Stories From Home

An interview with Yvonne Montoya and Clare Qualmann

Yvonne Montoya is a mother, dancemaker, bi-national artist, and founding director of Safos Dance Theatre. Based in Tucson, A.Z. and originally from Albuquerque, N.M., her work is grounded in and inspired by the landscapes, languages, cultures, and aesthetics of the U.S. Southwest. Montoya is the founder and co-organizer for Dance in the Desert: A Gathering of Latinx Dancemakers. She was a 2021 Plain View Fellow, a 2019-2020 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, a 2019-2020 Dance/USA Artist Fellow, recipient of the 2020 MAP Fund, and the first Arizona-based artist to receive the 2020 New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) National Dance Project Production Grant. www.yvonnemontoya.co

Clare Qualmann is a London–based artist/researcher and co-editor of the Lines of Desire section of Livingmaps Review.

Clare: I first came across your work through your walking film [Walking, an excerpt of Stories from Home: COVID-19 Addendum] and I wanted to start by asking you about that piece and about the inspiration behind it?

Yeah, I love that film, I was so happy to have captured the snapshot of that moment in time with me and my child. I'll begin with the inspiration behind the work. Prior to the pandemic I was working on an in person, full length, contemporary dance performance that is based on my family stories. I'm at least the 23rd generation, NuevoMexicana, someone from northern New Mexico, with very deep roots in in the land and in the place. ‘Stories from Home’ examines my family's history, our experiences and all the different things that have happened in the Southwest part of the United States. 

There are regions of the US that tend to be overlooked, and the Southwest is one of them, despite the very rich history here. So, we were working on that. It was set to debut in September 2020 at the Kennedy Center, and then of course the pandemic hit. My dancers had committed to five weeks of rehearsals in the summer of 2020, and I knew that they were counting on that for money, and now everything was canceled. And I thought to myself, well, what can I do now? What do we do? I was working with a consultant at the time who said, aren't you the person that dances in your living room? Because prior to all of this, I did a project called ‘Motherhood and the Performing Arts’ (the MPA project) which we shot in my house and at my son’s bus stop and in my car, because I wanted to capture the moments where juggling a career, dance, and motherhood brushed up together.

That gave me the idea that we could do a dance film series where the cast shares their stories from home! I repurposed one of the grants that we had, and I developed a dance film series. There are eleven dance films, act one is me and my child and our experiences with the pandemic. In act two, the cast of ‘Stories from Home’ take over, either working with their experiences of the pandemic or focusing on their own family stories.

Film Trailer: https://vimeo.com/432249921

My son and I went about creating six dance films, that focused on our pandemic experiences, and one of the things that we decided to focus on was walking. Walking was the new family ritual that came out of the pandemic. Before the pandemic we were very busy, and Tucson is a city dominated by car culture. We do not walk anywhere really, we drive. We just never had the time before. And then suddenly we were in front of screens for eight hours a day, with nowhere to go. Tucson weather is generally nice, except for the summer when it is too hot, so I said, we must do this, we have to walk. 

We started taking hour-long walks in the evening around our neighborhood. We live in what is considered an older neighborhood for Tucson. It is a neighborhood from the 1960s. There are lots of larger ranch style homes, and people were out decorating their yards with positive messages. There was so much positivity in the neighborhood, and we felt that on our walks. We were walking every day through the pandemic for an hour each evening, as a ritual, finding different routes, exploring different things. We did not realize how little we knew of our own neighborhood because before we were always driving. Our walks meant we got to discover our neighborhood, recognise different houses and the people living around us. We became familiar with who was making a big effort to decorate - the house that has the crazy Christmas decorations, or an amazing Halloween house. We started talking to more neighbors, becoming more grounded in the community.

When we were thinking about themes for the dance film, one of the themes that we knew we wanted to focus on was walking because that was a new pandemic ritual. And I thought it was a good challenge to create a dance about walking. Walking is a perpetual forward motion and it is difficult to create a dance in continual forward motion. Once you start walking, there is a rhythm to it. To stop that rhythm, to do a turn or other movement, can really disrupt the flow. Also, my son is not a trained dancer, so I had to think about creating movement that he could also do in this perpetual forward motion. Something that worked for the context of the dance film, but did not go too far, did not move too far away from the actual walking. There was a lot of work to balance, and then capture those things. I worked with a film maker who had a drone, and that was a lot of fun.

