One of Minnesota’s most elegant standard-bearers of dance has fallen.
Toni Pierce-Sands, a featured soloist in some of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s most iconic suites and a co-founder of celebrated Twin Cities company TU Dance, died Tuesday in Minneapolis. She was 63 and had been battling cancer.
“I don’t like to use the word ‘titan’ because it can sound harsh, but Toni was larger than life,” said Erin Thompson, who first met Pierce-Sands more than a half-century ago when both were teenagers training under Loyce Houlton at Minnesota Dance Theatre.
They would became adult colleagues and served together at the University of Minnesota, where Pierce-Sands taught for two decades and where Thompson still does.
“I’ve always been so impressed with her light and generosity that shone in her eyes,” Thompson said. “Toni mentored hundreds and hundreds of students.”
A Minnesota native born into an arts-loving family, Pierce-Sands set her sights on New York after graduating high school. She studied at the Ailey, where she would join the professional company. She eventually was a featured dancer in “Revelations,” “Cry” and “Rainbow Round My Shoulder,” all signature works.
Pierce-Sands also performed in Europe, broadening her technique and gleaning global knowledge with Tanz Forum in Germany and Rick Odums in Paris. She shared that knowledge at home with students by building a company modeled after Ailey — with a professional company and a school. In 2004, she and her husband, fellow Ailey dancer Uri Sands, founded TU Dance, named after their first initials.
“She had unstinting love for excellence, but it was based in spiritual resonance, not something for vanity, and she modeled that beautifully,” said Ananya Chatterjea, who also taught alongside Pierce-Sands at the University of Minnesota.
