Hometown: Bucaramanga, Colombia
Current city: San Francisco
Age: 41
College and degree: Universidad Javeriana (Bogota, Colombia). Degree in Communications.
Graduate school and degree: Laban Centre, now called Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. MFA in Dance Studies (no longer offered).
Website: My dance studio: www.calliopedance.com; Saint Mary's College: http://www.stmarys-ca.edu/mfa-in-dance
All of the dance hats you wear: Dance artist and educator, dance studio owner
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My 20s: Didn’t stop training everyday, and I traveled a lot performing in different venues and festivals in Colombia, Mexico, England, Ecuador, and Portugal. Went to graduate school. And in my late 20s started working at two universities in Bogota, Colombia - one with a dance degree already established, and the other creating a new dance degree. Started studying different somatic movement disciplines.
30s: Choreographed a number of site-specific dance performances; did research and published articles in journals and books in Colombia; moved to the United States and started working at Saint Mary’s College of California teaching in the dance undergraduate degree program and later creating a new MFA in Dance program. Became the owner of a dance studio for children in San Francisco and created a somatic based dance curriculum for children ages 3-12. Trained in different somatic movement disciplines and obtained a certificate as a somatic movement educator following the somatic system called “Dynamic Embodiment."
40s: Just started this exciting decade. Working at Saint Mary’s College of California as the Director of the MFA in Dance: Creative Practice program and teaching in both the undergraduate and graduate programs. Teaching children and running my studio in San Francisco.
Please share a little about growing up in Colombia, in a dancing household:
My mother was a dance teacher and had a school of dance in our home in the tropical city of Bucaramanga in the Andes mountains of Colombia. It was a big house for a family of 8 (2 parents and 6 children) plus two studios. So I grew up surrounded by dance everywhere. My mother was a Spanish classical dance and flamenco dancer as well as an expert in Colombian folklore. My oldest sister, after going through professional training experiences in modern dance and jazz, she specialized in flamenco. I was the youngest child and really wanted to be different, so I trained in a ballet conservatory from the age of 7 until the age of 17. And then I moved to modern dance, and later found my passion in studying dance as an academic field.
When did you move to the United States, and what was the impetus?
I moved to the United States in 2006 to work with my sister, who is also a dance artist. She is in Richmond, Virginia, where she has a dance non-profit organization called the Latin Ballet of Virginia. I worked there as the educational program director for 2 years, and then I got the wonderful opportunity to become a faculty member at Saint Mary’s College of California, so I moved to the Bay Area. I had a wonderful job teaching at two universities as well as choreographing and performing, and also a great life in Bogota, Colombia, but my husband and I wanted an adventure. So we decided to take on the opportunity for me to come to work with my sister in Virginia as the first step to see how life could be in the United States, and now we’ve been here for 10 years.
What is on your calendar for 2016?
2016 is going to be simple with not much traveling but focusing on teaching, which is my main job at the moment. I enjoy the balance of teaching children and undergraduate as well as graduate students. I run my own studio and do a big production at the end of the year. I am trying to finish a paper for journal publication at the end of February, and hopefully more like this opportunity will continue to happen this year.
Please describe your most current project (as a performer or choreographer) and the questions you are asking yourself right now as an artist.
I have been working as a performer for Cathy Davalos Dance Company and her project “Oh The Moon,” that will be performed in Italy this summer. In terms of my own choreographic work, I don’t intend to choreograph this year except for children’s choreography. My main choreographic interests are in creating dance installations and site-specific work. I hope to return to this in 2017.
Current movement practices and care for the body:
Yoga combined with swimming are my favorite activities that take me away from my dancing mind, so they really give me a break from being a dance thinker and allow me to connect to my body in a different way. I am deeply invested in somatic movement practices and find that the Alexander Technique or the Feldenkrais Method or a session in Body Mind Centering or Body Mind Dancing, and especially if it has hands on work incorporated, can be extremely beneficial for the health of my emotional, physical and intellectual body.
Somatics are integral to your work. Which practices have you explored, and who have you studied with? What was your presentation in the Summer of 2015 about?
