Your time has come to fly
You have no borders
—El Vez, “Órale,” sung to the tune of “Bridge over Troubled Waters”With brightly colored papel picado (cut paper banners), tissue flowers, and Latin American flags festooning the performance area at San Francisco's Z Space, David Herrera Performance Company's September 2023 event, ÓRALE!, Footnote 1 promised fun and festivity.Footnote 2 On its surface, the performance resembled a typical dance program, with an ensemble of ten dancers performing eleven separate pieces choreographed to songs from the catalog of El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, but an exciting hybrid form of movement theatre emerged through the interplay of live music, dance, and El Vez. Built around the music and performances of Robert Lopez, who has performed as El Vez for more than thirty years, ÓRALE! offered an opportunity for an intergenerational community of artists to find themselves in El Vez's work, and for Lopez to see his own vision reflected in the interpretations of the young dancers and choreographers involved.Footnote 3 This article considers how ÓRALE! harnesses the creative possibilities of resisting the implied disciplinary borders that too often separate music, dance, and theatre performance. We begin by discussing the creative invitation that El Vez offers, to make clear how he uses his art as a form of world building, using popular culture to critique US American society, make visible the disparate cultural traditions that exist within US American cultural forms, and to envision new ways of being. We then discuss ÓRALE! following two different through lines: process and product. The collaborative process of ÓRALE! was a site of cultural, intergenerational, and geographic exchange, inviting both performers and audience into a genre-defying performance that raised critical questions around intermediality and transtemporality in the arts. As a process very much in development, the collaboration experimented with learning through doing that led to a performance event that was at times messy and at times magical. Following Elizabeth Ellsworth, ÓRALE! was an example of “knowledge in the making,”Footnote 4 a fluid experience through which “the self is understood as a becoming, an emergence, and as continually in the making. This . . . moves us beyond a contemporary politics of difference based in semiotics and linguistics toward an experimental ‘pragmatics of becoming’ based on making and doing.”Footnote 5 The event embodied a Muñozian process of disidentification to bring into being a utopian present, residing in this space of becoming and of knowledge in the making to reveal the complexities of Latinx subjectivity while rejecting essentialist understandings of race, ethnicity, and culture.
The Creative Invitation of El Vez, the Mexican Elvis
In his opening statements at the performance, Herrera traced his relationship with the music of El Vez, which helped to contextualize the event. He recalled having taken a Subversive Latino Culture class as an undergraduate at the University of California–Santa Cruz decades earlier, which featured El Vez in the curriculum. For Herrera, encountering El Vez “was transformative. It changed the way I approach art making.”Footnote 6 At the time he was a theatre major but would later change his emphasis to dance, and his artistic approach melds these two disciplines to forge a unique performance practice, evident in the way he works with his dancers to devise pieces collectively, and in the ways he enacts collaboration with other choreographers, as in ÓRALE! Herrera spoke poignantly about his relationship with modern dance, which is often critiqued as a site of erasure, in that its progenitors, including Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Martha Graham, and others, drew from culturally specific dance forms and traditions without fully crediting them as influences. These artists came to define the form of modern dance, eclipsing the artistry they appropriated. Stated Herrera, “I was in love with an art form considered to be quintessentially American, but I felt erased by it.” The ways in which El Vez uses performance as a mode of world building offered the “invitation that I needed . . . to use modern dance to talk about my communities.”
That invitation is built around the way that Lopez uses world building to position performance as an active site of knowledge production. Following Diana Taylor and Dorinne Kondo, world building refers to Lopez's use of a variety of theoretical, theatrical, and musical tactics that bring into being a progressive social space that refutes the current economic, political, social, and cultural configurations of the United States.Footnote 7 As Taylor asserts in The Archive and the Repertoire, “Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity. . . . Embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing.”Footnote 8 That is, the act of performance both creates meaning and conveys it to others. It is a vital site of questioning, of imagining new possibilities, and of (temporarily) building new social spaces. In Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity, Kondo similarly stresses how performance harnesses the imagination, thus making it a site of potentiality: “Theater demonstrates that worlds are made, humanly imagined and fashioned, in collaboration with objects and technologies that are themselves replete with possibility.”Footnote 9 Performance allows for world building, and world building is an act of knowledge in the making.
World building through performance is not content to reside exclusively in the realm of the individual imagination or even the social imaginary; it goes on to create this new kind of temporary social space in actual time and space. El Vez performances temporarily engender this world and allow an audience to experience what it would be like. His performances share common elements. They are genre-defying: though they function under the umbrella of rock performance, El Vez shows incorporate a distinctly theatrical sensibility. They are richly polysemous in text, image, and sound. More than just a collection of songs to be performed, they follow a strong dramaturgical arc and employ stage banter and reworked lyrics to express key ideas; costumes, props, and spectacle to reinforce a story line; and sound to create an antiessentialist performance that builds a social space. Lopez uses El Vez to activate Elvis, critiquing the status quo The King is seen to represent and harnessing the many discourses attached to Elvis as a pop culture icon to engage in world building. He translates and remakes Elvis songs, as well as those of other artists, rewriting the lyrics and intersplicing the main melody with live musical sampling from multiple genres, to address a variety of social and political issues. His performances draw on different performance traditions, blending theatre, performance art, and rock performance.
El Vez performances exist at the intersection of two distinct loci of identification: Elvis and his position as a pop culture icon, and Lopez's own Chicano background. Lopez follows the Black linguistic tradition Henry Louis Gates Jr. describes in The Signifying Monkey, using El Vez to signify on Elvis and Elvisness. That is, he makes use of the playful (re)doubling of language, images, and sound to defer, repress, hide, or altogether set aside so-called official meaning so that new meanings can be brought forward. The intertextuality of an El Vez performance allows for this signifyin(g), through which he ultimately offers revisions—with a signal difference—to US American culture itself, critiquing race and ethnicity through a caricaturization of his own ethnicity and harnessing well-worn tropes that define nationhood and cultural ownership. Lopez furthers this by engaging myriad social and political issues. Through El Vez, he also draws on his personal identity as a gay Chicano punk to create a disidentificatory performance. In Disidentifications, José Esteban Muñoz posits that political power is encoded into cultural fields, making a “phobic majoritarian public sphere” that is hostile to minoritized subjects.Footnote 10 He explains that “to disidentify is to read oneself and one's own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject.” Thus, disidentification enacts a personal language of “identities in difference” to “transform [their] cultural logic[s] from within.”Footnote 11 Says Muñoz:
[D]isidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.Footnote 12
Through disidentificatory performance, the minoritized subject not only lays claim to dominant culture, revealing how it aids oppression, but simultaneously remakes it. In so doing, disidentification engenders a new social space that “would be the blueprint for minoritarian counterpublic spheres.”Footnote 13 These counterpublics themselves have a capacity for what Muñoz later defines as “queer world-making” which makes possible the creation of a “utopia in the present,”Footnote 14 a site in which one can feel hope and experience utopia, a site that is always in the process of becoming. Lopez harnesses this process of disidentification to transform the cultural logic of white supremacist heteronormative capitalism historically associated with and embedded in Elvis's status. If signifyin(g) critiques the culture that made Elvis, while making visible the elision of the Black traditions from which Elvis's music came, disidentification allows Lopez to remake Elvis into El Vez and to engage in world building.
