Ep 6: Lineage, Motherhood & Movement with Yvonne Montoya
In Summer 2018, Mina and I had the great pleasure of speaking with Yvonne Montoya, a Tucson-based dancer scholar, director, and consultant. This episode — which is long-overdue — was one of the most personally meaningful episodes for me. Because of that, I felt an overwhelming pressure to make sure it was perfect… and that eventually evolved into inexcusable delay and procrastination.
So, at long last, here is the last episode of Creative Confessionals!
In this episode, we get into our shared experience as Latinx women who have been subject to assimilation ancestral colonization. Yvonne shares her own journey to connect with her heritage, and ultimately use dance to tell the stories of her family.
As an artist who falls outside of the Eurocentric ideals of her medium, Yvonne speaks to the obstacles she faced as a dancer and why that resulted in the creation of her own dance company, Safos Dance Theatre. She also shares the struggles of being a mother while working in a field with few resources for parents.
Listen to this episode to learn how Yvonne is defying expectations and overcoming barriers to bring broader representation to the stage, and to hear her thoughts on how we can better support artists in local communities!
About Yvonne
Yvonne Montoya is a mother, dancemaker, consultant, independent dance scholar and founding director of Safos Dance Theatre based in Tucson, AZ. Originally from Alburquerque, NM, Montoya is a process-based dance maker who creates low tech site specific and site adaptive pieces for non-traditional dance spaces. Her work is grounded in and inspired by the landscapes, languages, cultures, and the aesthetics of the U.S. Southwest. Montoya is the lead choreographer for Safos and under her direction, the company won the Tucson Pima Arts Council’s Lumie Award for Emerging Organization in 2015. Her choreography has been staged throughout the Southwest and her dance films screened in Tucson, North Carolina, the University of Exeter (UK). She is currently working on “Stories from Home” a series of movement vignettes based on her family’s oral histories. 2017-2018 Montoya was a Post-Graduate Fellow in Dance at Arizona State University where she founded and organized the inaugural Dance in the Desert: A Gathering of Latinx Dancemakers. Montoya is a 2019-2020 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, a 2019-2020 Dance/USA Artist Fellow, and a recipient of the 2019 NALAC POD grant.
What you’ll learn:
Why Yvonne uses dance to research and academia with her community
How she uses movement to connect with and interpret the stories of her family
The importance of investing in regional talent in the Southwest
How mothers are vastly underserved in the performing arts
The importance of setting personal values as guidelines to know when to say “no”
Connect with Yvonne
Website: https://www.yvonnemontoya.co, Motherhood in the Performing Arts Project
Instagram: @mpaproject1
