City Dance Company

"Sherese, Every time I think about your dance company I smile, feel the tingles, and get inspired. If this can happen to me, I know that you must have an even greater positive impact on other viewers, not to mention the many dancers who have been blessed by your talents. Keep it up; you're doing great."
Albert J. (Bert) Smith III
Principal
Inwood Management
Houston, TX 77098 USA

Sherese Campbell: The Great Motivator

Ten years ago, Sherese Campbell set out to create a dance company capable of embodying her ambitious and eclectic artistic vision. Committed to forming a dance company that would reflect her own experiences, as well as the diverse lives of its dancers, Ms. Campbell combined the principles of her artistic training with a personal goal to positively affect social change. In 1994, Ms. Campbell established City Dance, Inc. bringing together dancers from a myriad of ethnic and cultural backgrounds from all parts of the city of Houston. At this point, Ms. Campbell's dream of a multi-ethnic, socially conscious and artistically vibrant company became a reality.

Now, having long established City Dance Studio on a foundation of passion, integrity, and technical precision, City Dance works every day to expand and enrich the boundaries of contemporary dance. Utilizing the medium of dance, which can be at once graceful and volcanic, ethereal and dramatic, City Dance repeatedly invents and reinvents itself artistically on the stage and with their high level of public service in the community.

Ms. Campbell has watched her company grow constantly teaching students and dancers to find their own voices along the way. The Company maintains an "Artist-in-Residence" status with Rice University and has performed extensively in Houston, other area venues and abroad, including Spain, France, Switzerland, and Monaco. Ms. Campbell's work with the company led the Houston press to describe City Dance as "urban, edgy, explosive, and very sexy.

Sherese Campbell is a graduate of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She trained under masters Larry Long, Lou Conte, and Maria Tallchieff and studied with the Ruth Page Foundation of Dance in Chicago Illinois. Later, she worked as a scholarship student with the Dance Theater of Harlem in the 1970s before touring Europe and the United States as a professional dancer and teacher with one of Finland's premiere dancing institution in the 1980s. Prior to founding City Dance, Inc., Ms. Campbell chaired the dance department at Episcopal High School in Houston, and taught dance at Prairie View A & M University. Sherese Campbell has just received an individual artist fellowship grant for her edgy and beautiful choreography from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County. Ms. Campbell is regarded by many in the dance community as one of the most inspiring and motivational dance teachers in Houston today.

The company is a flowing tapestry of visual and aural experience, and to watch City Dance perform is to see the pulsing synthesis of cultures, languages, neighborhoods, and lives. The company's practice studio shakes with the beating rhythms of innovation and tradition, the near-primordial screams and echoes of the mind working with and against the body, gathering a verve that spills into the performance halls and out onto the city's streets. These soulful emanations, dance and music and all that follows, are the sewn-together strands of diverse pieces of experience, and are in fact dialects in the language of the children of urban American life.

City Dance is a place where voices are given life, where feelings are provided structure and focus, and where dancers can do what they love. Always working towards this goal, Ms. Campbell has watched her company grow constantly teaching students and dancers to find their own voices along the way. As well as its "Artist-in-Residence" status with Rice University, City Dance has performed extensively in Houston and abroad, in Spain, France, Switzerland, and Monaco, and Ms. Campbell's work with the company led the Houston press to describe City Dance as "urban, edgy, explosive, and very sexy. The men and women perform awe-inspiring combinations, twisting, leaping, spinning, jumping and jiving with ease."

Always engaging and compelling, City Dance confronts the complicated social and cultural issues that shape our communities. With a fresh and invigorating fusion of styles, from ballet and classical to jazz and hip-hop, Ms. Campbell and her company use dance to explore the deep valleys and the soaring mountaintops of their vast urban landscape.