A Surprising Global Dance Showcase, Deep in the Heart of Texas

Harold George, a young dancer from Sierra Leone, was studying in Belgium in 1992 when a friendly Texas expat named Nancy Henderek invited him to perform in a showcase at the international school her children attended. She called the concert Dance Salad because of its bite-size sampling of styles and artists, including some of the city’s best professional companies.

“It was her little thing on the side,” George recalled in an interview from Brussels, where he’s now the director and choreographer of Dunia Dance Theater. Two more Belgian Dance Salads followed, and it could have ended there, a fond memory from an overseas adventure. Henderek, though, returned to the United States, not with a new language or an expanded gastronomic palate, but with a dance festival.

“Born in Brussels, brought up in Houston” is how Henderek, 76, likes to describe the festival. She decided to replant it in Texas, she said in a Zoom interview, because “international dance needed to be represented here, too.”

The festival, which became Henderek’s full-time focus, is now a mainstay on the city’s cultural calendar. On April 14-16, Dance Salad celebrates the 25th anniversary of its American incarnation — not counting two years lost to Covid — with a lineup of top international artists (all originally intended for the 2020 festival), that includes the Royal Ballet of Flanders from Belgium, the Hofesh Shechter Company from England and Dunia Dance Theater, as well as companies from Denmark, Germany and France.

How did these artists come to share a mixed-bill program for three nights in a city that’s not known as a global dance hub?

One answer is Henderek’s distinctive vision. She presents many dances — or parts of them — in one night (similar to New York’s eclectic annual Fall for Dance programs), rather than, as in a traditional festival model, giving each company an evening, or several, to itself. “It’s pulling the world together in my own way,” she said.

Each work appears on at least two of the three programs so audience members attending multiple shows, which many do, watch some dances twice. “I’m a big believer in seeing a piece twice,” Henderek said. Upon first viewing, “you get a feel for a piece. And then you want to see it again to see what resonates and what really blooms.”

But what distinguishes the Dance Salad even more is Henderek’s hands-on involvement in editing some of those dances to fit the program. This year, three works will be presented in what she calls a “curated version” so audiences “see work that they will never see anywhere else in that particular way,” Henderek said. That may not be a goal of other dance presenters, but it has become part of Dance Salad’s distinct identity.

As soon as she saw Shechter’s evening-length “Grand Finale” a few years ago, Henderek began imagining an excerpt that would be suitable for this year’s salad. “I felt right away that it had the resonance of something I could bring,” she said. If she started with the pas de deux in the middle of the first act and continued to the end of that act, she said, “that would be a unit of performance that would work for Dance Salad.” She approached Shechter with this idea.

“It took me a moment,” he said in an interview about showing an excerpt. He’d always thought of “Grand Finale” as a stand-alone piece, but Henderek’s proposal to present it with other short works eventually sounded to him “like a cool idea.” He also saw that stripping away some of the design elements — like a wall that’s prohibitively expensive to travel with — revealed the dance’s human side. “I like how limitations make you look at the work in a different way,” he said. His primary concern was “that the heart of the piece was preserved.”

That’s Henderek’s priority too. She has danced since she was 3, including for years with the Houston Grand Opera; taught dance in Texas and abroad; and has even choreographed, including for the first few Dance Salads. Her background informs a deep respect for the craft of dance making. When she asks choreographers to consider revisions, she said, she is inviting them to reimagine a work rather than merely trim it.

“It’s not a statue, and you cut off the arm,” she said. “I’m just a little bird saying, ‘How about this way?’ It puts up a little challenge.” Choreographers as acclaimed as Jiri Kylian and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui have collaborated with Henderek on edited versions of their works. Others have declined — but “fewer than you’d guess,” she said.

In the end, a “curated” work is still entirely the creation of the choreographer and must have its own artistic integrity, which is why George agreed to edit his dance “Making Men,” a critical examination of masculinity, for this year’s festival. (An accompanying film, directed by Antoine Panier, will also be screened.)

“I trust her,” George said of Henderek. “She has a good eye. She has good taste.” Of course, there are moments of frustration, he said, and as an African artist, he noted, “there’s a cultural distance between us. The stories I’m trying to tell, she may not see. But she will engage in that conversation.”

Henderek is also keenly aware of her audience. The full-length “Making Men” involves depictions of sexuality and violence as a way to probe masculine conditioning. “She said, ‘No, I don’t think that will work in Houston,’” George said. “She does have her sensibilities.” Henderek said that her intention was to keep the focus in the right place and that if a choreographer dwells on something provocative, the audience “will miss something else.” But, she added, “I want to expose audiences to things that make them reach.”

That balance between comfort and challenge, stylistically and thematically, is one reason audiences return. “She has gathered an audience that trusts her,” said the Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, whose work was first shown in the United States at Dance Salad, in 2006. “They buy a ticket not knowing what they’ll see but ready to discover different aesthetics in dance. They’re in for the ride.”

Along with her curatorial eye, it’s Henderek’s organizational force of will that has allowed the immense logistical feat that is Dance Salad to endure for a quarter century. She remains the festival’s artistic director and sole curator, running a lean operation of part-time and seasonal administrative and production teams. Given that most Dance Salad artists are not United States citizens, she has also become an expert in visa applications. (“You have them in before Christmas if you want them by April.”) Funding is pieced together from local sources, in-kind services and corporate sponsors, including modest contributions from Exxon-Mobil, where her husband worked, which is how she ended up in Brussels in the first place.

“She’s an extraordinary impresario, and a savvy operator” said Nancy Wozny, a Houston-based arts journalist who attended the first Texas Dance Salad and most since.

The effort has made Houston perhaps the most exciting dance city in America for one weekend a year. Maggie Foyer, a dance writer in London, said, “I travel widely, but there is no other date on my calendar when I can see so much fine dance all in one place.” Foyer, who has attended Dance Salad regularly since 2008, will host the festival’s annual Choreographer’s Forum on April 13. In Houston, she said, “I see dance that I would not see in London.”

Wozny sees homegrown qualities in Henderek’s and the festival’s voracious appetites, which can lead to marathon programs that approach three hours. “There’s a largeness to anything Texas, and there’s an expansiveness to Dance Salad,” Wozny said, which then reminded her of another Texas spectacle that inspires similar devotion: “It’s our rodeo.”