Sharing a Stage, Dancing a Dream

In the last few years, Gema Sandoval has discovered a lot more Latin America in L.A. than she knew existed.

During the 25 years she has directed her own Mexican folklorico troupe, Danza Floricanto / USA, she has eagerly attended many dance performances and cultural events in other ethnic communities. But when she started searching more methodically for guest companies to be in her “Latino L.A.” program (Saturday night at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre), she discovered dances so intriguing, they left her thinking, “How could I never have seen this before?”

Perhaps it’s because many of the groups--from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru and Bolivia--have sprung up over the last decade, and often perform only in ghettoized communities.

Parts of their various dance vocabularies reminded Sandoval of Mexico. “We all had the influence of the Spanish,” she says. But then there were the differences--the African-tinged dances and music that grew up around the Bolivian silver mines, for instance. And the dynamic, sensual Peruvian marinera dancing, named for the seaside towns where it developed. The latter genre has become “very stylized, very precise and nuanced,” Sandoval says, a result of fiercely competitive, rigorous contests that started in Peru about 100 years ago.

Before she decided to feature an evening with guest performers, Sandoval considered bringing their dance forms into her own company and expanding its range, along the lines of other eclectic folk troupes. “I think Floricanto could have done many of those dances,” she says, sitting in the well-appointed living room of her Whittier home in early August.

“But our sincerity might have been lacking, because we don’t come from those specific places. I’m an immigrant, but I don’t know about their traditions and issues of survival. I think the right thing to do is to ask them to be their own representatives.”

And so invitations went out to five groups, who will appear alongside Sandoval’s Floricanto; Los Folkloristas, a music ensemble from Mexico City; and other music groups. Soon after, dancers who usually perform in parks, at community festivals or in rented halls for graduation, wedding and baptismal celebrations, started rehearsing for their first foray into the world of concert dance.

With “Latino L.A.,” Sandoval says, the diversity of the Latin American dance arts that thrive in Los Angeles will be presented to a dance-going public. But that’s not the only goal. She knows from experience that getting the opportunity to perform in a proper theater can be a crucial step toward professionalism for the groups, which range in experience and technical skill.

“Some are literally family operations,” Sandoval says. “There’s a real innocence that touches me, this need to give what they have in this way. They’re going to look lovely, with a pristine kind of innocence not often seen on the professional stage.”

Others, she says, are more advanced technically and choreographically. One thing they share, Sandoval says, is a certain tenaciousness. “When they go on that stage, I have no doubt that they will be transformed,” she says. “Because they’re just at that place where they’re very strong, they believe in themselves, in their abilities and their possibilities.”

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Evenings and Saturday afternoons tend to be prime rehearsal time if your dancers all have regular daytime jobs. On this hot August Saturday at the barely air-conditioned Lynwood Youth Center, the members of Grupo Cultural Latinoamericano have not only assembled to rehearse, they have donned their heavy woven-cotton and wool costumes for the benefit of a photographer.

Ranging from 14 to middle age, the eight dancers run through their number for the Ford program (each group gets 10 minutes). It includes the bobbing steps and sways of both festive and devotional dances from a few different regions of Guatemala.

The amplification system is scratchy, but at the Ford, they’ll have live music (as will all but one of the groups), provided by a marimba band.

“We started this because of my kids,” says Jose Estrada, who watches from the sidelines. He is president of the group, husband of founder Santa Estrada and father of Christian, the youngest of the adult dancers. “They started asking me, “I’m not Mexican, I’m not Guatemalan, because I was born here, so who am I?’ ” Now, the children of the group--who will dance in a special morning performance at the Ford on Saturday--understand something about where they came from. And they are also learning how much fun it is to perform.

Estrada admits that his family never would have been dancing back in Guatemala. “When you live in the country, you don’t think so much about your culture. You want to see things from outside,” he says. “Now that we are outside, we’re looking back.”

