Samantha Peña got her start in the arts through dance at Rosemont School.
Photo courtesy of Samantha Peña.
Now, she’s pursuing her first post-graduate short film At the Ballet, inspired by her unique public school dance experience in Oak Cliff.
“I had danced only at school so I didn’t go to really any companies within the city like many dancers usually do. I’ve only done public school and so it was like a lot of after school dance stuff,” she says.
The opportunity from Rosemont and the Dallas ISD summer dance intensives, where students could train with professional dancers for ballet, hip-hop, jazz and modern for free, opened her into the world of the arts without the monetary barriers.
Through the summer experience, she gained the opportunity to train on scholarship at Dallas Black Dance Theatre a few times, even furthering her knowledge to learn technical skills that she probably wouldn’t have been able to had she not been there, she says.
“A bunch of students that went to these dance intensives and that I met through different Dallas ISD things for dance, they all came from similar background,” she says. “Dallas has a conclave of people from all over, but majority Hispanic or Black community, like Latino communities, we’d come together and I think for me was the switch up was from when I started high school.”
Photo courtesy of Samantha Peña.
As a teenager, she joined dance at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. While there were many students who had a public school dance background, there were also several others who had extensive outside studio experience. This new understanding was the shift for her view of dance.
“There was some people that had more access to opportunities outside of even what I did so some of them could’ve done some sort of dance intensive as well,” she says. “But then, they also had the means to go to studios after school every day.”
Peña says that gap in access pushed her to work harder, but toward the end of high school she began to have a sour stance toward dance, eventually quitting. Now, reflecting back on those younger years, she acknowledges that the comparison of herself to others got in the way of her prior passion.
After graduating from high school, she moved to New York to attend Pace University, where she went in undecided but two years ago graduated with a bachelor’s of arts in film and screen studies with a minor in art. She has been working in the city since through behind the scenes videography and photography and also production assistance. Now, she is revisiting the dance world through At the Ballet.
“Like many jobs these days, it’s really hard to find a job in the field that you want to do and sometimes you have to create opportunities for yourself, and that was kind of my spark,” she says.
Having now secured her first paid job within the industry at an audio post production company, she is exploring her filmmaking passions off the clock, too. She recently launched “alt + 164 productions” to coincide with the At the Ballet production process.
“I really want it to be a company that can uplift voices of all backgrounds and specifically minority backgrounds,” she says.
Her upcoming short film does just that, following the story of Elsi as she reminisces about her former dance passion and how it has affected her, a storyline that draws from Peña’s own experiences dancing in Dallas.
“Dance speaks loudly, and it’s spoken loudly across different cultures and different types and styles of dance and even the history of dance itself speaks so much of what it is,” she says.
“I think it’s a story that many people who have ever gotten discouraged by whatever reason to stop pursuing something that they love can hopefully give them another spark and realize kind of how I did like, ‘Hey, I don’t have to hate it, but I can love it a different way.’”
