A decade can seem like a long time, but it goes by quick as a wink if you’re moving fast. Such has been the pace of the Sandra Organ Dance Company, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this season. As a prominent soloist with Houston Ballet, Sandra Organ began to take stock of her life and career in the mid-1990s. She looked back at the goals she had achieved and looked ahead to what her future might hold. Her 15 years with Houston Ballet had given her a rich variety of experiences, working with major choreographers in a vast array of dance styles. There had been worldwide tours, beginning with Houston Ballet’s first tour to Europe in 1982, before she had even completed her training in Houston Ballet Academy to become a member of the performing company. And her acceptance into the company as Houston Ballet’s first African American ballerina had been a major milestone in her life.
But a career as a ballet dancer is physically grueling, typically ending when you’re still quite young, and Sandra wondered how much longer her healthy 30-year old body would take the punishment the dance floor delivers daily to all the bones and joints between the toes and the upper spine. So, she entered a period of self-examination, beginning with a book called Artists’ Way, discovering the obstacles to creativity. In the process, she drew strength from her early life to present a solo concert and build her future as a choreographer and director of her own dance company.
Sandra’s destiny to become a dancer had begun as child of five, when she saw Patricia McBride and Edward Villella on television, dancing with the New York City Ballet. Noticing her fascination, her mother found a teacher for her in Omaha, Nebraska, where the family lived. “She just happened to be a British teacher, who taught the same Royal Academy of Dance syllabus that Ben Stevenson was familiar with when I auditioned for Houston Ballet years later,” Sandra remembers.
During high school years at Omaha’s Duchesne Academy, Sandra had created a dance work every year. And when she graduated at the head of her class, she was allowed to replace the traditional valedictorian’s speech to her classmates with a valedictorian’s dance.
In seeking a new direction for her life 10 years ago, she saw her talent as a means to build a bridge between large dance companies and small dance companies. And as a person instilled with strong religious values, she has seen her dancing life as “an earthen vessel,” through which her talent is meant to be shared with others.
“I hope God’s power is magnified through my limited efforts,” she says, “and I just show up with my craft and the best gifts I can offer. And it seems like He uses that and people are touched by it. And that’s a cool thing and an easy way to filter my talent into another realm.”
Shaping a concept is one matter; putting it into practice is another. It took 18 long months to settle all the legal niceties in establishing the company’s non-profit tax-exempt status. In that process the spiritual concept of Earthen Vessels eventually materialized as the company’s official title, while the Sandra Organ Dance Company (SODC) serves as its business name. In the meantime, Sandra immediately got busy lining up performance opportunities, dancers and dance works, and the board of directors needed to establish and support the company.
Its initial engagement was commissioned by Fotofest in the fall of 1998, and this was followed by two appearances at the Jewish Community Center, an evening on Miller Outdoor Theater’s Texas Contemporary Dance Festival, a commissioned evening of dance from the Golden Triangle Chapter of Links (a national association of African-American women) in Beaumont, a couple of fund-raising events and the company’s first annual Black History Month engagement at the University of Houston’s Cullen Performance Hall.
SODC’s second season was even more ambitious, numbering a record 11 appearances. In the eight seasons since then, the company has danced 43 engagements, running anywhere from two-to-nine events in a given season. Its performances have been seen by audiences and surrounding communities as far north as Huntsville all the way west to Austin. The company even performed in Los Angeles, as an emerging ensemble on a conference hosted by the International Association of Blacks in Dance.
Its dance venues have ranged throughout small and large Houston area theater spaces: DiverseWorks, the Ensemble Theatre, Talento Bilingue de Houston, Heinen Theater on the Houston Community College campus, the University of Houston’s Cullen Hall and Moores Opera House, Wortham Center’s Cullen Theater, the Hobby Center’s Zilkha Hall, The Menil Collection, the Jewish Community Center, Richmond State School, St. John the Divine Episcopal Church, Kingwood College, Miller Outdoor Theater and downtown Houston’s Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex.
During that time, the company has partnered with nearly two dozen dance organizations, in Houston and elsewhere, and has brought students from nearly 50 schools to attend its performances. Building a board of directors, gaining financial support, establishing a stable corps of dancers, finding rehearsal spaces and surviving through economic downturns have all brought challenging moments.
Initially, SODC’s board consisted of a dozen members and now runs between 12 and 20. They include some charter members as well as new people with fresh insights to funding. Much of its early support came through individual contributions and its membership in the Texas Accountants and Lawyers for Artists. Over the decade-long span of SODC’s existence, Houston Endowment, the Houston Arts Alliance, the Mithoff Family Foundation, Target and the Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts have provided key support for SODC’s budget, which has ranged from $60,000 to $200,000.