But the dancers’ ambitions extend beyond the perpetuation of ethnic identity. Since they broke away from another Guatemalan troupe in 1994, a few Mexican Americans have joined them, and eventually, they want to perform many kinds of dance and become professional.

That goal, they realize, is far away. Now, they’re just learning about warming up before rehearsal. And although they perform barefoot, they still rehearse in shoes, not having developed the calluses that come with extensive dance training.

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In a small dance room at North Hollywood High School later the same afternoon, the 8-year-old troupe Mi Linda Nicaragua looks like a more regimented dance company rehearsal. While their founder, Miriam Arroyo, is back in Nicaragua vacationing and picking up a kind of handmade straw hat used in this number (you can’t find it in L.A.), choreographer Edgar Velasquez is whipping the dancers into shape.

The multiethnic group of performers are mostly in their late teens, the men in sweatpants and T-shirts, the women in leotards, ballet shoes and practice skirts. As they twirl, kick and lean into the postures of dances from different regions of Nicaragua, Velasquez stops continually to correct the spacing or the height of an arm, the angle of a tilt.

Here too the interest is in the pride and perpetuation of cultural specificity, as well as the lure of aesthetic dance-making. “After the dancers learn about the music and customs, the history of Nicaragua,” Velasquez says on a break, “they get interested in what their parents say about their own home country. They look into their own culture.”

Velasquez learned mestizo (of mixed Spanish and indigenous ethnicity) and other dances in folkloric troupes before he left Nicaragua. As part of his training, he spent time in villages, participating in festivals and ceremonies alongside what he calls “real people, not performers.”

Here, he works in a costume shop during the week, and tries to keep “the feeling” of Nicaraguan dancing for this company while adding touches of his own. Following the style of many national dance companies, Velasquez says he hopes to take ballet and modern classes here and incorporate them in his work.

“I love to mix the real thing with the clean and the classical,” he says. “My biggest goal is to perform in the Universal Amphitheatre one day. When I go there and watch the Amalia Hernandez company [Ballet Folklorico de Mexico], and I see the quality they have, I’m thinking of this group up there.”

Then he pulls back a little from the dream. “But there are more important things,” he says. “I prefer to be helping the community too. We use our resources to raise money for schools, for hospitals. To put a smile on someone’s face--maybe it’s better than being in a big theater.”

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Sandoval remembers what it was like to start a folk group with the responsibility of representing your community, then going through the growing pains of moving toward professionalism. “Floricanto came out of ethnic pride,” she says. “But for some time, it’s been more of my personal vision and an artistic endeavor.” Along the way, she says, “you gain some friends, and you lose some. Training dancers is a hard process.”

At the Ford, Floricanto will perform its “Jalisco” suite, which Sandoval calls “the most traditional thing that represents Mexico.” But for years, she has also experimented--creating dances with Chicano political themes, or collaborating with modern dancers. “The mind and the soul keep pushing, and we have a different reality here than we had in Mexico,” she says. “You’re still defined by the cultural background and the dance vocabulary that you know, but then you’re influenced by where you live now.”

Sandoval is glad to be giving opportunities to groups who have just started imagining the journey from community event to theater stage. But it turns out the venture is not all about giving. “I think they’re influencing me, and I welcome it, I feel so renewed.” she says. “When I go to see a different kind of dance, I sometimes say, ‘I really love some of those movements.’ What I will do with it, I don’t know yet.”

She smiles when she hears about the professional ambitions of the Guatemalan and Nicaraguan groups and wishes them well. “They have a great deal of community support,” she says. “Whether that will translate into financial support, I don’t know. At this point, they all need to evolve at their own pace.

“Now, they consider themselves to be cultural and artistic--it’s all the same thing to them.” She shrugs and looks optimistic. “And who knows? They’re doing things in ways that have not been done before. It’s all part of being in this country. We dare to dream in ways that other folks [back home] don’t.”

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“LATINO L.A.,” John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood. Date: Saturday, 8 p.m. Price: $25. Phone: (323) 461-3673.