Dancing Identity
A review of Ballet Hispánico at The Broad Stage, March 22, 2019
“What does it mean to be Latinx in a country that’s separated over 2,000 Central American families at the border, where the future of DACA remains perilous, and whose sitting president has labeled Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists?”
That’s a question fellow writer Jessica Flores posited in a piece of hers that I edited for The Argonaut in 2018 and it’s a question that still sits with me a year later.
It comes to mind again as I watch Ballet Hispánico at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica in March — the program featuring work exclusively by Latina choreographers. Though no piece in the program was overtly political, Ballet Hispánico’s jubilant celebration of Latinidad (a Spanish-language term which “attempts to encompass the multifaceted nature of the Latin-American identity”) alone felt like a bold statement in a country where a wall threatens to irrevocably divide the U.S. and Mexico.
On that night, audience members took delight in Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s flamenco flecked “Línea Recta,” (a playful yet courtly piece set to the strains of Spanish guitar), and rose to their feet after Michelle Manzanales’ highly personal “Con Brazos Abiertos,” a meditation on growing up on the border of two cultures — Mexican and American. (Tania Pérez-Salas’ Baroque-inspired “Catorce Dieciséis” rounded out the program as the third and final act.)
A rhythmic whirl of white skirts drives the last movement of Manzanales’ piece as men and women joyously whoosh their deconstructed Folklorico skirts (designed by Diana Ruettiger) to the blare and bounce of a mariachi trumpet. The mix of animated couture with the familiar strains of mariachi music was certainly a crowd-pleaser.
Despite the celebratory finish of the dance, weightier material is a focal point. Before Melissa Verdecia breaks into a somber duet with a sombrero, the words of Edward James Olmos come out of the speakers overhead — his famed monologue on being Mexican American from the 1997 movie “Selena” setting the tone:
“Being Mexican American is tough. … I mean, we gotta know about John Wayne and Pedro Infante. We gotta know about Frank Sinatra and Agustín Lara. We gotta know about Oprah and Cristina. … We gotta be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time. It’s exhausting!”
As if weighing these words, Verdecia dances with the sombrero — trying it on her toe, then chest, then ultimately bending backward into an almost impossible-to-sustain arch. If the sombrero is a symbol for one’s heritage (Manzanales grew up in Houston, Texas torn between her Mexican roots and mainstream American pop culture) then the move reads as a metaphor for the crushing weight of cultural expectations as well as the attempt to balance those things against the formation of one’s own identity.
When Verdecia, balances the sombrero on her toe and looks over her shoulder to examine it, I can almost imagine her interior monologue saying: “Can I balance this? Can I be both Mexican and me?”
It’s a question that should not only resonate with Mexican Americans but any American with an immigrant heritage, Manzanales observed in an interview on Ballet Hispánico’s blog.
“Most everyone in the US is an immigrant, and there are these splintered cultural backgrounds everywhere,” she said. “And so now, everyone is having this experience of figuring out, ‘Who am I?’ This conversation is so important, especially in today’s climate, where so many Americans are being attacked for who they are.”
Her choreographic investigation of this question certainly struck me as the descendant of Latin American immigrants. I live in a household where the chatter of Spanish and the bubble of empanadas can be heard, yet I cannot speak my Ecuadorian-born father’s native tongue, nor the language that my great great grandfather parlayed into a career teaching Spanish to curious Americans. I can trace my roots to Ecuador and Colombia and yet feel like a fraud if I call myself Latina. In school, I was not Latino enough for the Latino kids, nor white enough for the white ones.
What does this make me? Does this make me less Latina? Or less American? It’s an experience that I’m still coming to terms with.
But for the first time, I saw this question of Latinx identity being wrestled with through concert dance — a field overwhelming white and more often than not occupied with aesthetics rather than issues of race or identity — and for that, I was immensely moved and grateful.
