National Hispanic Heritage Month with Jaime Martinez

Americans have celebrated National Hispanic Heritage Month annually since 1988 to honor the cultures, traditions, history, influences, and continued contributions of Hispanic Americans. September 15th is an especially important date for several Latin American countries that celebrate their Independence days on the 15th, thus the festivities of Hispanic Heritage Month occur from September 15th to October 15th every year. 

In September of 2022, founding Company member Jaime Martinez joined current Parsons Company Dancers and Staff on Zoom to share a special Hispanic Heritage Month spotlight on Jaime’s time with the Company and experiences as a Puerto Rican-American entering the dance industry. 

Jaime Martinez's body is frozen in midair, his head cocked to the side in an airborne crouch. Below him, Gail Gilbert and Liz Koeppen assume frozen poses of their own in a black-and-white photo of the Parsons work "Rise and Fall" by Lois Greenfield.

Jaime Martinez leaps in midair alongside company members (left to right) Ruth Kroll, Robert Battle, Charissa Barton, Liz Koeppen, Mia McSwain, and Jason McDole in a black-and-white photo of the Parsons work "Mood Swing" by Lois Greenfield, featuring various costumes by Alex Katz.

Jaime discussed his first days in New York City as a young dancer from South Carolina, how “Dancing saved [his] life in many ways,” his first interactions with modern dance, and his meeting founder and Artistic Director David Parsons. He shared anecdotal memories of life as a touring Company member and reflected on his favorite Parsons works, particularly his tenure performing Caught: “Caught was the great joy of my life to perform for 13 years.” Finally, Jaime gave current Company dancers advice for touring internationally, and shared ways to connect and engage with the Hispanic-American dance community. 

Dancer Alex Kashock leaps in midair above Jaime Martinez's outstretched limbs. Both wear close-fitting dark dancewear in a black-and-white photo of the Parsons work "Rise and Fall" by Lois Greenfield.

Dancer Alex Kashock leaps in midair above Jaime Martinez's outstretched limbs. Both wear close-fitting dark dancewear in a black-and-white photo of the Parsons work "Rise and Fall" by Lois Greenfield.

Jaime Martinez tiptoes upright in white pants and sleeveless shirt, looking off screen to the right. Arched over his right shoulder, Denise Roberts Hurlin smiles in an upside-down midair split in a black-and-white photo of the Parsons work "Linton" by Lois Greenfield.

Links and Resources

More about Jaime Martinez

Jaime Martinez was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, immigrating to the United States at a young age, growing up in Columbia, South Carolina. He began his training with Ann Brodie and Naomi Calvert and studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Martinez moved to New York City in 1982 and became a founding member of the Parsons Dance Company in 1987. Today, Martinez tours with Victoria Thierrée Chaplin with Aurélia Thierrée. 

Land Acknowledgement 

Parsons Dance travels all over the contemporary United States and the world. Our New York City homes and workplaces occupy unceded land that was forcibly and violently taken from many different Native tribes, nations, and peoples. In New York City, these include the Munsee Lenape, the Wappinger, and the Canarsie; in Florida, where Jaime currently resides, these include the Seminole, Taino, Tequesta, and Miccosukee.  We are actively developing practices that seek authentic engagement with contemporary Native descendants, their ancestral homes, and other communities harmed by ongoing colonial injustice. To learn more about Parsons Dance’s commitments to anti-racist, intersectional inclusion efforts within our artistic community, you can visit parsonsdance.org/diversity.

Disability Pride Month Means Greater Access for All

For almost 40 years, Parsons Dance has brought life-affirming performances and joy to audiences worldwide through education and outreach programs, cultivating and sustaining an appreciation for dance. With a mission grounded in developing a more positive, creative, and welcoming world, we embrace the need to examine our history, traditions, and legacy practices to ensure that we are firmly aligned with this work.

If done correctly, this introspection raises complex questions. How do we approach discussion and discourse around dance? Movement? Art? What concepts and methodologies do we readily embrace and cling to in order to justify our choices and work? Who do we envision engaging with our craft? Who are we subconsciously or consciously excluding? Is our work accessible? Answers to these questions are not readily available, nor should they be. Instead, they require time, research, learning, and evaluation at varying levels.  

Parsons Dance continues to interrogate and answer these questions while identifying opportunities for improvement, accessibility, and excellence. July is Disability Pride Month, which we celebrate this year by partnering with UserWay to ensure that our website presence is not only ADA compliant, but an inclusive experience for all website visitors. We first discovered UserWay’s comprehensive web toolkit through our friends at AXIS Dance Company, longtime leaders in integrated dance. Now, our own website visitors can click a badge on any page at www.parsonsdancce.org to deploy a range of accessibility tools and create a custom user experience. Look at the bottom-right corner of this post for the round, red wheelchair user icon, and click or tap to give it a try.

