Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.

CHOREOGRAPHER YVONNE MONTOYA FUSES SOUTHWEST ORAL TRADITIONS WITH HER ANCESTRAL ROOTS TO CREATE "STORIES FROM HOME."

IN THE WAKE OF POLICE VIOLENCE, CHOREOGRAPHER DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON, BRINGS TO LIGHT THE EXPERIENCES OF FOUR BLACK MEN.

ACCLAIMED MASTER OF GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION, CUBAN PAINTER RAFAEL SORIANO WANTED HIS PAINTINGS TO CAPTURE WHERE "THE INTIMATE AND THE COSMIC CONVERGE."

BRINGING IT HOME >>Faith: So Yvonne stories from home honors the oral traditions of the Latino communities in the American Southwest and also reflects your own personal and ancestral history.

So what inspired you to bring to life these narratives in your choreographic work?

>>Yvonne: There were a couple things that led to the inspiration for stories from home.

The first was my father's passing in 2015.

My dad died of cancer.

He was from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I grew up here in Albuquerque, and my dad was the keeper of our family stories.

So we'd just be hanging out, having dinner, watching a football game, and he'd start sharing a story about his childhood or his dad or my great uncles, his uncles, people that I never had a chance to meet.

But when he passed, I realized that those connections to my family, to my ancestors, and to my child's family are no longer there.

And so I have a son, he lives and is being raised in Tucson, Arizona, where I live currently.

And so there's this disconnect with his New Mexico family and his roots.

And so I wanted to pick up the baton that my dad left and fill those giant shoes and share those stories with him.

But I wanted to do it in the language that I was most comfortable with, which is dance.

So I'm thinking what are the cornerstone moments?

What are the defining moments that shaped my family that makes us who we are that also are stories of the community at large, because we have a shared history.

>>Faith: So how do you approach the choreographic process for stories from home?

>>Yvonne: I started with gesture, so I'll highlight two dances and the way I use gestures.

The first is the dance dedicated to my father.

Braceros.

I had on video, I video recorded his oral history.

So he's sitting in a chair and he's sharing about his time with the braceros, but he wasn't looking at me, he was looking out in the distance and he started doing these gestures with his hands, like he was remembering the act of picking the watermelon or cantaloupe and putting them on a conveyor belt, throwing it up.

He was also doing this thing with his hand where he's kind of sliding it down a bit.

And I thought to myself, I should capture that because his body is remembering the motions.

That's the muscle memory of that work.

And so I wanted examine that and how can I take his muscle memory and then put it in dance form and share that with dancers so they could communicate those memories.

Because we hear in dance, your body's your instrument, but also working class bodies are their instrument.

So that was a parallel there.

So how could I fuse that parallel to show the beauty and the strength of that muscle memory, but also that movement, that repetitive motion of working class bodies.

There's a piece called Deslenguadas, which was inspired by Gloria Anzaldua, a section in her chapter, How to Tame a Wild Tongue, that focuses on the loss of the Spanish language.

And that was accompanied by a loss of, at least in my case, in my experience, of culture and tradition because I couldn't speak with my great grandma to learn her recipes or to hear her stories or even understand her songs that she was singing until I went to college and learned Spanish in school.

So that dance, it's a series of three solos and it goes back in time and across the generations to look at each person's, each generation's experience with the loss of language and what that was like and how did the body feel, and how does the body feel when someone asks me to speak Spanish and I can't very well.

Like where is that tension come from, for me, it's a form of embarrassment.

And outside of New Mexico and other Latino spaces, people will look at my last name and say, oh, Montoya Montoya, and start asking me questions in Spanish and then be like, well, wait, why don't you speak Spanish?

The dance is also a way to answer that question for Latino communities that are outside of New Mexico, this is why.

The majority of the dancers that I work with are either Mexican immigrant or Mexican American, mostly from the Phoenix area.

I have one from LA and we do have a swing cast dancer that is from Santa Fe that's currently joining the cast.

So one of the things that was really important is for them to come and experience New Mexico because it is different.

It's different than Tucson, it's different than Phoenix is different than la.

And I know that I sat them down.

I talked about all the importance of the dances, the themes, how they relate to my family, the stories of New Mexico, but to come and experience, to eat the food, to meet the people, to see the beautiful desert skies and the mountains.

I think that was important.

So we did a field trip up to Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Los Alamos, and we even went for a bit to my mom's village in the Pojoaque Valley to El Rancho to explore that area there.

They were very moved, especially going up to Los Alamos and seeing that area because one of the cornerstone dances and stories from home is a dance called Pajarito, which is about my family's experience of the lab prior to the lab being constructed through present day.

>>Faith: Why was that story important to tell for you?

>>Yvonne: So my great great grandparents, I think I got the greats right, Sophia Vigil and Roberto Roybal were the homesteaders that were on the Pajarito Plateau that were evicted in 1943 in order for the lab to be constructed.

After that, three generations of my family worked at the lab.

My grandmother actually retired from the lab, and then my mom and dad worked there for a few years in the late 1970s before I came along.

