CONVERSATIONS ACROSS THE FIELD OF DANCE STUDIES Cover Photo: Promotional still for Merián Soto’s “I Wish You Were Here” (1987) @ Society of Dance History Scholars Photo Credit: Merian Soto/Pepon Osorio 2014 | VolumeXXXIV Latin Dance AGE www.sdhs.org P 1 A Word from the Guest Editors | Cindy García and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera ...........................3 Unsettling Latinidad: José Limón in “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejías” | James Moreno .........................................................................4 Decelerating Movement: The Identity Politics of Time and Space in Rudy Perez’s Countdown | Victoria Fortuna ........................................................................7 Danzas fronterizas: Contemporary Dance Experiences in the Tijuana-San Diego Region | Minerva Tapia .........................................................................10 Cruel Exuberance: Choreographers Rosie Herrera and Octavio Campos Challenge the Imperatives of Latin Popular Performance | Celeste Fraser Delgado..........................................................13 Braceros and Blackness: Disrupting Racialized Disciplinary Legacies with Joel Valentín- Martínez’s Polvo | Cindy García...........................................................................16 Dancing the Latino Postmodern: A Conversation with Merián Soto (MS), Viveca Vazquez (VV), and Arthur Avilés (AA), moderated and edited by Ramón H. Rivera-Servera (RRS) .................................18 Latin@ Dance on Screen: A conversation between Melissa Blanco Borelli (MB) and Priscilla Peña Ovalle (PP), moderated and edited by Ramón H. Rivera-Servera (RRS) ....................................................21 Contributors .......................................................................23 News SDHS Awards ...................................................................................24 SDHS Publications. ...........................................................................26 Forthcoming Conferences: ................................................................27 March 2015 SDHS Special Topics Conference, Baltimore, MD, USA June 2015 with CORD, in Athens, Greece Table of Contents PAGE 2 2014 Volume XXXIV Dear Reader, This issue of Conversations across the Field of Dance Studies brings exploring their experiences living in the United States. The postmodern into focus Latin@ Dance. But what exactly is Latin@ Dance? Are we approaches Banes identified, privileged the experimental formalisms talking about popular social dances such as salsa, merengue, and of the booming downtown New York dance scene at the time but also bachata? What about modern or postmodern dance - as long as connected to the long history of social, folkloric, and concert dance Latin@s are dancing? In a nightclub, on a stage, or on a screen? And among Latin@ communities in the U.S. what exactly are we supposed to wear to the Latin@ Dance? Though these parameters may be fuzzy, the essays on Latin@ Dance in this Since the late 1990s, scholars have turned to the archives, stages, collection all demonstrate the vitality of latinidad -- the performative screens, and social settings of Latin@ dance in the United States. They repertoires and practices through which Latin@ expressive culture have produced groundbreaking scholarship on contemporary and coheres as meeting points for Latin American-descent communities. historical U.S. Latin@ dance practices and their continuing influence not only within local Latin@ communities but in the national and Latinidad brings under its realm an incredibly diverse population with international dance circuits as well. Here we showcase the work of varied histories and routes of migration to or forceful annexation into the scholars who approach Latin@ dance as both a growing field of inquiry United States. Latinidad also comprises contemporary living conditions within contemporary dance studies and a significant object of study for across a range of politico-economic factors such as race, gender, the project of Latin@ Studies. What Banes announced as a new wave, class, and sexuality. In short, we’ve got a lot going on -- including is now a maturing community of practice that, as documented in the tensions. To think of the choreographies of latinidad, we acknowledge short essays and conversations that comprise this issue, has gained the myriad music and dance practices that have circulated throughout presence in curated programs at venues across the United States and the Americas -- indigenous American, Afro-diasporic, Arabic, Asian, has most recently begun to manifest in scholarship, with a number European, and American -- as well as their confluences in the formation of monographs, critical anthologies, and articles recently published of Latin@ American culture. This