DANCE : Stepping in a New Direction : Gema Sandoval is turning her attention from Plaza de la Raza to concentrate on Danza Floricanto/ USA, a reaffirmation of her artistic roots

It’s Saturday afternoon in Lincoln Park and the familiar rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat of hard-heeled shoes on a wooden floor floats out to the sunny patio courtyard.

Inside a nearby room, men in workout togs and women in flowing cotton skirts form lines and geometric patterns, recreating rituals of courtship and combat. And at the center of this whirl of staccato sound, there’s a small woman with a timer hung around her neck. Half mom and half coach, she urges the young dancers on, unifying them in a single dynamic tableau.

The woman is Gema Sandoval. The company, Danza Floricanto/USA, is the oldest professional Mexican folk troupe in Los Angeles. And the place is Plaza de la Raza. All three are fixtures of Eastside community culture.

But change waits in the wings. Artistic director Sandoval is about to alter her course, or at least a major part of it. And even though the redirection won’t be evident when Danza Floricanto/USA performs as part of the Summer Nights series at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre next Sunday, it has already begun to have an effect on Plaza de la Raza.

Sandoval, who has worn two hats for the past six years, is poised to trade them in for one. Although she’s technically been on vacation for some time, Thursday marks her official departure as Plaza de la Raza’s executive director. She plans to devote herself full-time to Danza Floricanto/USA.

Sandoval has always identified herself first as an artist. Indeed, as a folkloric choreographer, she’s built a reputation by infusing her own interpretations of Chicano culture, feminism and other contemporary perspectives into the tradition of Mexican folk dance.

And as one of the very few Latina performing arts presenters in the country, Sandoval has also become widely known in the national nonprofit arts scene, speaking frequently at conferences both in the United States and abroad.

Danza Floricanto/USA, formerly Floricanto Dance Theatre, was first formed in 1975. Under Sandoval’s direction, it has developed a repertory of costumed dances that represent traditions from 17 Mexican states, as well as contemporary works created by Sandoval.

The troupe has danced in Mexico City and Tijuana and performed for Nelson Mandela and England’s Prince Andrew. It is on the California Arts Council’s and the Music Center’s touring rosters. And they have rat-a-tatted their way into the hearts and minds of countless Southland schoolchildren.

That’s partly because there’s more to Danza Floricanto/USA than the deferential damas and macho men of so many folkloric troupes. Under Sandoval’s guidance, the group has created a new version of an old style--a hybrid aesthetic that grew out of the choreographer’s affection for her own inherited culture.

“It’s what I grew up with, and at some point it didn’t say all that I wanted it to say,” says Sandoval of Mexican folklorico . “That continues to be the genre that I understand how to manipulate. That’s my language. We are careful to maintain the traditional things just so. But what I am trying to say goes beyond the Mexican experience.”

Besides, the choreographer argues, putting traditional dance onstage is already a change. “Even as you put them onstage, you’ve already violated a tradition,” she says. “These dances were never meant to go onstage. They were meant to be danced as social or religious rites of passage. And now we’re using it for entertainment purposes.”

To entertain, and to educate, that is. That’s why Sandoval often includes written or verbal explanations of the dances in her programs, in order to fill in whatever knowledge gaps her audience may have.

“There are many things about the Chicano experience that are foreign to the rest of the world: the way that we interpret the world, the icons and the specific mythology that we work with,” she says. “It demystifies it when you put it onstage and explain some of it. We all go onstage because we want to make ourselves understood.”

One thing Sandoval wants understood is that her culture is not static. And one change is the comparatively feminist perspective she tries to illustrate onstage. “A woman’s role in most societies is a passive one,” she says. “Generally, we wait for things to happen to us and then we react to them.”

But it didn’t take much to make the dances reflect a more modern point of view. “In the specific choreographies that are very traditional, all that I’ve done is made her an active participant,” says Sandoval. “That has allowed certain choreographic movements that otherwise would not have been possible.”

The 1991 “Epopeya Mestiza” (Mestizo Epic)--a partial new version of which, “Jornada Mestiza” (Mestizo Journey), will premiere at the Ford performance--is a showcase for Sandoval’s eclectic style. The dance spans five centuries of Mexican and Mexican-American history and was created in response to the touring exhibition “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries,” which was seen at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in October, 1991.

Last summer, the troupe premiered another major new work, “America Tropical,” also on the Ford bill, a suite of social dances set to Latin jazz. The other premiere on the Ford program, “California del Ayer, Hoy y Siempre” (California of Yesteryears, Today and Always), is a three-part work that embraces both early California culture and contemporary music and dance forms such as Norteno and Quebradita.

“I don’t want the work to be perceived as something that is happening in another place at another time,” she says. “We are now.”

In fact, Sandoval sometimes refers to her most contemporary works, which may include spoken dramatic narratives, as well as Sandoval’s own explanatory texts, as her “Chicano” works. “If we continue to do only folkloric, it’s not the concern of anyone,” she says. “I’ll do whatever it is I need to do within my aesthetic to make it seem to the public today that it’s the reality that’s here in this neighborhood.”