It has been more of a challenge to build a steady corps of dancers and find available times and proper spaces for them to gather for rehearsals and performances. “Over the middle seasons – 2000-2004 – there was a corps of about six dancers who stayed with me. We were doing things a little differently than other companies at that time. We were paying them for rehearsal time and I was trying to find teaching opportunities for them in the community, so they could sustain themselves. We were doing a number of shows, we were going into the schools, doing choreographic workshops and they were contributing some of the choreography. There are a number of dancers I can call upon for special projects, but building a steady corps is a project that will continue over the next decade,” she concludes.
When it comes to rehearsing her own dancers for a performance, Sandra has been especially thankful for the opportunities provided by her former employer, Houston Ballet, and its executive director, C. C. Connor. “Having worked there for 15 years, I knew there were times when the rehearsal studios were not being used, and he rented space to our company,” she says. Since the completion of the Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex on Texas Ave, most of her rehearsals are done there.
Tracing the history of her company over the 10-year span, Sandra says, “I’ve always had this juxtaposition of modern dancers and ballet dancers. Early on, everybody got trained in a ballet class. There was continuity of style, a balletic “line,” so that even if I did want to go in a more modern direction, they could put on pointe shoes or they could wear flat shoes and still have that balletic base. They could still do pirouettes and they could still look nice in an arabesque and things like that.
“What I’ve found now is, I have to hire either one or the other. When you can work with a corps of dancers over the years, you can get them to do both stylistically. But for different pieces now, I have to find modern dancers, and I have to find ballet dancers.” At present, she finds dancers from each category better equipped and “coming a little more to the other side now. But,” she says with a good laugh, “there’s resistance to the pointe shoe. And for those already in the pointe shoe, it’s a challenge trying to get them grounded!”
Turning serious, she takes up another topic. “Coming out of the (discipline of) ballet, I want to honor women of different sizes. I wanted to make dances that are about real people, so I didn’t mind if real people walked in the door and didn’t necessarily look like dancers. As long as they could do an arabesque and looked like women, great! That didn’t matter to me. That, to me, is affirming to who I am and who most people are. So, as I say, we’re ballet dancers without the tutus and the tights, and we look like women and we look like men, and we dance like women and men. And sometimes the women are required to do some lifting.” Summing up, she says: “I just feel like, if I’m going to tell stories that are relevant to people today, I have to choose people they look like, sometimes.”
Reviewing the dance works she has created these past 10 years, Sandra feels the works she has created for Black History Month are particularly striking. “You don’t find many artistic directors telling those kinds of stories.” She mentions a piece about Harriet Tubman, or a slave narrative “where I could create a solo about a woman who lived in an attic for seven years, inside a coffin, so she could watch her son grow up. “Those are kind of unsung stories,” she says.
She mentions the honor of memorizing and using the words to a piece she created on Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. For that piece, choreographed in 2005, she gathered a group of schoolchildren together, asking them to tell their own dreams. Her choreography incorporated the gestures they made as they spoke.
For a couple of years, her company worked with Rob Smith and his Aura Contemporary Music Ensemble at the University of Houston, where several of her dancers choreographed new works to the music on the program. She also participated in the UH School of Music’s Shostakovich Festival a few seasons back
She worked with the hip-hop company, Fly, to create dances at Miller Theatre. James Sewell’s choreography to Gian-Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors has become a staple of Houston’s holiday theater season. And in her February program at the Barnevelder Arts/Movement Complex, she staged a major work, There is a Time, by José Limón, the famed Mexican-born choreographer who established a significant modern dance company in New York during the mid-20th century.
Sacred dance has also been an important component of Sandra Organ’s choreography since her very earliest years. While sacred works are sprinkled throughout her repertoire of dances, she is careful to maintain that SODC is not a sacred dance company. Nor is its mission specifically committed to a celebration of her African American heritage. Its mission statement speaks of goals “to promote contemporary dance, educate the public and attract a diverse audience.”
Included in that mission is the goal of having a school of dance associated with her company. In the early 1980s, she felt incredibly fortunate to be awarded a scholarship to study at Houston Ballet Academy and then become a prominent member of the company. Indeed, that had been in line with Houston Ballet’s policy since the company’s earliest years. But looking back a few decades earlier, she also remembers that “my mother grew up in Houston and she sure couldn’t do that.”
Even today, she sees too few opportunities for professional artistic achievement among young people disadvantaged by their ethnic or economic background. So, a dance academy is prominent among her future goals, “and it’s going to be either in the Third Ward or the Fifth Ward,” she says quite firmly.
©2008, Carl R. Cunningham