Herrera saw similarities between his own experiences with contemporary and modern dance in the work of El Vez. Noting that he was “really taken by the abstraction” of modern and contemporary dance, Herrera described why he was drawn to modern dance, stating, “it felt like it didn't have borders around it . . . and that's how I understood myself.”Footnote 15 Yet at the same time, as his opening statements make clear, he also was made to feel marginalized from the form. Herrera notes how the processes of elision that surround Elvis similarly impacted the field of modern dance:
Modern dance really has this sensibility of being an American dance form. . . . And like much of music, including Elvis that El Vez uses, modern dance also took aesthetics from other cultures, other fields, other movement genres. And then . . . they got wrapped into this idea of Americanness, and to be very frank, whiteness, . . . and that borrowing—or in some sense it's even stealing—was erased from the history of modern dance.Footnote 16
This feeling of marginalization ultimately led to his need to center Latinidad in American modern dance.
Dance and dance history has, at times, been a site of erasure. Modern dance emerged in the first half of the twentieth century during a time of mass migration to and within the United States as Europeans fled war, Black Southerners moved North, and the western frontier promised new beginnings. In the wake of such massive change, acculturative processes were rampant as people were exposed to foreign cultures and other ways of being. As diverse peoples negotiated living side by side with new neighbors, artists began experimenting with cultural representation. Perhaps the most prevalent of these was St. Denis and her later-husband Shawn, with whom the pioneering modern dance company Denishawn was formed. Denishawn was known for staging the dances of other cultures. While Shawn was more concerned with authenticity, St. Denis's attitude was to take what she liked and leave the rest, resulting in a fantasy representation of other peoples. In 1940, St. Denis stated, “I have had neither the talent nor the time to study [oriental dance] techniques as they should be studied,” and that her own choreographies were “purely a mood of reaction to some oriental subject,”Footnote 17 illustrating the audacity with which she took from other cultures and also the permeable nature of cultural exchange at the time. While oriental dances were certainly an inspiration for Denishawn,Footnote 18 its locus in Los AngelesFootnote 19 placed it in proximity to Spanish and Native American dances, from which the company also drew heavily.Footnote 20
This cherry-picking led to a kind of amalgamation of movement practices that was passed to their students and younger company members, including Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Graham, whose first solo with Denishawn was “Serenata Morisca” during the 1921 tour.Footnote 21 Weidman and Graham also danced in Shawn's “Spanish Suites,” which formed part of the Denishawn repertory from 1921 to 1931 (when Denishawn disbanded),Footnote 22 as well as in other representations of Spanish or Indigenous peoples. Graham's later work provides a striking example of the incorporation of Spanish gestures into the modern dance movement vocabulary. Robert Fraser's photos of Graham's 1937 “Immediate Tragedy” capture Spanish dance aesthetics in Graham's intense gaze, precise arm positions, and upright verticality, but the choreography was never recorded, so the original movement is lost.Footnote 23 Graham's “Deep Song” debuted the same night, and while it distinctly captures Graham's style, it also reflects Spanish aesthetics: quick turns using spirals native to Spanish dance, tension and angular variations in the arms, and costuming inspired by Picasso's Guernica. Footnote 24 “Deep Song,” is a translation of cante jondo, a branch of flamenco that expresses the deepest sorrows of the human condition, and the title of a book of poems by Federico García Lorca that celebrates the beauty of the Andalusian expression. Both “Immediate Tragedy” and “Deep Song” were choreographed in direct response to the Spanish Civil War. Graham also represented Indigeneity and Latinidad in her 1940 “El Penitente,” a piece inspired by the penance practiced by avid Catholics in the Southwest.
Early modern dance pioneers infused their original works with flavors of Latinidad because it was an inherent part of their training. Humphrey's choreographies “Ritmo Jondo,” meaning deep rhythm, and “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” choreographed for José Limón and inspired by a Lorca poem about a famous Spanish bullfighter, also directly reference Spanish culture, movement stylizations, and costuming aesthetics. Pearl Primus, born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1919, is a central figure in modern dance, and Katherine Dunham's ethnographic explorations and choreographies from the 1930s and 1940s often focused on the Creole cultures of the Caribbean, including Haiti and Jamaica, and of Mexico. These influences bring a rich, intersectional Creole aesthetic that documents the presence of Spanish, Indigenous, Black, and Latin aesthetics in the origins and foundations of modern dance, yet these diverse influences were historically invisibilized as modern dance increasingly became the artistic cultural capital of hegemonic Americana.Footnote 25
Herrera asserts that dance can serve as a medium for transcending borders, expressing identities, fostering connection, and redressing erasures. As director and choreographer for the David Herrera Performance Company (DHPCo), the founder of Latinx Hispanic Dancers United, an alumnus of the National Association for Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) Leadership Institute, and a founding member of Dancing Around Race—a program focused on the implementation and discussion of cultural equity in dance in the San Francisco Bay Area—Herrera has continued to create work that has allowed him to bring himself, his culture, and his identities fully to the form of modern and contemporary dance. Herrera describes how trial and error allowed him to craft his aesthetic: “to be very honest, I created a lot of shit work because I was trying to do what I thought was expected of me in this field.”Footnote 26 What aided him in the creative process was really incorporating and embracing his Latinx culture, trusting it as much (or more) than the strictures of modern and contemporary dance. Herrera notes, “you know, one of my favorite things to do was to invite folks—working-class folks who are not in the arts—to shows and get their perspective of what they understand or don't understand. And I started to base a lot of my material on what they did understand. And so that's how I started incorporating more of myself into the work.”Footnote 27 Herrera came to realize that he too hoped to transform American traditions in his chosen field of modern and contemporary dance to make space for his own lived Latinx experience, noting, “If it truly is an American art form, and I am American born and raised of Latinx immigrant background, specifically Mexican, well, then, this should allow me to also speak about my identities.”Footnote 28
Both Lopez and Herrera use their art to claim a place within US American culture. They make visible the multiple articulations that are embedded in artistic expression, including Elvis and modern and contemporary dance, and they renegotiate space by turning the dial to their frequencies. As Lopez states:
El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, the “blank” Elvis. You could fit it into any category, so you could be Jewish, you could be lesbian, you could be whatever agenda and turn this American icon idea into an “I am part of this quilt also.” . . . Chicanos can be Elvis. Or, my Chicano agenda can be a Polish grandmother. My Chicano agenda can be your transgender [agenda]. I think that was the main idea—that you too can be King.Footnote 29
Through El Vez, Elvis becomes a conduit for the inclusion of multiple identities, one that offers an invitation: you fill in the blank. For Herrera, filling in the blank meant using his skills as an actor, dancer, director, and producer to transcend the perceived borders between the disciplines of dance, theatre, and rock performance as well as the humans that partake of them. Together, their collaboration combined the world-building capacity of Lopez's performances, the richly varied approaches of a disparate group of choreographers, and the evocative storytelling capacity of dance, creating new processes that crossed disciplinary borders. Their artistic partnership acted as what Ellsworth would call a “hinge,” creating “environments and experiences [that] are capable of acting as the pedagogical pivot point between movement/sensation and thought.”Footnote 30 The collaboration of ÓRALE! enabled experimentation across disciplinary boundaries to encourage knowledge in the making.