When you do, you’ll see a slide-out drawer like the one below to apply all kinds of accessibility accommodations to our site—from simple changes like enlarged text, to more complex behaviors like dyslexia support. These changes not only create the most comfortable browsing experience for those who need them, but they remind ALL visitors that opportunities for inclusive design are everywhere.

A sample of the UserWay pop-up menu that allows users to configure their own unique browsing experience for maximum legibility and ease of use.

With this small step and others like it, we join a growing community of organizations invested in bringing inclusive website experiences to the world. And having accomplished one goal, our work must continue toward others; a more accessible website is just one piece of broadening and deepening access to EVERYTHING we do. As tenets of our culture are rightfully redefined and scrutinized, we champion the notion that art neither exists nor can survive in a vacuum. Leadership is all around us: click here to read UserWay’s blog post about the history and legacy of Disability Pride Month, and click here to read AXIS Dance Company’s comprehensive Accessibility Statement for their own programming and services.

Art is a universal medium and should not be gate-kept or out of reach. Guided by these and other frameworks, we continue to update our cultural practices to ensure that our spaces are as inclusive and welcoming as possible for everyone who engages with Parsons Dance. 

Summarized from Userway.org:

The Disability Pride flag and Disability Pride Month colors are a unique and direct representation of the community, focusing on inclusion, similar to the LGBTQ pride flag. The original Disability pride flag was designed by Ann Magill, featuring a brightly-colored lightning bolt on a black background. With the feedback that the Disability Pride flag colors could negatively impact people with epilepsy, Magill redesigned the flag with muted colors symbolizing the diverse facets of daily life for people with disabilities.  

-Charcoal gray background: In memory of the victims of ableist abuse and violence, including children or those killed, suicides, or individuals who suffered from negligence.

-Diagonal band: Cutting across the barriers blocking people with disabilities from full participation, integration, and inclusion in society

-Red stripe: Physical disabilities (chronic pain/fatigue, mobility impairment, loss of limbs)

-Gold stripe: Neurodivergence (autism, ADHD, dyslexia)

-White stripe: Undiagnosed and invisible disabilities

-Blue stripe: Psychiatric disabilities (depression, PTSD, anxiety, etc.)

-Green stripe: Sensory disabilities (hearing loss, visual impairments, etc.)

The Gender Experience in Dance Auditions

Parsons Dance is one of many performing arts organizations exploring the meaning and consequences of gender for our performers, trainees, creative works, and audience. Our nearly 40 years of history on stages around the world means we have a big platform to share Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) values – but, as with any such established organization, we also have a lot of traditions and legacy practices to examine for improvement.

At a time when the very identities of Trans and other gender-non-conforming (GNC) individuals are under greater scrutiny and even attack, we are updating our own cultural practices to be sure our spaces are as inclusive and welcoming as possible for everyone who watches, learns, and works with Parsons Dance. Today, honoring the Trans Week of Visibility & Action, we’d like to share some progress and goals concerning the audition experience of dance performers themselves.

Young dance professionals, as the vanguard of new talent arriving in our industry, have always challenged the rules of engagement with arts institutions; today’s newest artists push boundaries of gender expression onstage and off. In a recent company audition, Parsons Dance explored several new practices meant to engage with and welcome that self-expression instead of suppressing it. The audition experience resulted in many new principles that we’re excited to repeat and improve in our upcoming audition settings. Here are a few of the things we tried:

  • Onsite, pronoun stickers (he/him, she/her, they/them, and blank) were encouraged to be worn by Parsons dancers and staff, and were made available to participants at the audition check-in station. Participants could choose to wear one or more stickers if they wished, including writing pronouns of their own on blank stickers if we lacked the best terms to represent them.

  • We set expectations at the beginning of each audition group by reading aloud a one-page, bulleted welcome script before moving from the holding room to the audition studio.

  • This let us share the challenges and pressures inherent in a competitive evaluation environment like an open audition, including the continued influence of gender on roles maintained by the Company in past, current, and future performances.

  • We also acknowledged that our own journey with and treatment of inclusion principles remains incomplete, and offered all participants to voice their own opinions about the way we should proceed to address them going forward.

  • To this end, our staff Director of Inclusion dressed to be visibly present and identifiable in transitional spaces throughout the event, and self-identified as a resource to share feedback, comfort/discomfort, or other non-artistic commentary about the audition experience. 