And then my dad was exposed to something during his time working at the lab and passed away in 2015 as a result of cancer that he contracted because of his exposure.

Initially, I didn't want to include Los Alamos in this piece because I wanted to do an entire piece about Los Alamos because there's so much to say and so much to tell, and so much to do.

But then I thought to myself, I can't have a show about my family called Stories From Home without it because it's such an important touch point and turning point in history for my family that it absolutely had to be included.

>>Faith: Why are these stories important to share?

>>Yvonne: I think they're important to share for two reasons.

One, we don't see these themes, these stories, even the color of the costumes, the type of music that I'm using, we don't often see that in concert dance.

And so I think it's really important to crack open the field of concert dance and to see my community reflected on concert dance stages.

Growing up, I never once saw myself reflected on stage, and I wanted the people that came after me to see themselves and their communities and sounds from their home reflected on stage.

And so if I can share these stories in my way, I can add to the cacophony of voices that are shedding light on these important stories and topics so that our history isn't forgotten, and so that our history isn't erased.

DANCING TO HEAL So, it's called "inCOPnegro: Aftermath," because we're really looking at what happens in the wake of police violence in the community and how do we heal from that.

So, we're trying to talk about, after all is said and done after the news outlets go away, after there's no more viral video, and there's this feeling that no one really cares anymore.

What is that community left to do and how do they heal with the trauma that they've experienced?

(rapping) I'm fighting a war within myself, playing a role, but all the chords can play themselves.

So Floco is the essence of that character called the questioner, who's spending the entire time questioning, am I a hero or am I a villain?

(rapping) For me, the sergeant seeing shield reflects the true society.

You want to change the world, you need to look at the proprieties hero villain, and vice versa is a dilemma first they love you The questioner is a character that is in between two worlds, so it's in between the community and how the community is responding to a current tragedy and being on the side of we'll say law enforcement for, you know, air quotes.

(rapping) You see it's a war going on outside, you better pick a side.

When I first started this, I was really curious about the black officer experience because I just never heard a black officer talk about their experience.

(rapping) It's way too rare that a wave could ever stem the tide.

I'm not the mouthpiece for the performance, but being the only lyricist, I do understand my responsibility of every time I open my mouth and I say something from my character in the performance, I have a very big responsibility to make sure that we're leading the story where it needs to go.

If I need to be by this light right here, So that triggers Dominick to move this way.

It's the same thing with the lyrics, like how I perform and how I move and how I write is going to affect the rest of the show.

Well, George Floyd was murdered, and it was really the days in the weeks afterwards.

So, me and my wife were pregnant at the time with our first child.

And at one point I realized that I'm going to have to teach my Black child about police.

And I just never considered that that's a step in my trajectory in my life.

So, over the years, I think like a lot of black people have had run-ins with police.

Up to this point, I estimate about 45 times since I was a child up until now.

My experiences were just always knowing that this interaction can go from a parking ticket to fatal and not knowing how that's going to go.

Every situation is kind of like that.

The week after I got my license, I was at soccer practice in Tallmadge, Ohio, and it was February and it was cold, it was snowing, and I got stopped by police officer And it was the first time I got stopped by a police officer as a new driver.

Again, I've been driving for a week and then the second cruiser came in and a third cruiser came in and a fourth cruiser came.

I was asked to get out of the car.

I was put on the hood of the car.

You know, I was patted down.

And this kind of whole moment happened for like a good 20, 25 minutes.

I was being questioned and things like that.

And I'm in soccer shorts in the middle of winter.

And then at the end they're like, Oh, your taillight was out.

And then they let me go.

When it first starts happening to you.

There's a lot of fear.

There's some shame because you assume, you're doing something wrong and that you're the reason you get in trouble.

But then after a while, there is a level of numbness to the feeling because it's something that you expect.

So now if I get stopped by a police officer, now there's like a routine that you go through.

You kind of know what's going to happen.

You're like, Well, yep, this makes sense.

It's been a while.

The feeling kind of lessens over time.

When Jayland Walker was murdered.

One of the things I started really paying attention to is how everyone was reacting to it and how you see that cycle of this explosion of people protesting and people really trying to show that this is wrong.

(rapping) for the ones that they make it out.

He was challenging me to potentially be a part of something that made me uncomfortable the second that he said it.

And artistically, those are the kinds of things that I try to be a part of, or I try to put myself in positions to be able to grow lyrically, production wise, artistically, just just from my mindset.

Like he was challenging my mindset to have a conversation about something, and I was just like, I never want to have this conversation, let alone publicly through my art form.

We need to start talking about how do we heal, and how do we not talk about healing like this Kumbaya thing where everything is going to be good.

It's complicated, it's messy.

Not everyone gets along in the healing process, and that's really ultimately what Aftermath is about.

I hope they come in open minded and I hope they leave open minded.

If they want it to be police brutality, then be open minded about that... community healing.

Be open minded about that ....black men, black people not being a monolith, black men being able to be soft, to be heard, to express grief in whatever way that is, whether it's crying, whether it's anger, whether it's dance, whether it's rap.