New Processes of Collaboration
The opportunity for Herrera to collaborate with Lopez came about by a bit of kismet, then fostered by the generosity of both artists. As he describes it, friend and fellow San Francisco–based choreographer Yayoi Kambara invited Herrera out to an El Vez show, not knowing that Herrera was already familiar with his work; Kambara simply saw the overlap between their two approaches to art making. Recounts Herrera, “And it was on the way there that she was [saying] ‘You know I think it'd be great if you guys work together.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I always thought it would be interesting, too, to do that. I just don't know. I don't know him. I don't know how to even approach that.’”Footnote 31 Oblique introductions were made: Kambara knew a friend from college who had played in the Memphis Mariachis, suggested that Lopez and Herrera needed to work together, and then walked away to let them negotiate. Says Herrera:
It was a brief conversation, just telling him a quick like, “Hey, I've studied some of your music. I'm interested. This is what I do. Would you like to continue the conversation?” And so [Lopez] immediately gave me his phone number, which I found really surprising, that he was so open to give me his phone number. And honestly, I really thought it just wasn't going to go anywhere. After that, I really just thought, “Well, you know, he's probably busy, he tours a lot.” . . . And I honestly don't even remember where the yes, when the yes kicked in.Footnote 32
Lopez recounts a similar story, saying:
I think I remember meeting him at an El Vez show in San Francisco, and he might have dropped a hint of the idea. And then we messaged during the pandemic. And that was, “Oh, sure,” thinking, “Well, this will obviously never happen. It's the end of the world.” So when he had gotten the grants and everything, it was already in progress, I was oh, I had forgotten completely about that project. . . . I never thought it would come into fruition. Not in a bad way—it was an unexpected surprise.Footnote 33
What drew Lopez to the collaboration were the layers of impersonation and interpretation. He says, “I liked the idea of someone interpreting my work in a different way, since what I do is ensure that someone else's work is done in a different way. It's the process of that process.”Footnote 34
Herrera served as the project leader, shepherding the collaboration as well as curating the selection of the guest choreographers. He credits the value of his theatrical training in envisioning the performance, stressing that he thought of ÓRALE! more “as a theatre event versus a dance event.”Footnote 35 From the start, he envisioned a show that would bridge the implied borders between dance, theatre, and rock performance, but what that meant was not clearly communicated. Herrera envisioned a seamless event that wove together the disparate dance pieces, much like what occurs in El Vez shows, which are expertly constructed, with a strong dramaturgical arc that is upheld via multiple channels: through the stage banter and rewritten lyrics; through the costuming and costume changes; and through the musical selections, the live sampling of multiple musical references, and the song order. From the moment the Mariachis take the stage, the music does not stop—the band vamps over costume changes and underscores the stage banter to keep the energy of the performance driving ahead. Perhaps what is most important is that, El Vez performances are ever-evolving, as Lopez frequently incorporates new ideas and new references into the shows throughout the tour, just as he continually recontextualizes his art and his music.
Based on Herrera's description, Lopez imagined the process as a kind of mixtape collection of his pieces, a packaged assortment of hits that would occur like a playlist. With this in mind, he was content to take on a supporting role in the production, and originally approached ÓRALE! not as an El Vez show but as more akin to emcee work. This was a natural assumption, as Lopez frequently emcees events, primarily burlesque shows and cabarets, where he adopts a vaudeville-like sensibility: “I'll be a spotlight, but it's not me. It's what's coming up next that you really want to see!”Footnote 36 Tracking this difference, he states:
In the El Vez show, I do not like dead silence, with nothing. Everything kind of segues into the next part. And that's what they were going for, except I had told my band we just play the song as it is on the record, and something happens, and then the next song starts. . . . And so we didn't [extensively] get to prepare musically.Footnote 37
Lopez did not realize that he would be the something-that-happens, and instead trusted that Herrera would cover the moments between the pieces. Had he known he was responsible for the transitions, Lopez reports that he would have considered more songs, increased his budget to allow for more rehearsal time,Footnote 38 and “brought more costumes or done other tricks up my sleeve.”Footnote 39 He also states that he would have exerted more editorial control over the process and the final product.Footnote 40
This miscommunication reveals the gaps that exist between the siloed art forms of dance, theatre, and rock performance and the pitfalls they pose in building a show using their differing approaches. Working from recorded music, as often happens in contemporary dance, can offer less flexibility due to the fixed nature of recorded media, whereas Lopez's way of crafting live shows maintains a clearly structured dramaturgical arc but allows space for improvisation, both within and around the songs. Despite these communication misfires, Lopez avers that he “was up for the challenge.”Footnote 41 In his own words, El Vez became for ÓRALE! “the glamorous glue that connects it all together.”Footnote 42 As we revisit later, the interstitial pieces and Lopez's interactions with the audience and with the dancers became a key mode of ÓRALE!'s disciplinary border crossing.
Crossing borders through collaboration and connection was always at the heart of the project. First and foremost was the collaboration between Herrera and Lopez, but equally as vital was bringing together Latinx choreographers from disparate geographic regions and aesthetic approaches. ÓRALE! featured six Latinx choreographers from across the United States, including Herrera (San Francisco, California), Alfonso Cervera (Columbus, Ohio), Eric Garcia (San Francisco), Stephanie Martinez (Chicago, Illinois), Gabriel Mata (Washington, DC), and Yvonne Montoya (Tucson, Arizona). Variety was important to Herrera, as he wanted ÓRALE! to represent the way “artists all over . . . see regional work very differently than how they see what they consider [to be] national work.”Footnote 43 Herrera continues:
How do we alleviate this idea of separation that we're sensing, and that we're feeling, by coming together and creating . . . one evening together. And so this was part of putting into practice what I'm preaching, which is [that] we can come together and create amazing material and still represent where we come from and who we are without losing ourselves and somebody else.
. . .
I don't think we do this enough within Latino culture, right? I just don't think we do. . . . I just wanted to keep pushing the boundary of what it means to be in the dance field, to be a professional choreographer, what it means to be Latino, and [to incorporate different] movement styles that you know. And really, with this idea, to keep showing the complexities and nuances of who we are as a larger community.
Through his curation, Herrera strove to build community while also making visible the rich diversity and multiple artistic sensibilities of this collection of Latinx artists, resisting the idea of a monolithic Latinx identity. The resulting presentation was a rough, raw, and honest collision of art forms and stylistic sensibilities that normally exist in isolation; it was a space of creation, exploration, and negotiation.
As noted above, planning for the project began years earlier, only to be interrupted by the pandemic. Herrera had assembled a total of eight choreographers, including himself, to participate with the same offer: they could choose between one and three El Vez songs from the catalog and would be given up to two full weeks of rehearsal time to create with the ensemble. When the project resumed postpandemic, two of the invitees withdrew, yet participation remained robust as the process rolled out. Lopez had set no restrictions on which songs he would or would not perform, so the choreographers were free to select whatever resonated with them. Herrera similarly notes that he gave the choreographers “carte blanche,” as he wanted them to make selections that they were “stimulated by, and [they wanted] to create around,” and he encouraged them to explore “what relationship they formed to the music, or to the words, [or to a] particular song.” Understandably, there were a lot of questions, but Herrera assured them that they would find out how all of these disparate pieces fit together as the process moved along. He notes, “So they really came in having to trust me with it.”
Herrera held auditions for the piece in August 2022; he recounts that most of the dancers were unfamiliar with El Vez, and some were even unfamiliar with Elvis. Rehearsals began in October 2022, and it was not until May 2023 that everyone saw the first iteration of the full show; after that the ensemble went on break, picking up rehearsals again in August 2023, in preparation for the September performance. Says Herrera:
I'm sure there were more questions they probably had in their head, but I think it was then that they recognized like, “Oh, there's something here,” but they also didn't really understand it. At points particularly they didn't understand the words, right? Because I didn't necessarily translate everything for them. Some of the choreographers asked for lyrics, and some of the dancers asked for lyrics. So then we created a lyric sheet that we shared with everybody, and I mean all the designers, all the choreographers, all the dancers. So we started putting these things together, like all the lyrics, to all the songs so that they can read them. They can, you know, do a little bit more research if they wanted to. . . . I would also show them some videos [that are] available, because I kept describing what [El Vez's] energy looks like, and I think they didn't quite get it until they saw some visual representation of him and the band, and what they do. And even then, after that—well, I think they found it exciting.