The neighborhood, after all, means a great deal to Sandoval. Mexican-born, she grew up in Los Angeles and went on to study at Cal State Los Angeles and Pepperdine. She was a folklorico teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District when she first formed a core dance company with a group of her advanced high school students.

But first, she and her young minions had to find a place to rehearse that would be considered neutral turf. “We came here to Plaza de la Raza because we wanted to have a place where the kids wouldn’t think ‘I can’t go there because only Roosevelt kids go there,’ ” she says.

Floricanto has matured concurrently with Sandoval’s tenure at Plaza de la Raza. She served on the center’s board for eight years before becoming executive director in 1988.

Since then, she has continued to use the facility to rehearse her company. But critics say she may have paid too much attention to the latter and not enough to her duties as head of the former. In fact, the most common charge is that Sandoval has kept the Eastside venue--which includes a small theater and a number of rehearsal/multi-use halls of varying sizes--underused.

“The theater is a fantastic, underutilized asset,” says Sean Carrillo of downtown’s Troy, a cafe and arts venue that serves as a gathering spot for Latino artists and others. “When I produced a show (the Nopalote Awards in March 1993) there, I was surprised to find the capabilities of their facilities and the technology that was available. All of these things are just locked away upstairs somewhere.”

Even Sandoval is aware that there has been a problem. “Saturdays and evenings I was rehearsing all the time. For six years I tried to do this, and more and more the plaza kept infringing on my Floricanto time,” Sandoval says. “When we (Floricanto) were going on tours, I had to really pull some rank to get out. So it was coming closer and closer to a decision time. When I started, it wasn’t like that at all. It was easy to say, ‘this was Plaza time, this was Floricanto time.’ ”

“I was beginning to have (to attend to) presenting, classes and the gamut of (the activities of) a community arts organization. It was imperative that the executive director be part of that. And I was really having a tough time. We have been working toward easing me out for a while. I let them know about a year ago.”

Rumors that the parting of ways has been acrimonious persist, although both Sandoval and board chairperson/interim director Lydia Lopez deny reports of “turmoil.”

Clearly, though, there have been changes. A reconstituted board of directors includes four new members. Perhaps the key discussion surrounding Sandoval’s departure, though, is the broader debate about whether Plaza de la Raza ought to continue to be primarily a community arts venue with an emphasis on traditional forms, or a more eclectic showcase for all kinds of work by Latino artists from all over.

While a number of Latino artists and others in the community are reluctant to speak for attribution on such matters, they place the blame for Plaza de la Raza’s comparatively low profile in the contemporary arts on Sandoval. It has been, they argue, a missed opportunity.

This debate has become more pressing in light of the recent failure of Proposition 180, which would have provided $10 million for the state’s Latino Museum in L.A., which would have no direct affiliation with Plaza de la Raza, but would add to the possibilities for exhibiting Latino arts. (That project is proceeding, but it won’t come to fruition nearly as quickly as it might have, had the funds been approved.)

For Troy’s Carrillo, a former member of the avant-garde Chicano artists collective ASCO, which was active in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Plaza de la Raza has always been somewhat irrelevant. “Growing up in East L.A., the plaza didn’t mean anything to me,” says Carrillo. “Historically, it never represented anything except the arcane and I don’t think that ever changed. They stand for upholding some kind of traditional cultural values, but those seemed, during a period in my life, to be indistinguishable from Olvera Street.”

Clearly, no one venue can be all things to all Latinos. And some say that Sandoval was in a no-win situation, especially given how few Latino-oriented and/or Latino-run venues there are. “The challenge for every arts center is being in a position to set up reasonable community expectations for what you can deliver with the resources at hand,” says California Plaza artistic director Michael Alexander.

There’s also a tendency to demand too much from the few who do hold positions of power--women and men who may want, as Sandoval does, to pursue their own individual artistic careers at the same time. “In those communities that have been marginalized, when somebody starts to emerge there’s sometimes the expectation that they’re going to be able to meet the needs of everyone,” says Alexander. “But that sometimes doesn’t meet the artistic needs of the individual.”

Yet whether or not Sandoval has been able to meet her own artistic needs, she has long brought an important perspective to the regional arts dialogue. “I’ve known her to be an eloquent, frequent voice for the Latino community,” continues Alexander, who has known Sandoval for more than a decade. “She’s been a willing contributor of her time, making sure that the arts interests of her community are kept in the forefront.”

Certainly Sandoval’s future path seems more clear than that of Plaza de la Raza. She continues to speak to arts groups across the country and to serve on National Endowment for the Arts and other panels. And she plans to start a center for folkloric dance and is in the process of finding a site.

Yet Sandoval will also continue to be concerned with the particular issues that face Latino artists, and with the strategies for their advancement. “One of the things that we people of color--particularly second and third generation--are used to doing is straddling two cultures,” she says. “The secret of our success is going to be the ability to straddle two different cultures.

“Every time you straddle, you bring some of the one side to the other, so there’s a continuous tainting of the two cultures going on. But it creates synthesis in the end.”

* “Danza Floricanto/USA,” John Anson Ford Amphitheater, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood, next Sunday, 7 p.m., $15 (under 12, $7). (213) 466-1767.