Written words

Latinx Literature: Choreographic Lens on Experimental Form in The People of Paper by Salvador Plasencia

Link to free article from 2020: click here

Theresa Delgadillo, Professor

Shifting Towards Active Engagement: Re-Imagining Spectatorship in Dance & Performance

Link to free article from 2019: click here

Nadine George-Graves, Professor

When Dance is Found—Again

HERE

All for abundance⚡️
Always thankful when another human has a self-discovery journey with finding somatics through a dance series.

Curious note: What have dance studies practitioners and scholars been doing in education all this time?
Not sure about most of this article’s claims to have been found, given the longstanding record. But hey, what do I know?

I guess you can re-discover it.

My philosophies, theories, and values differ greatly from those implemented in the article, so I will not be examining those at this time.

(polite censor)

Respectfully. Mervyn Marcano said, “Move at the speed of trust.”

With Abundance⚡️

LROD

3/1/25

The information below was fully accessible until the summer of 2024, when LROD took a short break.

LATINE MOVEMENT:
EMBODIED INTERSECTIONS OF LATIN DANCE,
MUSIC, and COMMUNAL PRACTICES

COURSE STARTED IN 2018 - 2024

What is contemporary dance?

Latinx/é Movement Practice started not as a trickle-down structure, not as a place of exclusion, and not for aesthetic creation, but as a place to pull the conversations together through embodiment while seeing, valuing, and appreciating who was in the room. I say this because this course was designed specifically for embodied curriculum within the ecology of higher education. I say this not for the sake of embodied studies because this is always strange to me as someone who is an embodied practitioner who rather prioritizes designing experiences and conversations through the movement of the body—aka choreographic strategy. But let’s shift; soon, the course emerged as a Latinx Movement Practice in 2018, which is more of a call back to the original proposal of Latinx Movement Practice at the intersection of Latinx studies’ art, literature, and music connections, however, the dance department at the time thought this type, of course, was not possible and reduced my capacity. At Harvard, I expanded to Latinx Movement: Intersections of Latin dance, music, and communal practice in 2020. The course had one more shift from x to e for linguistic purposes after receiving feedback from the community. Something we provoked in the course as part of the socio-political component and umbrella academic terminologies for identity. This course examines history, migration, sociopolitical articles, journals, and videos. The histories we discussed include African, indigenous, Latin, and European diasporas, moving forward toward Indian and Asian connections. The community was a mix of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students who came from all over the campus. We have reflective and critical responses with multi-modal engagements as time passes. We research more spaciously through the forms, music, and people who contribute. We break down the divides. Everything and everyone is connected in these rooms regardless of how complicated the histories are, and that is the most valuable takeaway. As a facilitator, I note that even the deep tangles of indigenous, European (Spanish included), Asian, Indian, and African (more) ancestries are a part of the conversations. Afro-Latinx honoring and visibility are crucial in these spaces, as respect for language erasure/differences and inclusion of accepting a spectrum of perspectives. Nosotros Somos. If one has never stepped inside, one does not understand what mobilizes in this course. I know this all sounds impossible, but history tells differently; the Workers' Dance League is known and documented to incorporate a fabric of constellatory ideas (yes, communism) but remember, this group included Anna Sokolow, Jane Dudley, Sophie Maslow, and José Limón, then came New Dance Group which gave rise to many critical creative and scholarly embodied movement practitioners, and I am sure many more who have not been having recognized throughout history have made similar impacts. Stacey Prickett (1989) wrote about this in her article “From Workers' Dance to New Dance.”

