By Anabel Costa
Linda Murray, curator at the New York Public Library, upper left, Ninotchka Bennahum, UCSB Dance professor, upper right, and Kiri Avelar of Ballet Hispánico, center, in a post-lecture discussion.
When Kiri Avelar was in the third grade, her mother would often criticize her school curriculum for neglecting Latinx history. Back then she was embarrassed by this, but today she researches the erasure of Latinx artistic practices from early American modern dance techniques and history.
Avelar noticed a very Western and Eurocentric perspective in dance history education that ignored non-white contributions to dance. While she wasn’t quite sure where to begin, she felt inspired to fill in those gaps.
“I had no idea where I was going with the research in the beginning,” she said. “But there was this feeling that something was missing — something there worth pursuing.” This feeling led her to analyze the choreography of some of the most influential pioneers of early modern dance, and she discovered the ways they pulled from Latinx movement.
Kiri Avelar studied the works of modern dance pioneer José Limón, which she described in her lecture Descubriendo Latinx: The Hidden Text in American Modern Dance.
Avelar presented her research to a virtual UC Santa Barbara audience last Thursday. Her talk, entitled Descubriendo Latinx: The Hidden Text in American Modern Dance, was one of the final lectures in the 2020-2021 Colloquia in Dance series, presented by the Department of Theater and Dance. The last in the series takes place Monday, April 12.
Avelar’s research is supported by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts where she is a Dance Research Fellow. She is also currently deputy school director and a teacher at Ballet Hispánico in New York.
Avelar’s research began when she noticed in her modern dance classes movements that were instinctively familiar. The spiral — the act of twisting the torso left or right, while keeping the hips facing forward — is a key movement in many modern techniques, but particularly in Martha Graham’s technique.
“I was doing that Graham spiral and I thought, ‘wait a minute, that feels familiar,’” said Avelar. She recognized the movement from Spanish dance, she said.
Martha Graham, Lester Horton, and Doris Humphrey were all pioneers of early American modern dance who developed the Graham, Horton, and Humphrey-Weidman techniques. In her lecture, Avelar said much of their heavily influential work pulled from the cultural practices of the Latinx diaspora.
Dance historian, choreographer, and Hampshire College professor Constance Valis will give a talk for the final lecture of the Colloquia in Dance series.
Through studying their choreography Avelar was able to see how these dance innovators drew from Indigenous, Mexican, and Spanish artistic traditions. These “seeds of appropriation” are still foundational to modern dance today, she said.
African-American dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham and Mexican-American dancer and choreographer José Limón created the Dunham and
Limón techniques. Through examining their work and comparing them to Graham, Horton, and Humphrey, Avelar found choreographic pieces that used movements that made clear their multicultural identities and the diversity within the Latinx diaspora. Dunham and Limón’s work “expertly” infused modern dance in America with many other styles and cultural traditions.
The final lecture in the Colloquia in Dance series takes place on Monday, April 12 and features a talk from Constance Valis Hill, a dance historian, choreographer, and professor at Hampshire College. Register for the event here.
Anabel Costa is a fourth year Theater major and Professional Writing minor. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.