Ballet Hispánico's Kiri Avelar Featured In NYPL Jerome Robbins Dance Divison Virtual Sixth Annual Symposium

Ballet Hispánico, the nation's leading Latino dance organization since 1970 and recognized this year as one of America's Cultural Treasures, will be included in The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts' Jerome Robbins Dance Division sixth annual Symposium. The virtual event showcases the outcomes of the Dance Research Fellow's work in the Division's archives.

This Friday, January 29, 2021 at 2pm ET, Kiri Avelar, a Jerome Robbins Dance Research Fellow and Ballet Hispánico's Deputy School Director, will speak about her research topic Descubriendo Latinx: The Hidden Text in American Modern Dance. To register for this free day-long streaming event, visit http://bit.ly/dancesymposium.

Kiri Avelar's research project Descubriendo Latinx: The Hidden Text in American Modern Dance positions the Invisible presence of Latinx in the early American modern dance canon as central to the retelling of our absented dance histories. The project identifies specific works by pioneers of early American modern dance that pulled on the cultural practices of the Latinx diaspora and investigates through research and creative practice how those seeds and appropriations continue to be generative and foundational to modern dance. Specifically, she examines choreographic works that Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, and Lester Horton created in their post-Denishawn careers, which continued a Denishawn legacy of pulling from the Indigenous, Mexican, and Spanish artistic traditions. In conversation with Humphrey, Graham, and Horton, Avelar also examines the specific choreographic works of pioneers José Limón and Katherine Dunham that investigated hybrid identity and the diversity within the Latinx diaspora. Avelar further explores how Limón and Dunham themselves created from a space of simultaneous cultural traditions that expertly infused the beginnings of modern dance in America and las Américas with myriad styles. As an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and scholar, Avelar focuses her work around collaborative community expression designed to further provoke thought around the artistic, physical, and cultural borderless experience of Latinx artists in America. Her work immerses audiences in unique spaces to explore themes of ruido, Mestiza Consciousness, intersectionality, migration, and Latinidades through film, embodied oral history performances, interactive screendance, and soundscapes.

Other research projects being presented are scheduled as follows:

10am - Ninotchka Bennahum - Border Crossings: Encarnacíon López Julvez, Léonide Massine Studies in Transnationalism, Self-Exile, and Art, 1930 - 1945

11am - Phil Chan - Dreams of the Orient

12pm - Sergey Konaev - Teaching to Survive: Immigrant Female Dance Schools and Classes in the 1930s-1950s (France and USA)

2pm - Kiri Avelar - Descubriendo Latinx: The Hidden Text in American Modern Dance

3pm - Yusha-Marie Sorzano & Ferne Louanne Regis - Investigating Process: An Immigrant Choreographer's Journey to Discovery

4pm - Pam Tanowitz - everything is true

For more information on the Jerome Robbins Dance Division's Dance Research Fellowship and the 2020-2021 fellows, please visit https://www.nypl.org/dance-fellowship/current-fellows.

Kiri Avelar is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, scholar, and activist who focuses her work around collaborative community expression. She holds an MFA in Dance from Rutgers University, and a BA in Dance with honors from New Mexico State University. Her teaching philosophy is centered around culturally responsive pedagogy, student voice, and reflection, challenging students to own their learning experience, take risks, and believe in greater, diverse possibilities both inside and outside the classroom.

Ms. Avelar is a 2020 Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellow for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Her scholarly research Descubriendo Latinx: The Hidden Text in American Modern Dance, looks at the absented presence of Latinx holding an integral role in shaping the foundation of modern dance in the United States. Her correlating artistic practice, The Intersections of Interdisciplinarity: Embodying the Borderless Experience, is designed to further provoke thought around the artistic, physical, and cultural borderless experience of Latinx artists in America, and immerses audiences in unique spaces to explore themes of ruido, Mestiza Consciousness, intersectionality, migration, and Latinidades through film, embodied oral history performances, interactive screendance, and soundscapes.

Having studied as a scholarship recipient at the Boston Ballet School, and more extensively in the New Mexico/Texas borderland region and Madrid, Spain, Ms. Avelar has performed with the Milwaukee Ballet, Cor Ignis Contemporary Dance, Sol y Arena Spanish Dance, American Bolero Dance Company, and as an independent artist. Her choreographic work has been presented in communities throughout New York City, the Southwestern United States, and Mexico, including El Barrio's Artspace PS109, Jacques d'Amboise's Arts Nest at the National Dance Institute, Ballet Hispánico's Performances for Young People at the Apollo Theater and The United Palace, Teatro INBA in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, Chamizal National Memorial Theater in El Paso, TX, Wortham Theater in Houston, TX, and the American College Dance Festival Gala in Laredo, TX.

Over the span of her 20-year career, Ms. Avelar has served on the dance faculties of El Paso Community College (Texas), New Mexico State University, Rutgers University, Sharron Miller's Academy for the Performing Arts (New Jersey), as a teaching artist in both private and public schools for New York City and in the El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juárez, Mexico borderland region, and since 2011 for the Ballet Hispánico School of Dance and Community Arts Partnership Program in New York City. She is the Founding Director of the Academia de Ballet Emmanuel, an after-school program providing quality dance education for the children of Hogar de Niños Emmanuel Orphanage in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México, where she resided for ten years. She has presented her work in dance education through workshops and conferences, including the National Dance Education Organization, NYC Department of Education, Face to Face Arts in Education Roundtable NYC, The Juilliard School Dance Division, American College Dance Festival, and the Congreso Internacional de Educación Física, Deporte y Recreación in Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico. She is a proud member of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) and the National Dance Education Organization.

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