The artists had to trust in Herrera's vision, and he similarly extended trust to them, especially to the guest choreographers, who were scattered across the country. He stressed that they should create the pieces they wanted to, using the process that worked for them within the parameters of the El Vez project. While Herrera was familiar with their work, he had not actually collaborated with any of the guest choreographers in this sort of capacity:
I knew them all separately, as colleagues and as peers, and many of them I met through Latinx Hispanic Dancers United, which is a networking branch with my organization, but I had never physically worked with them. And I knew I wanted to bring folks from different backgrounds. I just wasn't sure exactly how that was going to play out with the genres.
Though there were some logistical discussions, for instance about the casting of large group pieces versus duets or trios, for the most part Herrera gave the guest choreographers control over their pieces, noting, “It was important to me that it was their voice that was coming through in their own section, and not mine.”
Despite the challenges of the collaboration, both artists felt it was productive and meaningful. For Herrera especially the process was profound, as it moved away from familiar performance practices in order to create a more robust kind of collaboration. Herrera emphasized that ÓRALE! formed a true community, structured in a collaboration that allowed the dancers to speak directly with the musicians—an unusual practice in the performing arts, where hierarchical administrative policies normally designate lines of communication between the various art forms. Herrera stresses that the work was created not for the sake of publicity, but rather was a journey taken together:
Like any community we had bumps in the road, and then we have moments of excitement and moments of “Aha!s” and all of that, but it all culminated in this conversation that obviously was exciting and big and loud and luscious and fun, but it's also unfinished. And I don't mean unfinished as in, like, we didn't fulfill something. I mean there is so much more to be said.
Given the influx of interest Herrera has received from audiences, choreographers, and critics alike, he says, “it's telling me that it's needed. It's important.”
Intermediality and Transtemporality in Disciplinary Border Crossing
ÓRALE! offered a departure from familiar processes that can separate the disciplines of dance, theatre, and rock performance. As Herrera notes, “The whole process felt new. . . . Most of us had never tread these roads before, and so we didn't have a blueprint for it. But then, again, isn't that what art is really supposed to be? To take these risks and see what happens?” Thus the process falls into Ellsworth's conception of learning through doing, allowing art making to function as a fluid becoming. The juxtaposition of seemingly contradictory concepts—concert dance and rock—also created a space for dreaming and imagining other ways of being, engendering an ephemeral Muñozian utopia, situated in queer performativity. As Muñoz reminds us, “the ephemeral does not equal unmateriality. It is more nearly about another understanding of what matters. It matters to get lost in dance or to use dance to get lost.”Footnote 44 The impact of performance remains long after the experience has ended, a notion that dovetails with his understanding of a utopia as something that is always becoming, and therefore always unrealized, in that utopia “understands its time as reaching beyond some nostalgic past that perhaps never was or some future whose arrival is continuously belated—a utopia in the present.”Footnote 45 ÓRALE! allowed the artists and the audience to partake in that present. The resulting project allowed for complex exchanges including robust intersectionality, intergenerational collaboration, and translations between digital media and live performance.
El Vez not only inspired the collaborative invitation at the heart of ÓRALE!, he also became its anchor in the performance, providing both the music and the connective tissue between the pieces. Similar to what he does in his El Vez shows, Lopez maintained the energy of the performance by weaving interstitial music between the different pieces, interacting with the audience to enhance the immersive feeling of the event, and engaging with the dancers to create theatricalized moments that crossed the implied borders between dance, theatre, and rock performance. Equally active in the meaning making were the dancers, who collaborated directly with Lopez and the musicians to create a through line that added to the theatricality of the event. The collision of these different agents and their relationship to music in performance created an interesting friction in ÓRALE!, which required translating the media and processes through which rock performance and dance are apprehended: live performance versus recordings, both audio and video, and how this polarity was experienced by the choreographers, dancers, and musicians.
Popular music scholars note the interplay between these recorded and live media, which many consider to be entirely distinct, yet interrelated. Theodore Gracyk considers the recording to be the most authentic version of rock performance because of the ways that both fans and artists use technology. Audiences most easily and most often access music recordings, listening to them on headphones and speakers, while musicians capitalize on the studio production process to create music, even at times creating sounds and effects that they cannot make live. Gracyk boldly concludes that “Guitars, pianos, voices, and so on became secondary materials. Consequently, rock music is not essentially a performing art, no matter how much time rock musicians spend practicing on their instruments or playing live.”Footnote 46 Simon Frith acknowledges that recordings are vastly different from live performance, especially when heavy production technology is used to create sounds that cannot be repeated live, but believes they still gesture toward the importance of live performance. Even from the earliest days of music recording, Frith suggests that “Recording made available the physical impact of an unseen performer, giving access to singers’ feelings without those feelings having to be coded via a written score.”Footnote 47 Philip Auslander builds on both theorists to suggest that, although recordings are of primary importance in rock music, live performance serves to authenticate the performers themselves, both musically and ideologically. Notes Auslander, “it is only in live performance that the listener can ascertain that a group that looks authentic in photographs, and sounds authentic on records, really is authentic in terms of rock ideology.”Footnote 48
Lopez thinks of recordings and live performance as serving different purposes and using different techniques. He notes that there are songs that he included on albums because they fit the theme or offered an interesting musical exploration, but that he never intended on performing live—including, in fact, both “Ave Maria” and “Samba Para Elvis,” two ÓRALE! choreographies described in greater depth in a later section. He adds that song endings operate differently on albums as well; they might fade out on the recording or feature extended choruses, “where we would have ended it [sooner] in a live show.”Footnote 49 Thus, for Lopez, recordings seem secondary to the place his art most fully comes into being: as live rock performance. Says Lopez, “The recording is one moment at where I was on that day twenty years ago,”Footnote 50 a reification of something that is always in flux. He elaborates:
Lots of times we would go in the studio right after a tour. And so during the tour, since you're doing the same songs for three months in a row, luckily I would say, “Oh, oh! I have a new idea!” And so those new ideas would end up in the record. But then, after the record is done, I go, “It's done. Now I'm free to make it something else.” Because to me, that's the beauty of the live.Footnote 51
Lopez points to the ways recorded music captures one moment in time, the sounds and aesthetics of a recorded body of work that becomes something separate from the human artist that created it and that renders the music accessible in ways that excise the musician from the music. The recording is a fixed moment in time, but the artist continues to evolve.
