my grief, but the joy kept coming up,” Douglas Roberts said. “When you remember Tamara, you just can’t be sad.”