Bridge Live Arts presents the Bay Area premiere of Riverside and Los Angeles-based Primera Generación Dance Collective’s NOStalgia POP. This curation continues the organization’s support of creative, collaborative choreographic projects such as Dancing Distributed Leadership (2023-2024). 

In NOStalgia POP, the artists Alfonso Cervera, Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier, Irvin Manuel Gonzalez, and Patricia “Patty” Huerta expose “el desmadre” (the messiness) that is their first-generation Mexican American experience with eclectic, multilingual, Latinx aesthetics. 

Rooted in popular Latiné music, movement, and moments, this PGDC’s evening-length multimedia dance work pays homage and cheeky critique to the recuerdos romanticos that link Latine bodies together. A collage of ‘80s pop en Español, the “Latin Explosion” of the ‘90s, and millennial Mexican core weave together with media depictions of gente Latina. The group’s four captivating dancers tell the story of how messy, fruitful, joyful, and painful the development of an ever-growing Latin Pop culture memory has been and how mainstream media shapes and is (re)shaped by Latine nostalgia.

NOStalgia POP is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and Show Box L.A. 

As part of the NOStalgia POP tour, B.L.A. and PGDC will present a public workshop titled “Social Dances as Resistance, Power, and Community; or the Body as Altar.” 

In this workshop, PGDC and participants will gather to embody principles pertinent to various Latine social dance forms. In doing so, we engage and recall histories and futurities of resistance that dancing minoritarian bodies have cultivated through time and space to mobilize in dire times. In honoring these social dance aesthetics, we cultivate our bodies as altars, revering those who have taught us to resist.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Primera Generación Dance Collective (PGDC) is a collaborative group based in L.A/Riverside, California and formed by Alfonso Cervera, Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier, Irvin Manuel Gonzalez, and Patricia “Patty” Huerta. PGDC focuses on the visibilization of Latine corporeality, joy, and loss through movement-based exploration, process, performance, convenings, and curations. The collective grounds their works in rasquache (resourcefully tacky) play, generating work that speaks to their Latine, working-class experiences. 

As artists, they experiment with Latin American text, satire, song, and movement, and fuse together their eclectic aesthetics to expose el “desmadre” (messiness) that is embedded in first-generation, Mexican American bodies. Their work aims to reclaim "low-brow," Latine art and iconography to spark futurity. PGDC has performed at REDCAT, HomeLA, FLACC Festival, Mission Dance Theater, Highways Performance Space, El Teatro Campesino, Human Resources LA, BlakTinx Dance Festival in Arizona and L.A, and NAVEL. They are the recipients of the 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Grant that will be used to premiere “NOStalgia POP,” an immersive work highlighting how Latine bodies have shaped popular culture in the US and beyond. 

As curators, PGDC members work collaboratively to develop networks and resources for other first-generation artists. This mission has been a foundational force for their annual (de) Color-Es festival, an evening of radical performance centering BIPOC artists in Los Angeles. They have also built residencies for high school dance students in Southern California, raised funds for local LGBTQIA resource centers in LA, and developed community performances and arts events necessary to maintain the arts alive in the communities that they stem from. 

In 2020, the collective took over leadership for Show Box L.A, a non-profit organization that works to center and manifest trans-communal collaborations, creations, and networks between QTBIPOC artmakers in the LA region and beyond. Engaging in a shared leadership model, they work primarily to benefit the migrant-owned businesses in District 10 by offering programming and funds that are inspired and planned alongside the neighborhood’s residents.  For more information follow PGDC at @primerageneraciondance + @showboxla

📸 Photo Primera Generación Dance Collective by Angel Orrigi