Clare: I wanted to ask you about that, I was really struck by two things in the film - first the specificity of the location, which you have talked about a bit already, second – the strong visual imagery. The light, and the shadows, the powerful sunlight and the colours that it brings out are so powerful. And because of the aerial shots from the drone, there are beautiful, beautiful shadows from your bodies cast on the road. You are walking on the sidewalk, and in the road, and there is very much a sense I felt of pandemic quiet in the space, there is a lack of other activity, and so your bodies moving through space are the only action that is happening. I wonder if there is anything that you would like to say about that? 

Visually this film could have been made in almost any neighborhood on the east side of Tucson because the neighbourhoods have a similar look. The only real landmark that shows in the video is the mountain, and it shows for maybe a second. There were forest fires in the mountain North of Tucson when we were filming, and we captured that moment in time on film. Aside from that, our neighborhood is just a nondescript neighborhood. But it is our neighborhood and so I think that connection to land and place is there and is important. It is something we wanted to centre. The shadows in the dance film were used intentionally; I was choreographing for the shadows! We shot the trailer for the project before I finished choreographing the dance, I just had a few phrases of the dance ready, and we experimented with the drone camera flying back and forth and repeating them. So, we saw the effect of the long early evening shadows and decided to work with them. That fed into the creative process for the rest of the work. We did worry a bit about rain - in Tucson there are occasional monsoon rains in the summer. We were sure we would have plenty of sunny days to film, but you never know! Creating choreography for dance films, and specifically about walking, it is a different choreography than dance for stage. The movements that we performed would not necessarily look striking or remarkable on stage, but as a dance film, the drone footage captured the shadows nicely. It was a challenge to create movement for a dance using shadow. Working out how shadows grow and stretch, and that was fun. We were shooting in the middle of summer, and we had a limited amount of time in between the full heat of the day and before the sun went down. When we shot the dance film it was 106 degrees F (41 degrees C)! It was a challenging shoot! We kept filming back-to-back. We would want to film another run before the sun went down, but would have to pause because Buddy was overheating. It was a balance between making sure he was hydrated and well, and making sure we had time to do enough takes before the sun set.

Clare: I think that comes across really beautifully as well and it leads me to the next thing I wanted to ask you about. You talked about the way that the pandemic shifted you into this practice of regular walking, beating the streets of the neighborhood, and I think that is an experience that people in many parts of the world have experienced during the pandemic. Suddenly you are stuck in your immediate surroundings, and you are looking at it with new eyes. But not just with eyes, right? Because you are a creative practitioner, for whom the whole body is involved in the way that you respond, make work, create. I think there is something beautiful there around, what I would call a mapping process. Thinking of this journal, and the network around it, which is called Livingmaps, and then relating that to the kind of living mapping with your bodies of the spaces where you live, we could think of the film as a kind of map of your experience and your neighborhood, and your responses to the place?

Absolutely. I feel like this with a lot of the dance and dance films that I make, when it is site specific, that the place is a partner, it is a duet partner, another character or dancer in the story. I am affected by this space and this space is affected by me. And how does that come to light? How does that ignite the senses? How does that change my experience? There is so much that you become aware of when dancing outdoors, the textures of the sidewalk, whether it is windy that day, hearing a dog barking and trying to work out where it is. We made a noise walking across a rocky path and caused the dog to bark. Or sometimes we will see a snake. This land is really part of the desert so there are snakes in our neighborhood. Sometimes, we will see a giant one in the road and have to go around it. There are little rabbits in our neighborhood as well, and we will stop and watch them on our walks. That leads to new interactions, on different scales, connecting closely with the land and the place and the animals here. It feels like a reciprocal relationship that is happening between us and our surroundings, when we don’t get in a car. It is like the interface between us, and the location has been made much, much more immediate.

Clare: I wanted to ask as well about some of your other work. You began collaborating with your son in the Motherhood Performing Arts project, and that collaboration has continued through the walking work, and also in the Movement Postcards series that you work on together? Can you tell me about that project?