For the choreographers and the dancers, this excision—the recorded music—was, at least initially, the primary source of structure of the production. It was through the recordings that the dancers and guest choreographers were introduced to El Vez, made their selections, and set their choreography. While this intermediality led to challenges, it also enabled a productive intergenerational and transtemporal collaboration. Lopez was faced with replicating his younger self, recreating performance practices that he had long since set aside. At the same time, the dancers transitioned from experiencing the recorded music to working directly with Lopez and the band. The much younger dancers—many of whom are likely the age that Lopez was when he recorded his albums in the 1990s and early 2000s—in turn adapted their approach as the recorded music was converted back into live performance. The process was further complicated by the fact that four of the six choreographers were unable to be present during the technical rehearsals. Herrera of course was there, but he did not make changes to the choreography, whereas elements might have been edited or refined had the guests also been in the space. With those choreographers absent, the dancers worked directly with Lopez and the band. The interpretive process that had attracted Lopez to the project in the first place crystallized here: he collaborated with the work of the guest choreographers, much as they had collaborated with his recordings, latching on to key images and ideas to create with the dancers the theatrical moments that tied the narrative together. With his deep knowledge of musical history, his skill in musical references and mash-ups (both within his own repertoire and across different musical genres and artists) in performance, and his constant willingness to make something new with his art, Lopez stitched these intergenerational, transtemporal, and intermedial encounters into a cohesive event.
Due to the random nature of the choreographers’ selections, massive tonal shifts were required between the pieces, and it fell to Lopez and the band both to navigate those shifts and to weave them into a coherent narrative. A striking example of this occurred between the bombastically performative “En el Barrio,” choreographed by Garcia, and the much more pensive “Ave Maria,” choreographed by Martinez, into which that transitioned. At the end of “En el Barrio,” a dancer was given a bouquet of roses, which she separated and placed on the bistro tables that lined the performance space, to be used as props in the subsequent choreography. The rose imagery in both moments reminded Lopez of the 1963 Jaynetts’ song, “Sally Go ’Round the Roses,” which became the musical interlude not only to bridge the two pieces, but also to cover a costume change for El Vez, who returned to the stage wearing a black suit adorned with rose appliques, while The Lovely Elvette Priscillita donned a black lace mantilla.
Lopez also created moments of interactivity with the audience. For instance, to introduce the piece “Soy un Pocho,” an El Vez original that harnesses a “Chicano oldies classic about cruising, which got outlawed and now is back again,”Footnote 52 Lopez-as-El-Vez delivered a monologue about being an English-speaking Chicano that culminated with him locating a pocho in the audience.Footnote 53 At the Friday performance, he sat on the audience member's lap, instructing him to “practicar your acting” as he pulled from his pocket a piece of paper on which was written a Spanish phrase, which he asked him to read “in your best pochismo.” The audience member said “Soy la segunda generación latino” with a terrible English accent, and the band broke out in celebratory song. A bevy of dancers filed in to perform Montoya's triumphant tongue-in-cheek choreography, wearing cheer skirts and white athletic-style jerseys labeled with a “P” for pocho, red plaid collared button-downs fastened only at the top, using silver-black pom-poms employed in an earlier piece.Footnote 54 The dancers executed classic pom-line aesthetics, while other dancers paraded through the space bearing giant cards reading S O C K S—a joking reference to an annoying 1990s radio ad for a language learning program that is referenced in the song lyrics (“¿Eso sí que es?” is seen on the backs of the cards)—which they paraded across the stage while smiling and pantomiming the cheerleader spirit to rouse the audience.
ÓRALE! made visible the variety of interpretive approaches to live music, particularly the highly theatricalized performances of El Vez, raising questions about how meaning is made in rock performance. There are, of course, multiple sources: the lyrics; the sound and timbre; the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and tempos; the instruments used; the performer himself, his banter, his gestures; the costuming; the performance event; the context around that event; and the allusions made in and through the performance. When these meanings are further deepened by movement, as in ÓRALE!, the siloed worlds of dance, theatre, and rock performance are placed in conversation. In this interplay among music, text, and movement, when is a literal approach banal, and when does it allow us to approach something de novo? When lyrics are treated as a script for choreography, is some of the poetry lost?
The choreographic aesthetics intersected with the El Vez songs in various ways. For instance, “Taking Care of Business,” El Vez's version of the Bachman–Turner Overdrive hit, centers undocumented workers with “no green cards up our sleeves”Footnote 55 to discuss their exploitation and vilification through anti-immigration rhetoric and policy. The song also links to Elvis, who took the phrase as his personal motto, adding a lightning bolt to the letters TCB. Elvis made “endless jewelry with the symbol for his friends,” and prominently wore it on a gold chain around his neck.Footnote 56 Choreographed by Mata, this piece drew inspiration from the narrative of the song, along with its driving beat. It featured six dancersFootnote 57 in reflective safety vests and work attire performing gestures of fatigue that evolved into expressions of rebellion and revolt. “Black Magic Woman,” cochoreographed by Herrera and the cast of six dancers,Footnote 58 relied mostly on the sexy sound and feel of the song, in which El Vez performs the Santana classic in a rockabilly style. The dancers interacted with El Vez and Priscillita, incorporating the singers’ established choreography directly into the dance, which culminated in a provocative heels performance by Valerie Mendez.Footnote 59 Pieces including “Cuahtemoc Walk” and “Viva la Raza,”Footnote 60 both choreographed by Montoya, tuned to the joy, humor, and celebration of the songs, with exuberant choreography and clever costuming, which Herrera aptly described as “Mesoamerican Showgirl.”Footnote 61
Too much emphasis on the lyrics, however, caused some pieces to miss the mark. For instance, “Walk a Mile” cochoreographed by Herrera and dancers Cabrera, Maimon, Mendez, Santiago, and Velez, read as a literal walking extravaganza. The song is unique to the El Vez discography in that it lacks the political substance and layered musical references of many of his songs and is a more direct cover of the Elvis version. Says Lopez, it “worked for The Gospel Show. No other good reference,”Footnote 62 meaning it filled a role specific to the dramaturgy of one show and album, rather than having the social commentary of his other creations. The dancers walked, in pairs, alone, and as a trio, for what seemed an endless mile. Though the dancers began at odds, they eventually came to demonstrate camaraderie, lending helping hands with smiles on their faces and creating a sense of connection between the artists. Although the piece appeared to be rewarding to the performers, it fell flat as choreography, taking literally both the title and repetitive musicality of the song, while leaving deeper metaphorical meanings unexplored.
The pieces “Misery Tren” and “En el Barrio,”Footnote 63 choreographed by Garcia, revealed the intermedial and transtemporal frictions that can emerge between recorded music and live performance, while also demonstrating the clash of aesthetics that can arise between dance and narrative. “Misery Tren” transforms Elvis's “Mystery Train,” a song about lost love, into a retelling of the Mexican Revolution and a foretelling of social revolutions to come.Footnote 64 The dance connected to the driving rhythm of the song as well as the train imagery it evokes. The seven dancers performed repetitive, synchronized body pulsations and single-file rotations around the periphery of the stage. Their movements were emphasized by golden Mylar wigs and silver and black sparkling pom-poms that served to erase markers of difference as they drove—or rode—the rhythmic “train,” pulsating to the beat and nodding their heads emphatically. The piece transitioned into an El Vez revision of Elvis's melodramatic “In the Ghetto,” a song that features a pronounced narrative. The El Vez version tracks the birth and gang-life trajectory of “another hungry vato to feed en el barrio.”Footnote 65 Garcia, who describes himself as “equal parts devised theater artist, dance filmmaker, drag queen, and community organizer, with a penchant for queer maximalism,”Footnote 66 cast dancer Nico Maimon as “Mario Chi,” a nonbinary drag persona lip-synching to the song as Lopez-as-El-Vez sang it live behind them. As Maimon peeled off her wig, a painted-on mustache became visible on her upper lip. The other dancers, who had lost their poms but still wore their wigs, assisted Maimon in transforming as she donned a brown blazer embroidered with red roses and gold embellishments, and black platform combat boots, masculinizing the leopard-print bell-bottomed leggings and red spandex top worn in two previous numbers (Fig. 1). Serving to animate the transition, Lopez-as-El-Vez entered the dance space to interact with the dancers, saying, “You've got the power—la fuerza!” and making sexual innuendos equating the pom-poms with testicles. As he shouted, “The power of El Vez compels you,” the dancers encircled the newly incarnate Mario Chi, adopting subservient postures and fawning at Maimon's feet. They then elevated Maimon above their shoulders as if she were crowd-surfing atop an arena audience, while the live Lopez performed upstage with little acknowledgment.
