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Dancing Queen

You’ve seen her moves during timeouts at Dallas Mavericks games—at one time as a dancer and now as the director of the Dallas Mavs dancers. But Shella Sattler is shaking up more than just basketball games. Power House of Dance, her studio in North Dallas,
By D Magazine |

Just as the referee shouts, “Timeout, Mavericks!” the sound system at American Airlines Center gets cranked and the beat of Pink’s hip-hop hit “Get the Party Started” pulsates in the seats. A swirl of girls in satin black-and-blue hip-huggers glides across the court.

Paula Abdul, eat your heart out. Shella Sattler is kicking your booty.

You have probably seen Sattler—and her booty. She’s cheered for the Dallas Cowboys and LA Clippers, and she performed as a Dallas Mavericks dancer herself. A graduate of SMU with a degree in dance performance, Sattler danced professionally in the United States and Europe, touring with rap star MC Hammer. The show-stopping brunette is currently the director of the Mavericks dancers.

But choreographing those sexy, 30-second routines is the least of her claims to fame. Sattler is grabbing the national hip-hop spotlight as the owner of The Power House of Dance Studio in North Dallas.

When she founded Power House in 1995, her goal was modest. “Three hundred,” she says now, sitting in her office and flashing her high-performance smile. “That was my break-even point in the beginning. If we had 300 students, I knew we would make it.” Today she and her staff teach more than 1,500 students from age 2 to adult, at all levels of talent and training. But it is mostly teens that crowd the studio rooms, dressed in huge, low-slung pants, oversized plaid shirts, rugby jerseys, knit caps, hot pants, and baby-doll tops.

Power House offers all kinds of dance instruction. But the blend of dance and aerobics mixed with the beat and panache known as hip-hop, or urban dance, has energized the old-school disciplines of ballet, tap, jazz, drill, cheer, and modern dance. “We were the first to make hip-hop lessons a sensation with the kids,” Sattler says. “Traditional dance is ballet, jazz, modern, and tap. In the past, you had to take lessons from the age of 3 or 4 or you couldn’t make it as a professional dancer.” The concert circuit, with its need for precision dancers, has changed the market dynamics of dance. Power House was the first to capitalize on the new wave.

“HAVE AN EMPOWERING day,” reads the sign on the studio’s door. And while watching three of Sattler’s senior dancers prepare for competition, power is what comes to mind. The girls are still lanky teens, but even through the sweats it’s easy to see they’re muscled, conditioned, strong. At Power House you’ll also see girls who are big-breasted and booty-full. There are no anorexic dancers in this company. “All the stories about starved ballerinas are absolutely true,” Sattler says. “But my dancers don’t feel their worth is tied up in their physical image. They have self-respect, and it shows in their body.”

Hip-hop made line secondary to movement in dance. The energy is what matters. Percolating up from the streets where it started, hip-hop style changed the body shape of dance.

These girls—well-heeled and mostly white—fling themselves to the floor, raise their arms to the ceiling, stretch their bodies as they move, pirouette gracefully, and shake seductively in the studio mirrors. The moves are based in classic dance, but they express the emotive quality that comes only through pop music, the hyperbolic drama that’s only real when you’re young, the raw emotion we expect from rock, not performance dance. These are suburban kids studying street style, the cultural flip-flop of hip-hop. These kids are dancing with the focus—you could call it self-absorption—that comes naturally to teens, unaware that they are affluent, suburban, white girls dancing like poor, urban, black boys.

They take pride in being Power House girls, but they keep their eye on other dance studios in town. A few even take classes at other studios. One top dancer, Marcella Raneri, came to Power House last year after dancing elsewhere. “You were always aware of Power House dancers at competitions,” she says. “Then for a few years they stopped coming. But now they’re back.”

Feedback like this goes straight to Sattler, who is fiercely protective of her studio’s reputation. “She’ll ask us whom we’d like to have teach here,” says Lexy Hulme, another star performer. And she listens to their answers. Jason Parsons and Adam Parsons were both brought down from the Broadway Dance Center in New York as guest teachers.

“I watch the kids’ faces more than anything,” Sattler says. “Kids are my measurement of how well a teacher is doing. If they’re smiling, laughing, and learning, we’re on target. If your choreography is missing something, if the moves are boring, you see it on the kids’ faces.”

Proof of her success? Teachers from other studios attend workshops and take dance at Power House. “I love it,” Sattler says, flashing her gleaming power grin again, “when I see my competitors’ teachers taking class at my studio.”

The competition among Dallas dance studios is fierce. With the market an ever-changing pool of teenagers who graduate and move on, there is no resting on past laurels. Sattler’s latest project is, as usual, a first in Dallas: this fall, she’s starting a 50-member company for hip-hop dancers. The Hip Hop Extreme Company will teach all kinds of urban dance, and there will be no prerequisite formal dance required—only rhythm, enthusiasm, and high-wattage power.

“I always have to stay a step ahead,” Sattler says. “Twenty-five steps is even better.”

Mary Brown Malouf is a D Magazine contributing editor.

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