  • A specific, intentional ‘decompression’ space was held on-premises–with tempting snacks, juice, and water–to encourage organic visitation and discussion.

  • We also offered a post-audition survey as a compendium to the onsite decompression space for additional, and better anonymized, feedback.

  • Pre-audition survey questions during the registration process solicited optional self-identification along racial, ethnic, gender, and disability demographics, to help us better understand and accommodate the representation in the room before our auditionees arrived.

For next steps, we intend to repeat and improve the experience in upcoming auditions with still greater intentionality and opportunities for participation in our IDEA efforts. We are also developing a whitepaper about these efforts for our peers in the industry, to welcome their own creative ideas and suggestions going forward. 

While the complex decision-making of the audition process makes it difficult to evaluate how successfully we are navigating the issue of gender in a repertory company, we are certain that they have already made and will continue to make Parsons a more welcoming home for young professional performers in our industry. 

Of course, the important inclusion work of empowering Trans and other GNC individuals is not limited to the workplace culture at Parsons, or to the arts more generally. Below are some resources from the organization stewarding the national Trans Week of Visibility & Action.

  • Learn: Trans Week shares the 2021 genesis of its platform and how it aims to support and uplift Trans youth, artists, and more. 

  • Act: The American Civil Liberties Union is tracking the more than 400 bills attacking LGBTQ+ rights in legislatures around the country. Find out which might be under consideration in your area, and contact your elected representatives to voice your objection.

  • Donate: While many great causes exist to build Trans power and solidarity, we love the three arts organizations suggested by Trans Week and will link them here.

Image description: The eight Company members of Parsons Dance stand grouped together in black, pastel, and jewel-tone rehearsal wear. Their faces gaze outward from a cluster of bodies, with straightened arms outstretched in all directions towards the edge of the frame. Radiating from their fingertips are the pink, blue, and white striped colors of the Transgender flag.

Original photo by Andrew Eccles; image manipulation by Parsons Dance.

Disability Pride Month with AXIS Dance Company

Members of the AXIS and Parsons companies are gathered in a brightly lit rehearsal studio. They sit, stand, and kneel together in athletic rehearsal wear and face masks. The studio has a gray marley floor and white walls, which are covered in black and white abstract art. Photo courtesy of AXIS Dance Company.

We first met AXIS Dance Company when their work Roots Above Ground was presented digitally during our onstage season at the Joyce Theater last fall. AXIS’s mission is to collaborate “with disabled and non-disabled artists to create virtuosic productions that challenge perceptions of dance and disability.” July is Disability Pride Month, a chance to reflect and act in solidarity with Disabled communities.

Earlier this year, Parsons dancers visited AXIS in Berkeley, CA. There, we experienced AXIS’s mission in action as we studied inclusive, accessible speech and gestures to use in our own classrooms.

The day began with a warmup led by AXIS alum Katie Faulkner, called The Inter-Active Body. Grounded in Laban/Bartenieff principles, this session limbered up our physical and mental faculties; breath work and movement improvisation supported a playful examination of inner and outer sensations of the world around us.

Warmed up and ready to dance, we continued on to Fundamentals of Inclusive Teaching and Working with Diverse Students. AXIS Artistic Director Nadia Adame and her company dancers David Calhoun, Louisa Mann, Zara Anwar, Alaja Badalich, and JanpiStar led the Parsons team through new forms of inclusive language that will make our spaces more welcoming and accessible to students we teach all over the country and world.

In the afternoon, the Composition Masterclass paired off AXIS dancers with Parsons dancers to study—and then translate—a movement phrase created by Nadia. We learned how to break down her choreography to its underlying intentions, then expand those intentions into creative new movements that can be danced by a broad range of disabled and non-disabled dancers. A final showing capped the session with each pair’s own unique interpretation of Nadia’s phrase. As Parsons Dancer Megan Garcia reports,

Working with the dancers of AXIS was so inspiring–it was beautiful to be part of a space for dancers of all abilities. I loved learning how to implement new teaching methods in our everyday lives. 

We’re proud to have met and worked with the talented artists of AXIS Dance Company; future students of Parsons Dance will also benefit from the many valuable lessons we learned during our time together. Here’s how you can support the work of an innovative company bringing accessibility to the dance industry, one deep breath at a time.

Land Acknowledgement

Parsons Dance travels all over the contemporary United States and the world. The Berkeley studio where we collaborated with AXIS occupies unceded land that was forcibly and violently taken from many different Native tribes, nations, and peoples. These include the Muwekma Oholone and the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. We are actively developing practices that seek authentic engagement with contemporary Native descendants, their ancestral homes, and other communities harmed by ongoing colonial injustice. To learn more about Parsons Dance’s commitments to antiracist, intersectional inclusion efforts within our artistic community, you can visit parsonsdance.org/diversity.

