A Santa Cruz Troupe Picks Up the Pieces : Dance: Financially strapped Tandy Beal & Company hasn’t missed a performance since last fall’s earthquake.

“If 15 seconds made so many profound changes in peoples’ lives,” choreographer Tandy Beal said, speaking of the Oct. 17, 1989, earthquake in Northern California, “try to imagine what war is like.”

Beal said that she was just about to “grab the brass ring” of economic stability when the temblor struck. Now, Tandy Beal & Company, her Santa Cruz-based modern dance troupe, is entering its 15th year facing significant setbacks.

Parts of Santa Cruz, where many of the troupe’s donors live and own businesses, were seriously damaged. An innovative source of additional income, Cafezinho, a downtown coffee house owned by the dance company, is now a rubble-strewn hole in the ground.

Dancers, staff and supporters are all still recovering from earthquake traumas ranging from loss of homes, business and possessions to total nervous exhaustion.

In spite of it all, Beal points with pride to the fact that the company, which will be performing at Cal State Los Angeles today and at UC Riverside Saturday, has not missed a scheduled performance since the earthquake.

Part of the credit, she said, goes to the company’s administrative staff. “People say artists have passion and madness for their work, but our staff has the spirit too.”

Company managing director Sheila Baumgarten said that both the cafe, set up with a Skaggs Foundation grant to help the dance group become self-supporting, and the building that housed the company offices were declared unsafe following the quake.

“Cafezinho was run as a separate corporation that contributed up to $10,000 to our annual budget,” Baumgarten explained. The loss--none of which was insured against earthquake damage--was not only monetary, she said. “The cafe has helped us maintain a presence in the community since 1986. We also lost a month of work and suffered a psychological setback.”

The condemnation of the company’s office left the computer and all the company records inaccessible for three weeks. “Finally,” Baumgarten said, “we were allowed to send in four people wearing hard hats and given two hours to clear out the office we had used for 12 years.”

Baumgarten said that similar arrangements were made for removing property from the cafe before the building was demolished. The company has applied for a federal emergency loan but the process is moving slowly since many of the necessary records were lost in the quake.

The artistic work was not seriously disrupted, said Beal. The dancers had recently returned from the company’s 11th overseas tour--a State Department sponsored jaunt behind the fading Iron Curtain--and had completed its local season as well.

“The last performance of the season was a day before the quake,” Beal said, “It was a childrens’ piece called ‘Feel the Earth.’ We certainly felt it.”

Beal was teaching a modern dance class when the earthquake struck. “The students all bailed out right away,” she said. “Then I looked out and saw cars bouncing around on the street and thought I’d better leave the building too.”

When the shaking stopped, she and the dancers realized they were standing barefoot in a blackberry patch.

The quake didn’t give her any misgivings about remaining in California, she said. “All of life is about risk. At least this was a natural risk. Other places suffer from ‘people risks’ such as crime and war,” she said.

“And,” she added, “the spirit of creation keeps happening against the backdrop of destruction.”