SALLID SAVES PASSION FOR ‘HEALING’ WORKS

Choreographer/dancer Otis Sallid’s career of creating dances for such shows as the TV series “Fame,” “The Richard Pryor Show,” the Grammy awards and Debbie Allen’s act at Radio City Music Hall would seem like an artist’s dream, right?

Not quite. Sallid says he’d rather spend his time working on what he calls his “healing dances” and his “art pieces.”

“Dance is used for healing in many cultures,” Sallid, 32, explains, “and I want people to feel a real burden being lifted from them as they watch my healing dances. I want them to go out feeling cleansed and happy.”

Until now, Sallid (pronounced Sah-LEED) and his dance company, the New Art Ensemble, have been doing both “healing dances” and “art pieces” in small studio performances. Their program, “A Night for Dancing,” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center on Monday, will be the first showing before a wider audience.

Choreographic conventions are often ignored to bring forth what Sallid considers some of his strongest healing moments. He points out a section of “Hour of Power,” a gospel ballet that takes place in a church setting, in which a dancer sits motionless for almost 30 seconds. Sallid says the combination of concentrated energy as well as the context in which it occurs is powerful enough to arouse many people--and to make others feel physical and mental discomfort.

He says the healing dances will be even stronger when all the dancers performing them are fully aware of the restorative effectiveness of the choreographies. “I’m trying to get them to focus on somebody or something specific every night. I know it works.”

Sallid uses the term art pieces to differentiate concert works choreographed for his ensemble from commercial dances he creates for television, video and film.

“In the commercial work I’m really ‘selling it,’ ” he says. But commercial producers “don’t trust the art works. Their concepts get really shallow.”

Film and television choreographers are generally “powerless and unable to call their own shots,” he complains. “And the directors don’t always understand what it is you’re talking about.”

Sallid characterizes TV as a medium that “eats it up and spits it out. There are so many things I’ve done on TV that are unmemorable.

“But I’m not putting down the TV business,” he adds with a laugh. “That’s how I make a living.”

The art pieces that Sallid prefers to choreograph and present on concert dance programs are “all balletic and modern,” he says.

The two works that make up the “A Night for Dancing” program--”Love Songs,” a dance suite to Stevie Wonder recordings, and “Hour of Power,” the gospel ballet--include deliberate choreographic references to Alvin Ailey, Antony Tudor, Martha Graham and others who influenced Sallid during his studies at the High School of Performing Arts and the Juilliard School in New York.

“In this ‘black’ gospel work, up rises Tudor with a pique turn,” Sallid points out as an example. “Then there’s a jazz pas de bourree moving into a Graham fall.”

Sallid is emphatic about being thought of as cross-cultural rather than being pigeonholed as a “black dancer/choreographer.”

“My skin is black and I’m a dancer and choreographer,” the Harlem-born choreographer says. “But I’m Jewish. I’m white. I’m Italian--it doesn’t matter. After five minutes in the theater, the walls fall away and color isn’t part of the work.”

The only aspects of the work that are important to him are the ideas and concepts, Sallid says.

“Steps are inconsequential,” he explains. “Dance has nothing to do with ‘dancing’ anymore for me as a choreographer. It’s more the little nuances in what people do that interests me.”

Nuance is a key work for Sallid who says he deliberately leaves lots of “blank spaces” in his choreographies that audiences have the opportunity to fill in from their own experience. His aim, he says, is a form that combines the best of commercial and art dance.

“What I would like to create,” Sallid declares, “is a contemporary ‘Revelations.’ ” The work he refers to is a 25-year-old modern dance classic by Alvin Ailey.

His self-assured attitude has occasionally led to an accusation of arrogance, Sallid admits.

“I am arrogant,” he says, “because it feels good. I put in the work and the time and the energy and I deserve a little piece of the arrogance.”

Of course, Sallid says, there are moments in both the commercial and concert dance work when seemingly insurmountable problems buffet his self-confidence.

“What takes the hard moments and cuts them to the quick is experience, “ he states. “Once you’re a veteran in the wars it’s easy to fight back the doubts.

“I was a spring chicken when I started in this business,” he adds, “but the spring chicken has grown up to be a dragon!”