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Primera Generación Dance Collective
Meet
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 Mexican American corporeality, joy, and loss through movement-based exploration, process, and performance. The collective grounds their works in rasquache (tacky) play and resourcefulness, generating work that speaks to their Latine, working-class experiences. Utilizing a hybridization of text, satire, song, and movement, the collective fuses together their eclectic aesthetics to expose el “desmadre” (messiness) that is embedded in being first-generation, Mexican Americans, reclaiming iconography and "low-brow" art to spark Latine 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. 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.They are the recipients of the 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Grant. Follow PGDC at @primerageneraciondance + @showboxla
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NOStalgia POP
With eclectic, multilingual, Latinx aesthetics, Los Angeles and Riverside-based Primera Generación Dance Collective exposes “el desmadre” (the messiness) that is their first-generation Mexican American experience. Rooted in popular Latine music, movement, and moments, their newest evening-length multimedia dance work, NOStalgia POP, 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. 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 the ways in which mainstream media shapes and is (re)shaped by Latine nostalgia. A manifestation of joy and celebration of identity and culture.
“NOStalgia POP is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant.”
- Steven Vargas, Los Angeles Times
“Nepantla” is the L.A.- and Riverside-based collective’s first evening-length performance. Anchored by Alfonso Cervera, Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier, Irvin Manuel Gonzalez and Patricia “Patty” Huerta — the collective initially developed and choreographed the piece as part of an arts residency at a South L.A. dance studio called We Live in Space, but the pandemic interrupted their plans to perform an excerpt in person. The idea evolved into a film for the REDCAT NOW Festival in 2020, and the piece that Gonzalez says was seven years in the making finally premiered onstage at the Odyssey Theatre on June 17.