Natalie Galazka
Dancers Anne Plamondon and Victor Quijada
Rubberbandance mixes styles at DSW
Dance means many things to many people: for some it suggests the classical gracefulness of ballet; for others the rugged urban expressions found in funk hip hop and breaking. For dance artist Victor Quijada his dance has evolved to be a unique blend of both. Although Quijada has been noted for his particular mixture of b-boying and ballet he would hesitate to describe his company Rubberbandance as just that.
“I have to say that it’s probably not what you would expect because saying that it’s b-boying hip hop ballet or whatever is usually a very simplified way of trying to talk about what the process was” says Quijada. “I started breaking as a seven-year-old in Los Angeles where I grew up and around the age of 16 I was introduced to more formal dancing and the whole world of art. That had a big influence on my view of the hip hop culture and what I was doing with it.”
Quijada continued studying dance throughout his career as a young artist which included the hip hop clubs of Los Angeles and an introduction to theatre and formal dance in a performing arts high school. His questions about the potential of combining hip hop with post-modern dance forms led him to study with acclaimed choreographers Rudy Perez (a student of some of the giants in contemporary dance) and Twyla Tharp (a popular American dancer director and choreographer). Quijada used contemporary dance with his other experiences and the results of much of this work can be found in Elastic Perspective Redux.
“I continued to go up the dance stream and ended up a classical dancer with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal” he says. “So there’s a bunch of experiences in there: personal and being very profoundly involved in different worlds of dance and different cultures of dance. So all that information was being poured into me and my vessel.”
Rubberbandance is the result of years of cross-pollination with Quijada ’s life experience. Elastic Perspective Redux is a collection of their works from 2002 to 2005. “It’s still very fresh” he says. “It’s all the work that was happening at the very beginning of the company when I had years and years of questions assumptions and theories that I was trying to test and prove with this new company.
“A lot of questions about how the energy from hip hop could do something more than just entertain or compete; questions about what happens if I juxtapose this kind of vocabulary that comes from street urban culture and juxtapose that next to classical music” he adds. “What happens if I do vice versa taking the vocabulary and energy of classical culture and putting it against the backdrop of rap music or the hip hop energy as a soundscape. [I wanted] to see what would happen as I allowed these two worlds to collide choreographically.”