Figure 1. Nico Maimon performs as “Mario Chi,” surrounded by dancers Bianca Cabrera, Emily Hansel, Madi McGain, Brooke Terry, and Valerie Mendez in “En el Barrio,” choreographed by Eric Garcia. Photo: © Marisa Aragona—marisaaragona.com.
The minimal connection between Maimon and Lopez drew attention to the intermedial tensions Gracyk, Frith, and Auslander describe between recorded and live music, and illustrated the transtemporal nature of this collaboration. Perhaps in rehearsal Maimon was able to perfect an impersonation of a static moment from Lopez's past, but no matter how Lopez strove to replicate the recording of more than twenty years prior, the human margin of error eradicated the plausibility of convincing lip-synch. Moreover, the asynchrony shifted the emphasis of the piece from the movement to the lyrics themselves as a script. Performed emphatically, the words—which in fact are quite playful and silly—were elevated in importance, creating a kind of pantomime in place of dance. While this kind of lip-synching is a long-standing feature of drag performance, it here read more as affect than choreography. Garcia staged Maimon to adopt exaggerated rock star posturing as she impersonated El Vez, an Elvis impersonator, who was in turn sampling from Elvis, Traffic, and the Beatles as he performed live in the shadows behind her, juxtaposing his liveness with the lip-synching drag scenario.Footnote 67 Seeing the exuberant Lopez defer onstage to Mario Chi created an uncomfortable, sophomoric tension that parsed the difference between Lopez's expert delivery and Mario Chi's affect. The moment could be read in multiple ways, but none of them convinced: the elevation of the masculine and subservient fan-girl posturing by female-presenting bodies may have imagined an escape from the “Misery Tren,” as represented by the synchronized archetypal golden blonde-Mylar cheerleader choreography; it also offered an example of what Jack Halberstam has dubbed “Kinging,” in which the performance of the masculine subverts gender codes; and it also played with rock star performativity and celebrity culture. However, the myriad layers of impersonation and focus split between dance, Mario Chi, and the band, diminished El Vez and muddied the meaning.
The varied nature of the event as a whole and its emphasis on community building and process contributed to imagining a Muñozian space, built through disidentificatory performances that celebrated Latinx intersectionality, multiplicity, and complexity. While some pieces triumphed and others fell short, ÓRALE! remains a work in progress; one iteration of Latinx expression, collaboration and world building that is not yet realized, reveling in its unfolding to leave a lasting impression—a perfect example of Muñozian utopia. It also facilitated deep meditations about issues such as immigration, colonization, spirituality, and queerness.
Latinx Fluidity and Embodied Code-Switching
Órale—namesake of an El Vez song as well as the performance event—is a malleable Spanish slang word whose definition varies according to context. Herrera took inspiration from the word's multilayered, shifting meaning. He states in his director's note, “because the word only takes shape within the context used, it is uniquely magical and other-worldly.” Thus it is the perfect word to describe “the transcendent magic that is ‘Latinidad’ as experienced by the director, El Vez, the guest choreographers, cast members, and design elements.”Footnote 68 For Herrera, órale contains the multitudes, contradictions, and nuances of the vast and varied Latinx community. Similarly, ÓRALE! was about border crossing, about finding new modes of collaboration that reveal the complexity and variability within Latinx cultures. Herrera stresses that the performance “opened up my eyes to how much space we can take up if we come together, and how we can create environments that really nurture who we are, and the many facets that we are, and the intersectionalities that we are. And [we] invite other people to understand this, but also not apologize for it.”Footnote 69 Herrera again drew inspiration from El Vez, noting his flamboyance, his charisma, and his ability to bring an audience along with him on a crazy journey. Herrera encouraged the designers, choreographers, and ensemble members to embrace the bigness of the event and the multiple aesthetics of their multiple communities, saying, “Let's not be scared about it. Go for it, be bold, be direct. Reinterpret it, but don't shy away from the colors and the schemes. And make it loud. I'm like, ‘when you think it's loud, go 10 degrees higher.’ . . . The whole point of this is, more is more. This is one of those moments where more is more.”Footnote 70 Thus ÓRALE! unapologetically centered Latinx culture and community, highlighting the different approaches of the guest choreographers, several of which offered deep contemplations on Latinx identity, while also making visible the rich diversity of the community. The pieces considered significant topics that are at once personal, and yet often applied monolithically, including arrivance and displacement, Catholicism, and queerness; they worked to make visible the way the past continues to impact the present.
“Aztlán,” choreographed by Mata, offered one of the more contemplative works of the program, considering the way national borders have been concretized and politicized in dangerous ways. “Graceland,” the Paul Simon original, features a narrator who sings of a trip to Memphis as a sort of modern US American pilgrimage to a place of hollow redemption. El Vez's version calls up the mythic place of origin for the Aztec people, a “land, belonged to Mexico / but now holds no time and place.” The lyrics lament how “losing home / is like a bullet in your heart” and note that “It's just the land and name that's changed its borders.” Whereas the Paul Simon song expresses cynicism, the El Vez version more hopefully asserts, “I've reason to believe we all have been deceived / There still is Aztlán.”Footnote 71 Following the big opening number, “Immigration Time,”Footnote 72 “Aztlán” featured a duet between Edgar Aguirre and Brooke Terry. To transition into the performance, Terry, the only Black dancer in the ensemble, came to stand alone in front of El Vez as the sound of ocean waves filled the air.Footnote 73 Dressed in his Mexican flag mariachi suit, he placed his hand above Terry's head and sprinkled glitter into her hair, creating a kind of fairy dust baptism that would resonate with the water imagery throughout the piece (Fig. 2). The light shifted to reveal Aguirre, downstage right, wrapped cocoonlike in a midnight blue shroud. Terry slowly approached him, placed him over her shoulder, and carried him to center stage, where she unrolled Aguirre to reveal an enormous strip of cloth. Together they spread it diagonally across the space, each dancing on their side of the metaphorical water. Aguirre, dressed in a serape-striped poncho with fringe at the bottom, seemed to represent Indigeneity in the Americas, while Terry, dressed in dark purple pants, a neon yellow spandex top, and a floral crown, seemed to stand for Blackness. As they danced on their respective sides of the fabric, they observed each other, creating a duet that remained connected from afar. At times, they held the fabric at each end, causing it to billow beneath them and to come alive in a dance that evoked the crossing of waters—be they the Atlantic Ocean or the Rio Grande. At one point, they walked toward each other from opposite ends of the fabric, hands cupped together before them, as if carrying something precious across the water. They then came together on top of the fabric, sharing their weight in a series of connected movements, in which each was supported by the other, alternating positions, above and below. This alternating exchange of support evoked images of advancing and setbacks, each working together to get back on their feet, helping each other to find shared solid ground. At the end of the piece, Terry draped the fabric onto Aguirre's shoulders, and as he exited the space she arranged the fabric behind him like a royal garment. The piece made visible the different modes of arrival in the Americas along with the still-present effects of colonization, enslavement, and nationalism.