I got to know about somatics during my graduate studies at the Laban Centre between the years of 1998 and 2001. Contemporary dance training in London then was receiving a lot of influence from the somatic movement work and especially from the Skinner Releasing Technique. When I moved to Colombia after my graduate studies in London, I studied the Alexander Technique for 6 years with Bobby Rosenberg, a colleague of mine at Universidad Javeriana in Bogota. While I was studying with Bobby and creating a new dance degree that would have a strong influence of somatics, I received a scholarship to come to the Bay Area to study at Moving on Center. They had a program called “Participatory Arts” that had a strong component of social justice, the performing arts and somatics (Alexander, Bartenieff Fundamentals and Laban Movement Analysis, Process work and Authentic Movement). There I studied with Martha Eddy, Carol Swann, Peggy Hackney and Susan Bauer. I continued to study with Martha Eddy, and she is still my main teacher that I have followed and continue to study with. I trained in her somatic movement system called “Dynamic Embodiment” as well as in her “Body Mind Dancing” method for teaching dance to all based on Body Mind Centering as well as BF and LMA concepts. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen has had a great influence in my work as a teacher and researcher. I have studied with her in group workshop settings as well as in individual sessions. I participated as a teacher in the most recent International Dance and Somatic Practices Conference at the University of Coventry in England last summer. My presentation focused on the concepts of “cellular consciousness” and the “place of space” from Body Mind Centering, exploring the sense of universal space that we can experience in our bodies through the awareness of the life and presence of our cells and the history that they have in the formation of our corporeal existence. As we allow our bodies to go there, we open the possibility for potential states of being in relation to flow and space and highly creative processes for dance practice.
When did you open a studio in San Francisco? How do you balance owning a business, teaching young children, being a college professor, and having a family?
It’s a crazy balance. When I moved to the Bay Area, a good friend of mine had just opened a dance studio for children. I started working with her, teaching about 12 classes a week at the same time that I was teaching part-time at Saint Mary’s College. A couple of years later, she had to move and asked me if I wanted to take over the dance studio, and I then became the owner. That was in 2010, so it’s been almost 6 years of a lot of work. I do administrative work, teach the dance classes in Spanish, manage the curriculum and create weekly lesson plans, organize the end of the year production with the children, and train and supervise the teachers. I feel very lucky because all of the teachers that I have at the moment are wonderfully aligned with the dance studio philosophy and curriculum. The dance studio has 150 students, so I communicate with 150 families. I am also full-time faculty at Saint Mary’s College, where I teach mostly in the graduate program and hold the title of the Director of the MFA in Dance: Creative Practice program. At Saint Mary’s I feel so supported by the most wonderful community of teachers and staff. We all work together, so in some sense the work feels “less” than running the dance studio all by myself. I love both of these worlds --- teaching in an academic setting where I can continue to do research and teach theoretical courses that I feel completely passionate about, and having the opportunity to dance with children who also teach me a lot as I witness them go through their developmental stages and see how they live in their bodies that naturally dance.
You helped create the new low residency MFA program at Saint Mary’s College. What excites and challenges you about this?
The MFA in Dance Program at Saint Mary’s College was a very exciting project for me because I was able to dream about the type of graduate program that I believe in. I brought in ideas from the graduate program that I did and especially how much it was based on theory and research, as well as my interests in areas such as somatic movement studies, social justice and critical pedagogy as it applies to dance. These are the main disciplines that the MFA in Dance: Creative Practice program focuses on as they relate to contemporary choreography. Seeing how these ideas - that I once put on paper as a proposal - being materialized now in our current students and especially in those who are in their final stage of studies, is extremely exciting. I am referring to our first graduating class who will finish the program this coming June 2016. In terms of challenges, there are many, especially because it is a new program and both MFA in Dance programs (Creative Practice and Design & Production) are unique in how they are designed and what they offer.
Last performance you saw that inspired you:
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre Company from Taiwan. I saw them in January at Zellerbach Hall performing the work by artistic director Lin Hwai-min titled “Rice."
Final thoughts - Hope/belief/love of the profession:
My main hope for the field of dance has always been that we as dance artists are able to look outside of our own bubble of dance, that we are able to consider all types of thoughts and disciplines so we can look at dance with a broad – universal – mind. We don’t have to look at dance from the perspective of dance; we can be critical of our own practice and follow it based on multiple angles of thought (philosophy, politics, the arts, history, astronomy, science, ecology, justice…).
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Related posts:
Low Residency Masters Programs in the United States
Artist Profile #76: Cathy Davalos (Richmond, CA)
A Modern Dancer's Guide to.....the San Francisco Bay Area
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