Hopping From Hip-Hop to Ballet

By Annette Grant
New York Times
August 20, 2006

A dancer starts out as a b-boy, forms his own post-hip-hop dance company at 26 and gets a commission from a classical ballet company at 30. Not a common progression in the dance world, but it is Victor Quijada’s story. Talent plays a large role of course, but so do curiosity, hard work and a knack for being in the right place at the right time.

Mr. Quijada, whose parents are from Mexico, grew up break dancing on the streets of Los Angeles. As a teenager he danced in clubs: delirious nights of comradeship, competition and invention.

“In the clubs a hundred dancers wanted to test one another,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “There were high stakes in originality. As soon as a move was on video, we dropped it.”

When he was 15, some rappers nicknamed him Rubberband for his unusually elastic dancing style.

Then something transforming happened: He went to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. “I discovered art with a capital A,” he said. He heard classical music, learned about other dance forms and found a mentor, Rudy Perez, the Judson Church pioneer.

“Trying to find new possibilities of movements meant trying to dance to any kind of music,” Mr. Quijada said. “I was hearing hip-hop in classical music. Hip-hop is the essence of creating something out of nothing. I was in love with where I could find it. Hip-hop is an energy source, not just a category of dance.”

When the choreographer Twyla Tharp started her company Tharp! in 1995, she was looking for new dancers. Mr. Quijada’s girlfriend, also a dancer, decided to try out along with several hundred others in Los Angeles. Mr. Quijada went along too and was called to New York for another look. At the end of the audition there were 14 dancers left onstage, and Mr. Quijada was one of them. He was flabbergasted.

“Every day was my last day there,” he said. “I’d never trained that way. Everyone else had always planned to be a dancer. It was a comedy. I became a sponge and took in everything, trying to absorb the work ethic and craftsmanship required to be a professional.” He toured with Tharp! until 1998.

Before and after Tharp rehearsals, Mr. Quijada began to take an array of dance lessons to learn classical vocabulary and movement. Everything became fodder for his creative efforts, and gradually he saw how to stage dance. “Inside of me there is no front to dance,” he said. “It’s happening all around, not on a stage facing front. I had to figure out how to link it to a theatrical setting, and as I go I learn what works and what doesn’t. My goal is to keep my theater from being like watching theater on TV.”

In 2000, after a stint with Eliot Feld’s company, Mr. Quijada moved to Montreal, his current home, where he joined Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal. By the time he formed his own company — called Rubberbandance Group, after his old nickname — in 2002, he had created works to music ranging from Vivaldi, Verdi and Prokofiev to tango, rap and folk songs, as well as to the spoken word. He calls these works hybrids and fusions that have a genetic resemblance, like siblings.

Being at the right place at the right time again, Mr. Quijada shared a dressing room with Peter Boal, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, while both were performing at a benefit in New York in 2001. He slipped Mr. Boal a tape; they talked. “He knew a lot about ballet,” Mr. Boal said. “When I saw his work live, it was electrifying.”

Last summer Mr. Boal became artistic director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, a classically trained company. He asked Mr. Quijada to choreograph a work, which is to have its premiere at the troupe’s home in Seattle on Nov. 2.

This week Rubberbandance will follow on the heels of the Northwest Ballet at Jacob’s Pillow, presenting “Elastic Perspective,” a suite for six dancers, including Mr. Quijada, that has been mutating into its present form for about four years. It even has a lyrical love duet. In hip-hop? Yeah.

Source: nytimes.com