Just being open minded to a plethora of themes.

The way that you were when you came in.

It's a gift to the community.

We as artists have an ability to see all the unsaid things in society and in a city and in the community.

So, we took all those unsaid things and, and molded it and created it into something to hand the community for them to do with as they will.

And I just hope they feel the care that we put into this for them.

I feel like it's the perfect time for us to be doing this show because the concept has shifted to being around community healing.

A couple of years ago, I would have said this is really important because this conversation's happening nationally, like it's happening over and over.

We have to have this conversation.

But now I think it's important because it's home, it's here, it's now, it's what's happening to us in this community.

And there's a lot of pain in this community, but we still have to figure out, so what do we do now?

It's important to figure out how to start that conversation, to have that conversation.

We're not the only ones having this conversation, but we're the only ones doing it this way.

JOURNEY THROUGH THE COSMOS He would say, "I do not pretend to transmit a message of reality.

I am moved by the longing to travel within my paintings in a dimension of spirit where the intimate and the cosmic converge."

My hope is to have scholars, art historians, Ph.D. student candidates, curators that are interested in my father's work, come and have access to the archives and have access to sit and reflect and look at the work, be able to live with the work for short periods of time.

Because this is a work that you don't just see you have to really look at.

And so, these are little reflective moments of meditation and almost transcendent.

The later period, they're almost transcendence.

So, he invites the viewer to come on, come on this adventure with me, you know.

So that's what I hope for this space, that people can come and sit and reflect and learn more about his work.

My name is Hortensia Soriano, and I am the daughter of Rafael Soriano and also the director of the Rafael Soriano Foundation.

My memory is, is that he would come home from work and he would usually take a little nap and we would have dinner.

And then he began the process of painting.

And I remember as a child, I only asked my mom one time.

"I don't understand why my father doesn't play with me at night or why doesn't he watch television with us."

And my mother said to me, "Your father is in the back room in the Florida room doing very important work."

And I understood that what he was doing back there was was pretty special.

It was just that one time.

So, I always was comforted knowing that he was back there doing what he loved most.

For me, they were all adventures and he would bring us in to the Florida room, me, and my mom, when they were completed, and he would ask us: What do you see?

What do you feel?

Tell me about the colors.

And we would talk about these paintings, and then they proceeded to name the paintings.

Him and me and my mother would give each painting a title.

It was an adventure for me growing up with his paintings and, you know, taking the paintings outdoors to dry.

And one thing with my mom and my dad, the weather became a big thing in my house because if you look in the yard, you can see the fence.

There were sometimes three or four paintings, these masterpieces hanging on the fence to dry.

I'm working right now on the catalog Raisonné project, and so far, we've entered about 1400 works that began in Cuba.

And they go all the way through 2000, maybe 2001.

So, it's quite an extensive body of work, considering that his main medium is oil and oil takes so long to dry.

If my mom was not helping him and doing the frames and mounting the canvases and always having a fresh canvas for him, he definitely would have not been able to paint that amount of work that he did.

So, yeah, thanks to her, we have this body of work today for sure.

I'm going to show you a very beautiful geometric painting that I'm fortunate enough to have in the collection.

This is called Motivo Del Mar.

It's a 1953 piece.

The estate, maybe about 300 works.

We still have it in the estate.

And right now, we have LnS Gallery that is helping us and has the representation of the estate.

One of the main things that we wanted to do was to showcase to people this tenacity of story and those work of how he was really painting for himself.

He was an artist who was looking at how to continue the chain of art history, how to gravitate towards a different visual vocabulary and really doing it, not thinking of any commercial success at all, but more importantly about a personal fulfillment, which is why I think it creates a really interesting energy to the viewer that Soriano isn't only an artist that you see, but it's an artist that you feel.

He's an artist who's challenging the notion of abstraction through light, through surrealism, through atmosphere.

Almost like if you observe a Rothko or Cuban American Rothko.

He believed in God and he believed in the spirit.

And and he went inwards.

He looked inwards for the sustenance in his life.

And I think that that's what translated on these paintings, that luminosity of of yes, the cosmos.

He was fascinated with the man on the moon.

When the man walked on the moon in 1969.

And so, these are like moments of landscape.

The psychic landscapes in this cosmos could be under the sea, in your imagination and the colors.

He was a colorist and the colors are very he always said they had to do with his Bay of Matanzas, which changed colors six or seven times, depending on the time of day.

And so that light always stayed in his memory of those colors.

And so, these palettes have to do with that bay of Matanzas, which he loved.

Well, it's very important to me for my father's work to find its place in history, because I feel that he is not just a Cuban artist or a Cuban American artist.

He is an artist that belongs to the world.

And that's part of the mission of the foundation, is to place pieces in museums and in public institutions globally for future generations to be able to enjoy.

So, yeah, I want people to know that, you know, he was a master.

He was not just a Cuban master, but he he's a master, period.

And I will say my father was very, very humble and he would never have said any of this.

But I'm the daughter.

I can say all this.

So, yeah, he was a true master.

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Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.