L.A.’s Best Foot Forward Belongs in Latin Dance

Right now, Latinos make up 45% of the citizens of Los Angeles County--and 70% of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District--but you’d never know it from the kind of concert dance events presented on local stages. Not only is the amount of imported and home-grown Latino dance ridiculously small here, but nearly all of it is backdated folklorico spectacle, as if Latino dance audiences were somehow less invested in the here and now than anyone else.

Demographics alone dictate a change in the status quo, and the issue isn’t only fairness, but the future: Where is the postmillennial Southland dance audience going to come from if young Latinos can’t see people like themselves in our concert dance performances, and don’t feel included or represented by the art as it’s practiced here?

In the highly politicized art world, the term “underserved audience” is usually applied to latchkey children or indigent seniors. But who in dance is more underserved and even arguably excluded than a generation of Latinos growing up with virtually no heroes and role models to cheer for?

A radically different picture emerges in the Latin world itself--in Havana, for example, where at the 1998 International Ballet Festival I saw young people crowd into the balconies, standing room and even the aisles of the antique Gran Teatro Sala Garcia Lorca to watch National Ballet of Cuba dancers and guests of the same age group perform classical and contemporary repertory.

Or consider Mexico City, where theatricalized folklorico is mainly for tourists but a professional chamber-size contemporary ballet company has been in residence at the university for more than a quarter-century, and where an annual contemporary dance competition packs the ornate Palacio de Bellas Artes with young people ready to boo the judges off the stage if they make an unpopular choice, as they did in this writer’s presence two years ago.

That kind of young Latino dance audience can’t be found at Southland concert dance, and no wonder. Over the past 10 years, the Orange County Performing Arts Center has presented only three non-folkloric, Latin-identified companies: Miami City Ballet, National Ballet of Cuba and the Royal Spanish National Ballet, with Julio Bocca’s Ballet Argentino coming up later this season. (For those who question the inclusion of the Miami company, it boasts not merely a number of Latinos among the dancers and support staff but also a resident Peruvian choreographer, Jimmy Gamonet de los Heros.)

For the same decade, lists supplied by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts name only Grupo Corpo of Brazil, Miami City Ballet (twice), Maria Benitez, “Tango X 2,” “Forever Tango” and, earlier this season, Ballet Hispanico--a company promoted here primarily as a vehicle for non-Latin choreographer David Rousseve.

As for the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, that venue offered just Ballet Hispanico, Julio Bocca’s Ballet Argentino and Tango Buenos Aires from its opening in 1993 to the present.

The situation improves when you look at the excellent local in-school and outreach programs incorporating contemporary Latino concert dance. In February, for instance, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Symphony for Schools program brought a total of 11,092 fourth- and fifth-graders to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for hourlong performances featuring dancers from National Ballet of Spain.

Moreover, an extensive teachers’ guide to those programs helped clarify a host of potential questions--from the big issues (“How to Be Good Audience Members”) right down to the apparently widespread if underreported confusion between “flamenco” and “flamingo.” (One stamps, the other stork-walks.)

*

But once exposed to and inspired by world-class Latin dance, those children face the same long wait as everyone else before the next major event comes along. And this at a time when Latino stars dominate American Ballet Theatre and many, many other U.S. companies--and when Spain’s Nacho Duato has emerged as arguably the most sought-after choreographer on the international scene. (In the U.S., works by this Kylian protege are danced by American Ballet Theatre, the Boston, Houston and San Francisco ballets and Hubbard Street Dance Company.)

One possible explanation for the inability of non-folkloric Latin dance to gain a significant foothold in Southern California lies in the definitions of cultural diversity accepted or adopted by many local dance presenters--definitions that conform to old biracial (black and white) paradigms. In the past five years, for instance, 12 black modern dance and ballet engagements have been presented by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts as opposed to three each for non-folkloric Latin and Asian dance.

With the whole world to choose from, such an imbalance represents a powerful commitment to one spectrum of expression--but a commitment that inevitably affects audience development in a community where the African American and Asian American communities are virtually equal in size and the Latino community is more than four times larger.

In prioritizing African American dance, presenters here and across the country have fostered the growth and emergence of a remarkable generation of artists--a generation that took advantage of its increased access and support to tackle new themes and forms, establishing themselves as indispensable to end-of-the-century modernism. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that their equally promising compadres are still waiting in the wings for the same opportunities: high-profile commissions, substantial corporate underwriting, invitations to arts festivals, a place at the table.

*

The gateway to access for nearly all American dance can be found in events called booking conferences: trade fairs in which management conglomerates sell blocks of dance to performing arts venues and representatives of those venues patch together deals with one other. These deals make engagements affordable by sharing the costs of a national tour among as many presenters as possible, and they involve a fair amount of horse trading: “I’ll take Merce if you take Twyla.”

Many presenters say that little Latino dance is offered to them at such conferences beyond folklorico, flamenco and, more recently, tango--though a representative for one major dance booking agency argues that a wider choice than that is increasingly available, “but [local presenters] are only choosing what they’re used to” and that “a lack of sophisticated marketing across the country” results in the targeting of the traditional audience base rather than underrepresented minorities.

This pattern is likely to change later in the decade, as Latinos become the largest minority in the entire nation and more communities begin to face the same demographic realities as the Southland. But, for now, anyone seeking an extensive sampling of Latino modernism must look for it beyond the usual dance marketplace--in festivals, for instance, such as the one in Havana (coming up again this October).

Local artists have also tried to do their part. For a brief period in the mid-’90s, Frank Guevara’s Dance Theatre of East L.A. represented an uncompromising and sometimes outrageous attempt to bring to this city a contemporary Latino perspective. But that project ended with his death in 1996, and no one with anything like his daring has taken his place.

However, Gema Sandoval’s Danza Floricanto/USA has helped fill the gap by stretching the concept of folklorico to encompass the perspectives of Southland Latinos as they explore the challenge of belonging to two border cultures. In addition, the large, quasi-folkloric flamenco community has in recent years begun to be a dynamic creative force, largely thanks to nurturing by the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood.

But engagements by all these companies are invariably sporadic, short-lived and thus not widely seen enough to make a significant impact, and that’s not going to change without major action on several fronts, starting with an attempt to involve the Latino community in the future of every form of dance. Want to hold a festival showcasing Southland modernism or tap or jazz dance? Great, but where are the Spanish names? Want to build a major local ballet company? Terrific, but who’s your Latina ballerina?

It’s all going to happen anyway eventually, so let’s help it as an investment in the future of an art form on our home turf. And don’t for a moment think of it as affirmative action, not nearly--just traditional, old-fashioned, all-American majority rule.