Photo courtesy TU Dance. 

To dance. Uri Sands has carried that desire deep within his heart since he was a kid in South Miami-Dade. As he grew up, he transformed the great passion of his youth into a way of life.

Like so many other burgeoning artists from South Florida looking for opportunities, though, he left home to find his place in the world. His talent flourished in New York, where he would meet his future wife, Toni Pierce, at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Later on they moved to the Twin Cities, where they opened the TU Dance (TU for Toni and Uri) studio and school in 2004.

On Nov. 8, Uri Sands returns to South Florida as an internationally renowned choreographer and dancer for the debut of TU Dance at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center.

“The visit to Miami is the start of the company’s 11th season, and it’s a homecoming for me,” says Sands, who lives in St. Paul, Minn. “After that, we have our season here in St. Paul, and then we go on to a regional tour. So this is the first performance of a number of performances that will be leading up to the holiday season.”

It’s been a long time coming.

Toni and Uri during a curtain call. Photo courtesy TU Dance. 

“I feel such a sense of pride to be able to come back and share and provide opportunities, and access, and performances in the community that basically raised me,” he says.

It is a melding of Knight Foundation’s work in multiple communities. This year the foundation announced an $8 million arts initiative in St. Paul, which included $500,000 to create the TU Dance Fund to help the company expand its programming, cultivate new donors and diversify the city’s dance community. As part of the effort, Knight introduced the Arts Challenge to St. Paul, a philanthropic tool that has thrived in Miami since 2008 and now takes place in four Knight communities: Akron, Ohio, Detroit, Miami and St. Paul.  

Eric Fliss, general manager of the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center, is bringing TU Dance as part of the center’s “Bring It Home Miami” series, funded by a 2012 Knight Arts Challenge award. The series originated with an activity called “Viva Broadway,” which invited Miami artists who had gone on to Broadway to return for a unique musical production.

“As part of the work that went into that event, we were really exploring all the genres and all the artists from the South Florida area, and I was able to identify Uri,” says Fliss.  “Not only did Uri grow up here, but literally one block away to the west of the center in a housing project.”

Signature moves

Fliss identified the qualities that made Sands a perfect candidate for “Bring It Home Miami”: an artist from Miami, his body of work, the arc of his career and the inspiration for his work as a dancer.

It is a story that resonates among the Miami artistic community, one appreciated by none other than award-winning playwright, theater director and Miami native Tarell McCraney.

“When black kids from Miami get out of our neighborhoods alive and make it in the arts, it gets back; you hear about it, no matter what scale. And Uri was doing it big,” shares McCraney via e-mail from a plane headed to Miami from Chicago.

“But I didn’t meet him until 1999, my first year in undergraduate school, when he performed ‘Hymn’ with the Ailey company in Chicago. There is this signature move in the piece where a man laying in a push-up position pushes himself off the ground so high that someone could roll under him. It took my breath away. I thought nothing more amazing in life could be done.”

“I have always admired Uri Sands for being able to push himself off the ground so high and so beautifully that all troubles seem to pass.”

A choreographer’s homecoming

Sands has visited Miami before professionally, as a dancer for Alvin Ailey. This time, he returns with his own vision as choreographer.

“It is really special, particularly being in the South Miami-Dade area, which is the area I’m from,” says Sands, who lived in Liberty City for a few years before moving with his family to Perrine-Cutler Ridge-Goulds while he was in elementary school.

Sands, now 40, says that his introduction to dance happened when he was just about 9 years old, and he used to break dance with the older high school kids.

“I could do all the headspins and the tumbling and the flipping and all of that stuff,” he says with a laugh. “And that was basically my first exposure to any sort of dance, and it happened in the culture of these communities.”

Sands later attended New World School of the Arts in Miami, and went on to Philadelphia, where he danced with the modern dance company Philadanco! for two years. In 1995, he joined the Ailey company in New York, and finally, moved to Minnesota in 2000. (He also has danced with North Carolina Dance Theatre—now named the Charlotte Ballet and another Knight arts grantee—and Complexions Contemporary Ballet, among others).

Through all the years performing, choreographing, and traveling the world, he absorbed the influences – modern dance, classical ballet, African inspirations, urban rhythms – that shaped TU Dance and gave it its unique character.

Looking for ways to make the art of dance accessible to communities most in need prompted Sands and Toni Pierce-Sands to found TU Dance. Sands and Pierce-Sands are both artistic directors of the company.

“We started the company in Toni’s hometown of St. Paul, Minn., because there was a real need and desire, and we thought St. Paul was uniquely poised for the type of vision that we had for dance and for access for young people,” he says. “And she kept saying, ‘You know, Uri, somehow or another we are going to figure out a way to engage and share the wealth, so to speak, with your hometown of Miami.’”

And so they will with the South Miami-Dade presentation.

“I think that the performance we’re going to have there is like an initial step of hopefully developing a relationship with Miami,” says Sands, who will hold workshops while in town as part of TU Dance’s outreach to young people.

“We can’t underestimate the value and the power that the arts have in really being able to transform lives,” he says. “We have to be conscientious about that. And our work for Toni and me as artists and leaders is to ensure that as many people as possible can actually have access to that power.”

J.C. Pérez-Duthie is a Miami-based freelance writer.

South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center presents TU Dance on Saturday, Nov. 8, at 8 p.m. Tickets: $20-$35. Special youth and student pricing are available with ID. Box office: 786-573-5300, or online at SMDCAC.org. The center is located at 10950 SW 211th St., Cutler Bay.