Figure 2. El Vez interacts with dancer Brooke Terry during the transition to “Aztlán,” backed by The Lovely Elvette Priscillita (Crissy Guerrero) and the Memphis Mariachis (L to R: Pat Beers, Lety Beers, Declan Halloran, and Ashley Paul Ryu). Photo: © Marisa Aragona—marisaaragona.com.
“Ave Maria”Footnote 74 similarly offered a compelling and complex look at religious domination, and the racial and cultural hierarchy that it has been used to enforce. The dance featured the trio of Edgar Aguirre, Emily Hansel, and Fabiana Santiago, with Priscillita singing much of the song. The fair-skinned Hansel and Santiago were dressed identically in black lace, tie-front bolero tops with appliqué roses on the hips and backs. They performed in synchrony while Aguirre, of darker complexion and dressed in a simple white cotton poncho-style shirt and dance shorts, was marked as a clear Other both through costuming and through the independent movements he performed. Hansel and Santiago executed the aesthetic codes of traditional ballet and its derivatives, demonstrating long leg extensions, pointed toes, and vertical orientations. These movements were periodically interrupted and punctuated by silent screaming gestures toward the sky, disrupting the expectations and norms of classical dance, and evoking images of anguish and torment caused by the horrors that colonization had unleashed in the name of religion. Aguirre's movements were closer to the ground, spiraling with and against gravity in athletic buoyancy. Several times the dancers made abstracted signs of the cross with their hands, extending the gesture above their heads and widely into the lateral space, referencing a uniquely Catholic gesture that evokes the Spanish influences embedded in Latin American Catholic practices. The dancers occasionally made twisting gestures toward the sky, as if screwing in a light bulb. As the dance progressed, Aguirre partnered with Santiago, creating a choreographed conversation of styles, and drawing further attention to Martinez's stylistic choices for the dancers. As their partnering intensified Hansel's movements became increasingly erratic, until Aguirre reached toward her, catalyzing a calming effect akin to a blessing. These combined choices in costume, style, and gesture seemed to represent European and Indigenous influences on Latin cultures, though no direct references to Indigenous dances were discernible. It also seemed to gesture toward the power of belief and connection in the promotion of spiritual healing. At the end of the piece, Hansel and Santiago showered Aguirre with long-stemmed red roses as he knelt in the center of the performance space as a kind of Christ figure. Lopez walked slowly toward him from the elevated band stage, removing his jacket. He prominently displayed the image of La Virgen de Guadalupe that graced the back of the jacket over Aguirre's head, then draped it over Aguirre's shoulders in a gesture that simultaneously embodied the Catholic cope, James Brown's cape routine, and Elvis.
A final piece to highlight celebrated queerness, which is increasingly under attack in right-wing politics. “Samba Para Elvis,” was choreographed by Cervera, a first-generation, queer Mexican American artist trained in traditional Mexican folklórico, contemporary dance, and Afro-Latine social forms that he fuses into an autobiographical form he calls Poc-Chuc.Footnote 75 Perhaps more than any other performance, this piece beautifully captured the sort of intermedial, intergenerational, and transtemporal performance that ÓRALE! made possible. Lopez notes:
I love my recordings of this and the instrumental version. Both show my youthful ambition of live sampling and overlapping ideas. The lyrics [from “Are You Lonesome Tonight”] are broken to fit the arrangement. . . . It's rock mock samba done in a slow “surf” estyle. Then it turns into “Walk on the Wild Side” played at a slow samba speed but still faster than the Lou Reed song.Footnote 76
More than is common for him, Lopez in this quote references his recordings along with his past ambitions, marking his own transtemporal meditations. Because this is not a song he often performs in concert, this live performance for the dancers in front of him was unique. Speaking directly to them, Lopez-as-El-Vez set up the sensuous duet by delivering a short monologue that evoked memories of prom and the thrills of first love.Footnote 77 As the disco ball above came to life, dancers Edgar Aguirre and Juan L. Ruiz appeared, covered head to foot in loosely fitting outfits and face coverings reminiscent of lucha libre masks. El Vez, Priscillita, and the Memphis Mariachis serenaded the dancers in an unfolding love story, creating a utopian energy that looked beyond nostalgia to a past that may never have existed, but that in performance becomes possible.Footnote 78 Witnessing the piece felt like glimpsing an intimate moment between young lovers; the kind of moment when the rest of the world disappears. The masks, however, also suggested the need to keep this particular love hidden (Fig. 3). The anonymity of the costuming, which revealed little about the dancers’ identities other than that they were both masculine, honed the focus on the movement alone, creating a heightened kinesthetic awareness of each weight shift. Aguirre and Ruiz shared a liquidlike weightlessness in their dance, allowing them to move with agility across the earth while equally occupying the space above. Performed barefoot, the choreography seamlessly drew on elements from each of Cervera's movement traditions, shifting between techniques with such fluidity that only those familiar with each genre might discern the styles quickly enough to catch the steps. The sensuous duet was, at its core, an intimate partnership, venturing in and out of contact improvisation, lifts, and synchronous footwork patterns that blurred the lines between petit allegro, top rock, and Mexican folklórico. The movements exhibited a fluency and dexterity reminiscent of multilingual code-switching; just as changing languages requires the speaker to conceive of different thought paradigms simultaneously, these different movement paradigms reside in the body, and can access a different kind of code-switching. As Herrera stated, “to [Cervera] and me, it's not a blend, it is who we are; it is how we see ourselves.”Footnote 79 On the surface, Cervera's work appeared to be the most obviously Latinx, using Latin social dance as its entry point. However, when confronted by an audience member who claimed that Cervera's piece was the “only real Latino movement,” because it was “the most visually representative of what most people think of,” Herrera's response was that “it was all Latino movement, because it all came from us.”Footnote 80
Figure 3. Dancers Edgar Aguirre and Juan L. Ruiz perform “Samba Para Elvis,” choreographed by Alfonso Cervera. Photo: © Marisa Aragona—marisaaragona.com.