I love to travel and having been unable to travel for so long during the pandemic was hard. I realised that my child is 13, he is growing up fast and it won’t be long before he wants to leave home, go to university. I became very aware of wanting to build memories with him. And some of the best memories I have of my father, who is no longer with us, are travelling together. I want to continue that. We have travelled together, and I travel for work. In the past I took him with me on work trips, so we have this history of travelling together. After filming these series of dance films, I thought, let's create these little, tiny travel dance films and share them online. It was my former assistant Nicole Curry, who came up with the term ‘Movement Postcards.’ I had been calling them mini dance films. We make them wherever we travel, in every location that is appropriate. Sometimes we visit sacred sites, and it does not feel right, we observe and respect. 

I have a longstanding interest in making dance outside of the theatre, and I have noticed that during the pandemic dancers and choreographers have been doing this more, but they are taking the work that they would normally have performed on stage and are just doing it in different locations. So, the dance is not new, it is not unique, and it is not in conversation with the place. It does not activate the space. 

When I work in a place I want to explore. I ask where are the interesting spaces? Where are the negative spaces? What can I do with my body in this space? How much weight can I give a location? How is my body responding to this place and space? When I see work that is a ‘copy paste’ of theater work, that has just been brought outside into a new location, it does not really translate or resonate in the same way. So far, we have 28 Movement Postcards, and we are releasing one every week, I just finished editing the last two last night. My son is really taking leadership on them, he is offering music suggestions, he has ideas for framing shots and camera angles. There are challenges because he is still building his skills, but he is learning about holding things steady, and marking the camera location for multiple shots. We shoot on my phone; we do not have any fancy equipment or whatnot. But the focus is on our travelling, how we experience unfamiliar places, how our bodies are responding. We are creating miniature maps of our experiences with our bodies.

Clare: I saw that project and I immediately thought these are like maps of the places, in another format, in a dance film format. Because as you describe, you are paying attention to the space, in order to offer a version of it back to itself and to others. It is a sort of recording or transcribing of a response. I suppose what it might do is make you pay attention in new ways? Because if you know you are going to make something like this then you cannot skim over the surface of a place, you must pay attention on a different level and just as you have described in your creative process – you are looking for the negative spaces, looking in detail and making a sensorial response. I think that has some real parallels with multi-sensory mapping.

I agree with you. When we walk into these spaces and we look for what is calling us, what speaks to us, and sometimes the spaces are so big, like the national parks that we have visited can be overwhelming and we really ask ourselves ‘what are we drawn to’?

Clare: Can you give me some examples of the places where these movement postcards have come from? Do you fold them into travel that you are having to do anyway?

So far, we have made Movement Postcards in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, South Dakota, Texas, Wyoming and Washington, DC. I also recently shot a Movement Postcard in Agua Prieta, Sonora, México. 

We create Movement Postcards when we go on hikes, family trips, and when I travel for work. For example, the dance films we shot in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota, were filmed during a summer 37-hour family road trip. In the fall break we took a mother – son trip and we danced around DC. We made dance films at the US Capitol, the Supreme Court, and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and two places in the Kennedy Center. We also filmed Movement Postcards during a hike near Tucson, AZ where we live, and during a trip to visit my family in my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sometimes when Buddy cannot travel with me because of school, I will film Movement Postcards without him as I did in Texas during an anniversary trip and México when I was visiting for work.

Clare: Do you think this project will just keep rolling? I guess it need not have an end?

Yes, we will see what Buddy says, but I envision this project going until as long as he wants it to. Hopefully until he moves away to college. So that will give us some longevity. The format certainly means that you can do a lot in the moment and then come back and edit overtime, which is a different rhythm than other dance projects where you have to do everything up front and mount everything for a giant show. This is like a trickle, and it fits better into our daily lives as a practice.

Clare: I am drawn to creative practices that function like that; they are intrinsically motivated. Because it is a relationship with the person that is long term and ongoing, and relationships with place. You set in place the concept and the method for creation so it can just keep happening. I think that's how really extraordinary artworks can accumulate. They are accumulators, or multipliers rather than, as you say, works that require intricate planning and execution, they have organic growth. The other project that struck me, with a strong connection to place, identity, and cartographies is ‘Las Fronterizas’. Can you tell me about that? 