What happens when pedagogical philosophies, activism, and equitable educational initiatives are activated and mobilized in the room? Again, this is a familiar methodology because communities have been doing this outside the institution for centuries, but that's the point. How can dance be separated into formal, vernacular, and social? How can a higher institution determine the foundational credits without discrimination of dance histories' expanded lineages? This means that we do not erase or devalue dance/movement researchers, artists, and scholars as the prime sources for embodiment. We have been experiencing the embodiment you just stumbled upon our whole lives. The field is crucial to configuring the expanded conversations, not chopped and sold for parts (as I have experienced). Perhaps institutions have been looking at the configurations of contemporary performance all wrong. Past 2020, we know this already: the system needed to stop, shift, and re-evaluate what dance was doing curricularly. Who do we serve? How do we think about dance as an education and profession? These are all essential and constant questions to sit with. The lineages of dance have been at the core of society for as long as humans have existed. Except for a brief period, a film called Footloose documented a whole town that didn't dance. The last sentence is a joke. Dance was the heartbeat of our social function pre-industrialization, modernization, and capitalization. Suppose one cannot re-engineer or re-imagine what dance and movement possibilities are for educational purposes in alignment with our present moment (2023). I say this because I have watched people continue to remove those of us who are embodied practitioners with experiential educational scaffolds ready to be built, but because the profile doesn’t fit a certain expectation because the qualification is experience (meaning experiential), and I also mean broader than before–the doors remain narrow. I am all for abundance, but the rotating doors, leveraging artists, and galvanization must stop. If you want embodiment, bring the practitioner/scholar to the table. Do not research them, find them, discover them, or limit their intellectual capacity.

In that case, I am at a standstill. The standstill is good; I will breathe, rest, play, and scaffold during the low tide. I know the work I do is part of a larger fabric, constellation, and ocean, and will just continue moving—because movement is my first language.

⚔️

With Abundance⚡️,

LROD

01/01/24

Livable Futures: Climate Gatherings

“Every month in 2019, we are hosting small groups interested in moving through it in a transmedia performance ritual of sound, light, water, and intermedia immersion. We find that holding space for feeling into thought makes intentional action more possible. We are in Germany now but will have more gatherings in Columbus starting in August. Join us: livablefuturesnow.org” - Norah Zuniga Shaw.

Until 2024, I was a contributing and core artist of Livable Futures, and my involvement with Livable Futures started in 2016. My role began as an experimental dancer in the work and evolved to lighting, costume, media, and co-creative collaborator. Climate Gatherings Lecture for the co-creative environment, allowing those involved to dive deeply towards artistic change, and theoretical, and factual implications. During our rehearsals and residencies, we have held space for special guests like Tonya Lockyer, Michelle Ellsworth, Pamala Z, Andre Zachary, and Susan Kozel to participate in the collaboration process. Through these rich explorations, we have discovered the width and depth of different variables essential to the work. Alongside these special guests are the core members, Norah Zuniga Shaw, Oded Huberman, Marc and Ann Ainger, Dorian Ham, Lexi Stilianos, Laura Patterson, Tara Burns, and myself. The audience collaborates with this work because they are personally invited to complete a survey before attending. The reason for this is that Norah can source the audience for texts to connect on a deeper level of performance, like sewing in the audience's thoughts about the environment of the performance for action versus passivity. Having an inside scope of how the audience participates is further research for me when building co-creative immersive environments.

As a dance practitioner, these lectures challenge me to investigate deep dives into spaces where time no longer exists, warps forward, and slows down. The work starts with a simple score - improvise with a partner but stay entirely in sync with each other. While this task seems easy, it is very complex to be identical to someone in an improvisation. My partner has shifted over the two years, but there is an expenditure on the possibilities of movement operations each time. My work with movement has seeped into states of deep meditation, internal/external critique, and hyper-awareness of space and time throughout this project.

Sharing rich dialogue of transmedia performance with more communities is deeply needed in our present moment.

CO-CREATORS

Norah Zuniga Shaw, voice and movement improvisation, intermedia design

Oded Huberman, intermedia design, technical director, interactive sound performance

LROD, Laura Rodriguez, movement improvisation, intermedia design @lrod_portal

Tara Burns, movement improvisation @taralovinsugar

Dorian Ham, DJ and “objects of extraction” percussionist Columbus, OH

Byron AuYong, “objects of extraction” percussionist NYC @hearbyron

Michael Morris, Ritual Facilitator Columbus, OH

Tonya Lockyer, Ritual Facilitator NYC and Creative Producer

Marc Ainger, multichannel sound design / custom interactive software design

Antarctic expedition tent, loan from Byrd Polar Research Center. Contributing designer and directors Nadia Lauro, Michelle Ellsworth, Ohad Fishof, Noa Zuk.

