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Sandra Organ Dance Company's "Season to Remember" Black History Month Peer Response By Frank Shonka What a delight to see a compendium of the best of Sandra Organ's black history dance month choreography in one place at one sitting. Add on top of that the one piece that is arguably the best of Jose Limon's choreography and you have a delightful evening. But first things first. With the exception of 'The Slavery Machine' whose sound track was created at the Huntsville penitentiary in 1934, I'd seen all the other pieces over these ten years. Yes, that's how long Organ has been making dances with her company! Because she picked the right pieces they were memorable and easily recognized. Her company was beefed up (in numbers of dancers, not physically) for this performance and I counted a total of twelve dancers, which is what I remember from the times I've seen the Limon piece. You would expect that Black History month would fill the audience with people of color but the first weekend seemed to be primarily members of the dance community. The last night's performance was a racially mixed audience and after ten years it's nice to see the black community supporting Organ. It also added a sense of pride to the whole atmosphere; this permeated to the stage and added to the performance. Of all her pieces, and there were 12, I love the way 'Phenomenal Women' has developed. The dancers who did the honors, Barnes, Schaffer, Organ and Cortez, looked svelte and sexy. The women speak for themselves and any time you can get a dancer to speak on stage you are pushing them to expand their horizons. Worked just fine.
Other reviewers over the last ten years have put their two cents in on how they felt about Organ's work. It'll be fun comparing my thoughts to theirs. I never got the starting piece, Star Spangled (2003), with the Hendrix sound track not quite making it through the Suchu speakers. And come on, would Jimi have ballet dancers in pointe shoes doing his stuff? So right off the bat I got a little grumpy but that quickly changed. Seems Organ has been working in the schools around Houston for the last ten years and here in 'Freedom Bytes' are the sound tracks of high school students' essays (from the mouths of babes) with clear beautiful innocent thoughts on what freedom means. These sound tracks became the vehicle that created seven vignettes danced and choreographed by Organ's dancers in 2003.
In 2001 Organ created 'Dogan' about the death of her grandfather's brother who was killed while attending to a patient of his. She culled this information from combing through back issues of black newspapers here in Texas. Learning about your family history in this fashion can only be an emotionally wrought experience and she has done an admirable job putting this on stage and performing this herself.
Finally, here's the piece I love, created by Jose Limon from the Ecclesiastes poem 'there is a time'. There is a specific dance technique called the 'Limon Technique' and it's a technique that requires the dancer to use a loud audible breath to go through the body. This, combined with a beautiful swooping motion, is what dancers use to perform Jose's choreography. This was missing. A word about the dancers. None of the dancers were trained in this way, but they did an admirable job. God bless those precious souls. They were thrown into a whirl pool and they made some sense of it. In particular the sequence 'A time to hate, a time of war' with Lauren Perrone showed what passion there is in this dance. Her movement brought out the meaning of the word 'hate' and this is what I came to see.
The male parts to this choreography are strong masculine movements probably best taught by a male teacher. The men didn't stand a chance without some of this training. Bless them all and most of all bless Organ for having the strength and gumption to try this out. There were only seven rehearsals of this reconstruction under the tutelage of Condodina who was a Limon dancer. I believe that the present Limon company is about the sixth iteration of what Limon started. Although every generation of new dancers loses something of the original choreography, every generation also adds something and so the original dance subtly changes. I remember one of the company members being miked off stage while reciting the poem line by line as it was danced and this was missing. I remember the lights slowly coming up on the dancers as they swayed in the circle that represents time. This didn't happen. Call me a 'Limon snob', but these seemingly inconsequential things are what makes or breaks a dance.
The Limon stuff almost worked and Sandra Organ's retrospective was fun. Glad I went twice.
Frank Shonka
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