Artists of the Year 2005

In late October, afraid she'd be late for the Princess Grace Awards, Toni Pierce-Sands leaped from a cab stuck in Manhattan traffic, ran in her gown, heels and borrowed diamonds down 5th Avenue, and shyly skirted the celebrity-studded red carpet leading into the black-tie gala. She wasn't late. She quickly found her husband, Uri Sands, whose wide-eyed nervousness matched her own.

Sands had been selected for the Princess Grace Foundation's inaugural Choreographic Fellowship. "Uri's works had strong compositional structure layered with arresting movement, and inventive partnering dusted with sensuality," said Bonnie Oda Homsey, dance chair of the Princess Grace Awards Selection Committee.

That evening, actress Bebe Neuwirth presented Sands with the award as luminaries including Prince Albert of Monaco and Mikhail Baryshnikov looked on. For Pierce-Sands, winning the honor "was just 'Wow!' in a year where everything has hit at the same time," she said. The gala, in fact, was the final, crowning event in a year of career-catapulting achievements for the St. Paul couple.

In July, they premiered their multicultural dance company, TU Dance, at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis -- to sold-out audiences. In addition to founding TU Dance, Sands choreographed the work, and Pierce-Sands was her husband's "interpreter" as she set the choreography on the dancers. She's also the company's rehearsal director. Showcasing local and out-of-town talent, the 18-member ensemble (which included Sands and Pierce-Sands) performed with the symphonic richness of an orchestra and the technical precision of long-established company.

The concert's six dances were uncommonly generous in nature and gracious in sensibility, a reflection of the couple's personalities. The choreography offered a fresh, invigorating movement vocabulary. While seamlessly melding African, modern, ballet and vernacular dance styles, underscored by a rhythmic musicality, each work displayed different tone and content. The work was not only intelligent and rigorous, but also emotionally accessible. Hence TU Dance's tremendous popularity.

In September, the inaugural Sage Awards gave TU Dance a prize for Performance.

In a premiere for Zenon Dance Company in November, Sands also demonstrated his facility with richly textured movement imbued with mysterious interpersonal dynamics.

A risky juncture

During 2005, Sands ended his position as dancer and choreographer with North Carolina Dance Theater in Charlotte, while Pierce-Sands taught full-time in the University of Minnesota's dance department.

There won't be any slowing down in 2006. "We're very excited by their work, and it's our goal to remain supportive," said Cynthia Gehrig, president of the Jerome Foundation. TU Dance's premiere was funded, in part, by a two-year grant from Jerome. But, she added, "Now is an extremely risky moment. After the jubilation of starting a company comes the next point."

Sands agreed: "We're in that middle ground where we're no longer emerging and not quite established. That's the most precarious place, I believe." Laughing, he added, "I'm looking for a couple of manuals on how to run a dance company, how to create work and dance in the work you've created, that sort of thing."

In the next year, the company needs to secure its nonprofit status, put dancers on contract and find the funding to hire an executive director. The couple want to book another performance season in the Twin Cities in addition to a concert scheduled in June 2006. They're also looking for a Minnesota gig away from the Twin Cities. And the dream of starting a dance school is never far from their minds.

Their choral ballet "Truth," for VocalEssence's "Witness" series, will be performed Feb. 19 at Ordway Center in St. Paul. Also in February, they travel to Florida State University for a choreographic workshop with a Philadelphia-based company, Philadanco. From May 5 to 7, Pierce-Sands, recipient of a 2004 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Dancers, performs a solo made for her by Ron K. Brown, artistic director of Evidence, at the Southern (after which the piece will enter TU Dance's repertory).

In the summer they travel back to Charlotte to make another work for North Carolina Dance Theatre, and also to New York City. There, the eminent Judith Jameson, artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, has commissioned Sands to choreograph a new work for the couple's alma mater (they met as dancers there). That commission will place Sands in what the New York Times recently called a "dream-team canon of African-American repertory."

"Uri keeps reminding me, in the midst of all the continuous activity of doing our own stuff and having the company, that we're exactly where we said we wanted to be when we started our personal mission of forming TU Dance," Pierce-Sands said. "We're really on track. And there's so much energy coming toward us, so much momentum, we just need to stay focused in creating the right next steps."

At the same time, Sands added, they wouldn't have experienced such a tremendous year without the funders, dancers, other dance-company artistic directors, presenters, lawyers and publicists who helped them along the way. "Toni and I are firm believers that you don't get anything done by yourself," he explained. "Nothing's done without help and we've gotten a ton of help. We're really grateful to this community."

Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities dance critic.