The clarity with which Herrera seeks to assert the Latinx presence in US dance mirrors the ways in which he and all the participating US Latinx dancers and choreographers are, conversely, indelibly branded with US American dance aesthetics that exist as part of their personal Latinx identities. ÓRALE! celebrated the subtle code-switching that is lived by Latinx modern and contemporary dancers and choreographers by providing a forum that allows the creation of art in community, and the discovery of connections between movement and cultural practices as US Latinx Americans. Herrera and Lopez's invitation to celebrate Latinidad is an inclusive offer; one that does not require a Latin identity to partake. As Lopez often says, “When you come to an El Vez show, you walk away proud to be a Mexican, even when you're not.”Footnote 81
Extending an invitation to celebrate Latinidad forces us to recognize how we continue to rely on phenotype in our understandings of race and ethnicity, and thus raises questions of how we receive the dancing bodies. Faedra Chatard Carpenter points out:
[P]henotypical traits (such as skin color, facial features, and hair texture) have traditionally guided our perceptions of race. These perceptions, often erroneously understood in terms of ‘biology,’ have, in turn, fostered assumptions regarding the physical, intellectual, and/or moral differences between groups of people. While it is often used as a way to explicate or understand human variability, this notion of race as biological is highly problematic.Footnote 82
Race and ethnicity are social constructs, made material through social, political, and economic practice. And while most people have rejected the idea of race and ethnicity as biological realities, it is often difficult to shake notions of essentialism fully. Notes Carpenter, “Despite the common recognition that racial categories are not fixed and absolute, we have yet to abandon our allegiance to them.”Footnote 83 This is perhaps amplified in attempts to define Latinx identity. Carla Della Gatta seizes on this complexity as she answers the question, “What is Latinx?”:
Latinx is an ethnicity and can be of any race: white, Black, Indigenous, or Asian. These are the ethnic and racial categories defined by the US government, and the terminology as well as the groupings cannot be applied within other countries. Conceptions of Latinidad have historically been anti-Black, while Latinx theater and performance have more often included Indigeneity, typically with a marginalized presence and through religious representation. “White” is often used, as it is employed here, to mean racially white and non-Latinx; although “Anglo” historically fits this definition, it is outmoded and can lead to unintended associations with “Anglo-Saxon.” Whiteness also connotes a set of power relationships. I am aware of the problematics of this terminology and the way that, conversely, “Latinidad” conjures an image of a racially white peoples, when it in fact includes many who are racially Black and Indigenous. Language is in constant change: Latinx use terms including “Latin,” “Latino,” “Latino/a,” “Latina/o,” “Latin@,” “Latinx,” and now at times “Latine” or “Latiné” to describe themselves and their cultures. I use “Latinx” because it acknowledges that gender is not a binary, it is intended to be inclusive to all, and because it contrasts with the gendered language of Spanish; it is not a word in any language, and for me, it encompasses the spirit of language play.Footnote 84
Both scholars point to the importance of understanding the historical conditions of white supremacy and racial oppression, just as they point out the impossibility and misguidedness of clinging to racial essentialism. Latin surnames and given names can be clues to inherited cultural ties, as can physical characteristics, but they are not absolute. Dancer Brooke Terry reads as visibly Black, but her phenotype gives us no information about her cultural heritage or family history. As we watch her performance, exploring transatlantic travel in “Aztlán,” does it matter if we know how her personal story intersects with the performed narrative? Edgar Aguirre was costumed repeatedly as representing Indigeneity, and Angel Velez, a petite trans dancer, was costumed and read as primarily female. This reminds us of the fact that how a person “reads” is all conjecture, even if essentialized understandings of race and ethnicity seek to suggest that we can clearly decode phenotype because racial difference is something fixed, permanent, and real. At the same time, because ÓRALE! invites a celebration of Latinidad, we are invited to read these bodies as Latinx, and to understand that all of these contexts are embraced, even those that exist in contradiction with each other within the performance experience.
Recurring themes of Americana appear in a myriad of US iconography, exemplified by El Vez and reiterated throughout the production through the cheerleader, showgirl, prom, and blondeness. It is important to note that while the program itself and El Vez's performance traditions make use of the Spanish language, English remained the dominant basis of the production itself, going as far as to include the piece, “Soy un Pocho,” that both celebrated and mocked monolingual English-speaking Chicanos. By the same token, through the absence of Portuguese, Nahuatl, Zapotec, Guarini, or other Indigenous languages, the program acknowledges a shared Spanish-language-based Latinidad, existing within an English-speaking paradigm, centering Latinx culture while leaving space for everyone to take part.
Concluding Thoughts
The ÓRALE! journey, which crossed borders of language, culture, and the performing arts of dance, theatre, and rock performance, is a conceptual and literal meeting place of becoming. Notes Ellsworth, experiences like that offered by ÓRALE! “can be magical in [their] artful manipulation of inner ways of knowing into a mutually transforming relation with outer events, selves, objects, and ideas.”Footnote 85 Such events challenge rigid concepts of identity and instead view multicultural relations as something constantly in flux. Stemming from complex interactions in which people meet, clash, and grapple with concepts of power and overlapping identities, this border crossing refutes essentialism in favor of constructing a space of negotiation where cultural meaning can evolve. By embracing a collaborative process, and by securing the physical space to share it with a diverse public community, Herrera and Lopez carved out cultural space in the minds and hearts of the audience, broadening its reach with every iteration. Reflecting on the process, Herrera stated:
I wanted to keep pushing the boundaries of what it means to be in the dance world, to be a professional choreographer, what it means to be Latino in movement styles, you know? And leading with these ideas to keep showing the complexities and nuances of who we are to the larger community, and for the benefit of the audience.
Of course it's not lost on me that a lot of our audience is going to be white. Actually over 50% of our audience [for ÓRALE!] turned out to be BIPOC, which is great! But, I have to consider, what is this going to feel like and look like for everyone showing up?Footnote 86
ÓRALE! pushes the boundaries of inclusion and problematizes essentialism through complex layers of iconography, asking, What further potential might be possible?
ÓRALE! filled a need. Notes Herrera, “the practice of being in community is not actually propagated, and you don't see it. . . . I don't see it in the history of the dance world often enough here in the United States, especially for folks like myself. . . or most BIPOC communities.”Footnote 87 Perhaps in the future, the participating dancers will look back at the ways in which ÓRALE! crossed borders and celebrated Latinidad, offering them a space for reflection and a chance to engage with their younger selves, as Herrera and Lopez did in this process. Perhaps this exploration might serve as a site of excavation for the next generation of dancers, revealing how Latinidad is buried in the deepest roots of modern dance, yet continues to flower today. Ultimately, ÓRALE! did not resolve any gaps that exist between the different disciplines of dance, theatre, and rock performance, nor did it resolve intermedial or transtemporal frictions, but that was not its intention. It did make visible the exciting potential of what Ellsworth would call “knowledge in the making,”Footnote 88 and the ways that embracing such an approach might allow us to experience ourselves in becoming by challenging ourselves to create new collaborative processes of making and doing. Moreover, it highlighted the power of community, and through disidentification, created a Muñozian moment in which performers and audience could come together and cruise utopia.
Karen Jean Martinson (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Her scholarly and creative work explores the intersection of contemporary US American performance, consumer culture, neoliberalism, and the processes of identification, interrogating issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She also writes and talks (constantly) about dramaturgy and dramaturgical thinking. Her monograph, Make the Dream Real: World-Building Performance by El Vez, The Mexican Elvis, is forthcoming from Intellect Press. Martinson has developed her robust dramaturgical approach over the past two decades, and has worked on socially engaged theatre that considers issues of race and racial oppression, the impacts of gun violence, intergenerational trauma, the Indian Industrial Boarding School System, issues of mobility in underprivileged communities, and the impending climate crisis. Her scholarship has been featured in such journals as Leonardo, Review: The Journal of Dramaturgy, Theatre Annual, Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal, Cultural Studies ⇔ Critical Methodologies, and Popular Entertainment Studies. Martinson currently serves as the VP of Advocacy for the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), was Secretary of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and is active in the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS), and the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC). She was awarded the Leon Katz Award for Teaching and Mentoring by LMDA in 2023.
Julia E. Chacón is a doctoral candidate in the Theatre and Performance of the Americas program in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. She holds an MFA in Dance and MA in Creative Enterprise and Cultural Leadership from Arizona State University and a BFA in Dance and BS in Anthropology from the University of New Mexico. Her research area of interest examines how dance practices and performance are a site of transnational exchange, with an emphasis on flamenco and Spanish dance in the early twentieth-century United States. A professional dancer, she trained in ballet, modern, and flamenco and toured for twelve years with international flamenco companies directed by Maria Benitez, Carlota Santana, José Galván, and others. She directs Julia Chacón Flamenco Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona.