‘Las Fronterizas’ is an ensemble of six women artists from two different generations in three different artistic practices, dance, theater, and digital art. We started out looking the border, the US Mexico border, but specifically our border with Arizona, Sonora border. Half of the collaborators live in Douglas or Agua Prieta and our first project was looking at cross border love stories. Love stories are a counter narrative to what we hear on the national news, which is dominated by violence, which of course exists. But there is also a community that sees itself as one community that is split in half by this wall, and that includes the whole spectrum of human lives and emotions. Later we expanded the project to include a collaboration with artists on the Mexico / Guatemala border. Now we are doing border to border exchanges and exploring the similarities and the differences, asking what are the challenges? And what are the love stories there? And what are the connections? We went to Guatemala before the pandemic to visit that border and there are so many connections. There is a clear undercurrent of how we were all connected by the land. There are Mesquite trees all over my neighborhood, and Mesquite trees in Guatemala. The people we met there migrated and crossed through the desert, through the same borders that my partner and his family crossed to get here. The same borders I cross when I work in Douglas and Agua Prieta. They have stories of the border and have experiences in the same land that I am living in, and that connects us in ways that we do not immediately realise. There has always been a North-South connection between Arizona, New Mexico, and Mesoamerica that since the conquest of this land has been cut off, and it is not something we talk about anymore because we have been taught to believe in borders. What is left is an undercurrent of connection. The project is really about grounding in space, grounding in place and exploring how these have been split. The wall, the history of the land, the community and the people, the languages, the foods. How that all comes together to inform this experience.

Clare: You're opening up so many ideas with this work - it reminds me that it is easy to take borders as fact especially in a contested land like the Americas, the border between the US and Mexico is a line that could have been drawn anywhere, or not at all. Your work draws attention to the fact that the land is the same, the plants are the same, the rocks are the same and that accidents of birth see you on one side of the border or the other, and the implications of that are enormous. You are making an embodied response to the landscape, to the locations and the ecology of the place, the human and non-human beings who make it up.

Yes, and one of the other elements that we talked about was water, because Douglas and Agua Prieta share a water table. What happens to one community happens to the other, water is fluid, it does not know a border exists. We were looking at earth, trees, water, and together they make a map of the community. I see these as snapshots in time because things change and ebb and flow. The border has changed so many times, they redrew it repeatedly, up until very recently it was more fluid. A few generations ago you could just come back and forth. But now there is a hard line, a wall and passport checkpoint we have to go through. This work is trying to show the fluidity of the land and the connection between the people on each side of the border. The artworks are like maps, it is a different way of mapping the border.

Clare: This brings me back to what you were saying in the beginning about the desire with your practice not to just take studio dance and put it on location, but rather to create a genuinely site-specific practice that is not only performed in place, but also conceived of, developed, rehearsed, generated, produced and performed on location.

Yes, when I am creating these pieces we rehearse on site, so we would be rehearsing ‘Walking’ dance out on our walk route. And the ‘Movement Postcards’ capture the essence of the moment and the feeling of the moment with and in a location. When I work with dancers from the Borderlands community and we are rehearsing there in those two communities, the connection to place is key. So the body is very much informed by where we are in place and in this space.

Clare: My closing question is about what is next? Are there other works on the horizon for you?

That takes us back to where we started, which is the ‘Stories from Home’ project, which we are about to start in-person work on again. In that project we are using maps, working with digital artists to animate them, because the maps support understanding of the deep connection to land that we have in Northern New Mexico. We have been collecting all the maps of New Mexico that have existed from pre-colonization until now and we are going to incorporate them in an animation to bring a sense of grounding to the project, the depth of our history here. There will be a projection of the animation before each dance. This work has a lot of my story in it – my ancestors are the Indigenous peoples of New Mexico, Mexico, and also Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century and found refuge in northern New Mexico. The dance and the maps work together to relate to these stories and the roots that go through it. My body is a map of the history of this land, a coming together of these cultures in great but also fiery violent ways. That is the next project I am working on. Every dance will have a map. For example, Braceros is a dance about my dad’s experience as a child laborer and a migrant farm worker in the 1960s. The animation that plays before this dance is a map of the Southwest without the borders marked just the dots of the locations where he would travel to go pick. In between the cities and towns are yellow dashed lines of a highway that show the paths of migration. Not only my dad and his family’s migration from Santa Fe, NM as the traveled in annual loop across the West. But also, the migration of the Braceros from Mexico who traveled North to border cities. Wesley Creigh is the artist who is creating the animation and we work together closely to make sure the maps of the land mirror the ways dancers map their bodies during the performance.

Clare: That sounds very interesting – I would love to see this work live – the assemblages of images, maps, animation and dance sound fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing your work with me Yvonne, it has been a pleasure to learn more about your practice.