entails approaching latinidad as both or forthcoming. a sociological fact in which inter-Latin@ relations and pan-Latino imaginaries are on the rise in the United States, and an analytic in Latin@s now constitute the largest minority population within the United which latinidad is a theoretical framework for interpreting Latin@ States and Latin@ dance practices form a truly hybrid and hemispheric expressive culture. repertoire that has influenced dance scenes around the world from the concert stage to the popular screen and from the nightclub to Rewind 23 years to the 1991 Society of Dance History Scholars annual the athletic club. It is our hope that this issue’s engagement with an meeting held in Miami that focused on Dance in Hispanic Cultures. expansive archive and contemporary network of practices offers At the conference, Sally Banes announced “la onda próxima” or “next un pasaje to some of the most exciting conversations in Latin@ wave” of a U.S. Latin@ postmodern dance scene in New York City Dance Studies. during the 1980s and 1990s. Notably, Banes’ presentation advanced the notion that Latin@ choreographers embraced Latina/o, rather than Hispanic, as a banner for the “new” directions of a dance practice. Such a practice was born from within Latin@ communities invested in Cindy García and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera A word from the Guest Editors www.sdhs.org PAGE 3 Unsettling Latinidad: José Limón in “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejías” James Moreno Mexican-born modern dance choreographer, José Limón (1908- Limón replied through a movement vocabulary blending abstract and 1972), formed The José Limón Dance Company in 1946 and placed mimetic gestures. His movements were taught and bound throughout his mentor, Doris Humphrey as Artistic Director, a role she performed the dance, using tense bodily relationships to dramatize the already for the next twelve years. During this association, Humphrey theatricalized ritual between man and bull. He often moved through choreographed dances for Limón in which he performed as both a space in a hobbled way, beating the ground with one foot while hopping culturally marked and culturally unmarked figure. This article examines on the other. His arms and hands regularly moved up and down the the first of Humphrey and Limón’s collaborations, Lament for Ignacio central axis of his body, sometimes miming the stabbing motions of Sanchez Mejías (1946) based on Federico García Lorca’s poem of the a torero. For his costume, Limón went bear-chested and wore ballet same name. In it, Limón portrayed the renowned Andalusian bullfighter slippers and pants. His pants were reminiscent of a torero’s taleguilla, Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who was gored and killed in the ring. the bullfighter’s tight fitting pants that go to just below the knee. My title, “Unsettling Latinidad”, refers to the ways that Limón’s performance in Lament unsettled latinidad from a fixed geo-political location. Limón’s recognition as both a culturally marked and unmarked figure showed that latinidad was not a fixed or static cultural identity, but a fluid concept that could be connected to, or disconnected from bodies. By culturally marked body I mean a body that is marked as different from dominant and normative cultures (Manning 2006, xv). For example, in the postwar period explored in this paper, the male European-American, or white male body, embodied the dominant normative culture in the United States. This made the white male body culturally unmarked and Limón, culturally marked. However, since Limón was also recognized as culturally unmarked, he unsettled perceptions that tied race to blood and land and revealed flux as a constant rather than anomalous attribute of cultural identity. The Dance By the early 1940s, an arthritic hip had stopped Humphrey from dancing and Lament was the first dance she composed without physically demonstrating the choreography. Through their long working association (Limón had previously danced with the Humphrey/ Weidman Dance Company for ten years) Humphrey and Limón had cultivated a shared movement sensibility that allowed them to construct choreography through images and descriptions of emotions and moods. For example, in rehearsal, Humphrey guided Limón with verbal cues: “[n]ow you are listening, now you hear the bull bellow, now you José Limón in Doris Humphrey’s Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejías at Jacob’s Pillow. hear the trumpet, now you have a feeling of strangulation. What does John Lindquist photograph © The Harvard Theatre Collection, it mean when you pull up your shoulder? How does it make you feel?” The Houghton Library. (Humphrey quoted in Cohen 1972,187) PAGE 4 2014 Volume XXXIV While there are films of Limón performing Lament, most are in