Photos by: Studio Kin

LA POCHA NOSTRA

During 2018-2020, as a former core member, I worked with the international company La Pocha Nostra with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Balitrónica, Emma Tramposch, and Saul. Not only has this radical team of performance artists changed my life, but they have also helped me find a home in the performance art world where my work as a performance artist, mask and apparel maker, collaborator, and choreographer can all converge within the cultural, liberatory, and political Pocha universe. The opportunity to perform research within a lineage of cultural aesthetics was beneficial. I believe futurity beyond the cultural borders of stereotypes and traditional production is possible. The masks and apparel shown here are all designed and assembled by me to create personas for our activism and street performance interventions.

Photos: Heather Lynn Sparrow

Taco Reparations Brigade

Taco Reparations Brigade (TRB) founding members are Paloma Martinez-Cruz, Ruben Castille-Herrera (RIP 2019), LROD, and Bryan Ortiz.
Photos: Michael Babcock

TRB ORIGINS READ HERE

TRB sets out to confront the food appropriations in the streets of Columbus, OH, with performance as a protest. As a co-founder with Paloma Martinez Cruz, Ruben Castilla Herrera (RIP), Bryn Ortiz, and Nicholas Pasquarello. Usually spotted around local Mexican or Latin food restaurants that have stolen Latin food to capitalize. This group is a radical pop-up performance group spreading awareness of culinary brownface. TRB performs as a Lucha Libre in the streets of Columbus with heart-stopping action. The entertaining slow-mo wrestling match between Misty Taco Bells (PMC) and Organica (LROD) draws crowd interactions and conversation about TRB’s cause. The Menu-Festo is handed to people eating in the restaurant and offers information and chants. Donations taken go to various supportive organizations around town.

For more information, read Paloma Martinez-Cruz’s new book. Click here.

TRB ORIGINS READ HERE

Be The Street

During Spring 2019, I engaged in devising community theater with Our Lady of Guadalupe Center (OLGC). Our course facilitators were Moriah Flagler, Ana Puga, and Paloma Martinez-Cruz. While I continued my dive into the theory around community engagement, I was also able to continue to query the complex realities of excavating community narratives, backed by my years of experience. I found the course to be quiet, mostly in activations, but these are personal notes. The community at Our Lady of Guadalupe Center was beyond welcoming and willing from day one to participate, which, at heart, is where the beauty of this project lies.

Brief

Mission: OSU’s Be the Street (BTS) is a community-engaged performance project dedicated to creating collaborative spaces with and for the community within the Hilltop neighborhood through storytelling.

During this semester, I developed branding and a logo for promo materials for the performance event as one of my projects. Weekly teaching and facilitating devising meetings with the Our Lady of Guadalupe Center with Sebastian Munoz and Bryan Ortiz. I intended to apply my understanding of inclusive, adaptive, and expansive pedagogy in community movement practices. My mentors, Dr. Nyama McCarthy-Brown, Hannah Kosstrin, Theresa Delgadillo, Norah Zuniga-Shaw, and Crystal Perkins, are re-negotiating how I understand community practices in institutional dance, and I am especially thankful. Much of the theoretical analysis in many different directions (fandom, funeral industry, digital media, archeology, philosophy, Dance History, pedagogy, and WGS) started at Cornish, but having a more expansive lens with the historical records helps while also being challenged to discourse about it, rough (at least for me). Movement and music were first; speaking takes a lot of practice, and people often find it hard to understand me.

Developing a brand is a transferable skill I have picked up from being in the visual arts field and being on my marketing team as an arts entrepreneur. Using InDesign and Photoshop, I was given a springboard of an idea to run with from the lead directors of Be the Street. I find designing for a company or program easier when I have somehow been embedded in the work. The logos and brands had to go through several approval requests while meeting OSU branding standards. I enjoyed the process and am glad I was able to be a part of it.

On the devising performance with the community end. Our time over the 15 weeks was to create a 20-minute performance piece based on roots, home, and identity. We ended up devising movements to embody the terms. Working with Bryan Ortiz, a visual artist, and Sebastian Munoz, Romance Languages, was enjoyable. This piece would be performed at the end of the semester at Steamworks Factory. We worked with Albany Park Theater to develop different strategies on how facilitators can give space for our community participants to control how the performance shapes itself. At the end of our time together, we created a piece made from music, songs, and installation called “Vengo de…”. We watched our participants engage with different art forms and reconnect with their creative voices during this time, which was awesome.

However, I question even this model, as it also seems limited given institutional resources and design.