What if a Dance Piece Were Actually Funny? Or Super Sad?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/arts/dance/mariana-valencia-air-performance-space-new-york.html

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Growing up in Chicago in the 1980s, the choreographer Mariana Valencia began making dance steps long before she knew what choreography was. From the ages of 2 to 5, she had a recurring gig on public access television, as a guest on the Spanish-language children’s show “El Club del Niño.”

“Those were my first experimentations,” Ms. Valencia said over lunch in the East Village, recalling the song-and-dance routines — rehearsed in her babysitter’s living room — that she performed alongside acts by other local children.

She received some prompting from adults but was mostly left to her own creative devices, whether lip-syncing to her favorite pop song or doing a ribbon dance. The show’s friendly host, known as Palomo, “was all about giving immigrant people’s children a space for artistic expression,” she said. She remembers her mother, who was born in Guatemala, cheering her on from the sidelines.

Those on-air appearances are one source of inspiration for Ms. Valencia’s latest work, “Air,” which opens on Thursday at Performance Space New York. Over the past few years, Ms. Valencia, 35, has been fine-tuning a lively, candid style of solo performance, combining her postmodern dance background, dry sense of humor and no-frills manner of storytelling into poignant explorations of her personal history.

Within the rigorous structures she builds — tightly ordered sequences of movement, song and spoken text — she finds the freedom to improvise, to respond to her audience in the moment. She knows how to read a room.

In “Air,” she explores influences that have shaped her sensibility, more through osmosis than through conscious choice: the Spanish-language media — movies, music, local news — that was ever-present in her bilingual childhood home. As in much of her work, autobiography opens out onto larger themes, and humor encompasses sadness.

Channeling characters from her past, like the former Chicago news anchor Edna Schmidt or the Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado, she draws parallels between the experiences of Latin American immigrants in the United States in the 1990s and today. Dehumanizing immigration policies, she subtly reminds us, are nothing new.

Ms. Valencia has been choreographing in New York for more than a decade, but the past couple of years have brought heightened attention to her work. Since 2018, she has received a $40,000 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (a significant sum in the scrappy field of experimental dance), her first evening-length commission (from the Chocolate Factory Theater) and an invitation to perform in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She also took her work on tour for the first time.

This recognition has coincided with her shift toward solo performance, toward telling her own stories in a deliberately inviting way. When the curator Greta Hartenstein, who brought Ms. Valencia to the Whitney, first encountered her work — an in-progress showing of “Album” (2018) — she was drawn to the generosity of her approach.

“She has a way of sharing such personal histories,” Ms. Hartenstein said in a telephone interview, “but also leaving room for every audience member to see themselves in that narrative, or their family or their friends, and so it becomes a shared experience.”

Ms. Valencia hasn’t always had such a warm rapport with the spectator. During her early years in New York, she created what she calls “abstract quiet dances,” informed by her studies at Hampshire College in western Massachusetts, where she took her first formal classes in dance composition and technique. (On summer breaks back in Chicago, she trained in the modern dance techniques of Lester Horton and Martha Graham.) As an artist just starting out, she aligned with the traditions of postmodern dance, including a disengagement from the viewer, a kind of refusal of being watched.

“I had this idea back then that the dance would happen whether or not anyone was there to see it,” she said, “which also meant my affect wouldn’t really change.” But she began to notice a shift in herself, not only as a choreographer and performer but as an audience member frequently witnessing the same kind of dances she made.

“I wanted to feel welcomed, not that it was bothersome that people were watching the dance,” she said.

“I was like, What if something was funny, like actually funny? Or what if something was actually super sad?” She became interested in “navigating people through all those feelings without isolating them,” she said. And she wanted to tap into a wider range of skills, many of which she had honed in high school before turning her focus to dance: acting, singing, comedy improv.

The dancer Lydia Okrent, Ms. Valencia’s friend and longtime collaborator, has followed this transformation in her work, from “mad at the audience,” as she said in a telephone interview, to more expressive and self-assured, especially in her use of comedy.

“She is very funny,” Ms. Okrent said, “and that doesn’t come out of having an easy life. We are funny because life is really hard, and she keeps herself afloat through her humor.”

Ms. Valencia doesn’t shy away from painful subjects, many of which reappear from one solo to the next, like spirits that need her tending: the death of her stepfather, with whom she was close; the AIDS epidemic in New York; her grandmother’s crossing of the United States-Mexico border in 1969, a journey that began in Guatemala. Humor provides a way into heavier material, expressed not just through her finely calibrated monologues but also through her vivid dancing.

“I feel like the actual movement that comes out of my body — I’m telling a joke a little bit, like a modern-dance joke,” she said. “It’s playful and it’s serious. It can be very metered and mathematical but then it like, farts a little. It’s skewed.”

Brian Rogers, the artistic director of the Chocolate Factory, which presented Ms. Valencia’s “Bouquet” last year, has noticed the fine line she treads between mocking and appreciating dance, never quite settling on either side.

“In these solo pieces, there’s a reverence for dance history,” he said, “but also a very embodied ambivalence to it that sometimes comes out as comedy. But there’s something sincere about it, too. There’s really no cynicism in her work that I can detect.”

In developing movement, Ms. Valencia often pulls from existing images and objects. For “Air,” she looked to forms of Latino and Latina self-representation across millenniums, collaging them into what she calls “choreography in Spanglish.” These include the poses of pre-Columbian jade sculptures; photographs of the East Los Angeles art collective Asco, which was active in the 1970s and ’80s; and the portraits of Southern Californian women archived in Veteranas and Rucas, a popular Instagram account founded by the visual artist (and Ms. Valencia’s friend) Guadalupe Rosales.

Ms. Valencia has also been studying moving images, in particular the films produced by and starring the Mexican comic actor Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas. She devoured these growing up — so voraciously, she said, that his physicality must have infiltrated her own.

“I watched those movies like they were gold,” she said, breaking into a smile. “I was glued to his nuance and cadence and how he uses language and how he moves his body and how he’s talking about really difficult things, but they’re hilarious — and they’re not always clear.” She could have been describing herself.