Celebrating Pride by Dismantling HIV+ Stigma

A dozen dancers and students dressed in athletic rehearsal wear sit in a sunlit rehearsal studio with black marley flooring, blue and white walls, large shaded windows, and wooden ballet barres around the perimeter. The participants are arranged in a semicircle facing a large TV cart in one corner, where two speakers’ faces are projected via Zoom.

 

In 2022, the LGBTQ+ community and its allies face harsh backlash across America. Trans youth are being barred from participation in their schools and communities; educators are denied mere mentions of sexual identity in their classrooms; in the wake of recent Supreme Court activities, women’s bodily autonomy has just been severely curtailed, and even the landmark 2015 decision legalizing marriage equality now appears threatened. And despite spectacular medical advances in both prevention and treatment for HIV and AIDS, queer individuals living with these conditions remain targets of discrimination—even within their own communities.

Late last fall, during a guest performance season in New York City with Parsons Dance, Company alumnus Eric Bourne acknowledged his HIV-positive status live from the Joyce stage while promoting a fundraising appeal for our longtime collaborators at Dancers Responding to AIDS (DRA).

This June, Eric and DRA co-founder (and fellow Parsons alum!) Denise Roberts Hurlin hosted Parsons Company Dancers, Staff, and Summer Intensive participants on Zoom, sharing a special Pride month spotlight on Eric’s travels with Parsons and his experience as an HIV-positive artist in the dance world.

They discussed Eric’s journey from commercial musicals to a touring concert dance career, hilarious costume mishaps on the road, and the challenges of navigating life in the arts with HIV. Eric and Denise shared tips and career resources for ALL dancers across the country, as well as a few of their favorite organizations raising funds to support the HIV/AIDS community.

We hope that improving awareness through the actionable engagement opportunities below our video helps Parsons Dance better embody the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (I.D.E.A.) values we promote and share with the world. To learn more about our commitments to these values and how we are actively pursuing them, please email diversity@parsonsdance.org.

Happy Pride from Parsons Dance!

Links and Resources from our Conversation

  • Support Detroit’s Geared For Life, whose mission is to enhance the lives of LGBTQ+ citizens in the State of Michigan through education, awareness and special event activities.

  • Visit Dancers Responding to AIDS and donate OR volunteer.

  • Are you a dancer in need of financial or emotional support? Contact The Dancers’ Resource, a program of the Entertainment Community Fund (formerly the Actors’ Fund).

  • Get professional guidance from The Career Center at Career Transition for Dancers.

  • Broadway Bares, a program of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, uses friendly competition to raise funds for the HIV/AIDS community: audiences sponsor their favorite performers to stage an unforgettable evening of dazzling burlesque.

  • DRA’s annual Fire Island Dance Festival, now back in the Pines after a two-year pandemic hiatus, helps sponsor medication, meals, counseling, and financial assistance while bringing world-class dance companies to the shores of the Great South Bay.

More about Eric Bourne

Eric Bourne grew up in Midland, Michigan, where he began dancing at the age of 16. He started his formal training while attending Ryerson University, and moved to New York City in January 2007. He performed the role of James in the North American Tour of Twyla Tharp's Movin' Out, and danced with Parsons Dance from 2008 to 2013. Since then he has continued teaching and dancing, including a recent guest season with the Parsons company onstage at the Joyce Theater in December 2021.

Follow or message Eric on Instagram: @bourne.eric

More about Denise Roberts Hurlin

Denise Roberts Hurlin completed her BFA in Dance in 1984 from the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College. She was a founding member of Parsons Dance in 1987 and later performed for six years with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. In 1991, Denise and fellow Paul Taylor dancer Hernando Cortez co-founded Dancers Responding to AIDS to help friends and fellow dancers who had become ill. Denise remains in her role as founding director, leading the program’s efforts to continue providing a safety net for the dance community. She also serves on the advisory council for The Dancers’ Resource, a program of the newly renamed Entertainment Community Fund, formerly known as the Actors Fund.

Follow or message Dancers Responding to AIDS on Instagram: @dradance

Land Acknowledgement

Parsons Dance travels all over the contemporary United States and the world. Our New York City homes and workplaces occupy unceded land that was forcibly and violently taken from many different Native tribes, nations, and peoples. In New York City, these include the Munsee Lenape, the Wappinger, and the Canarsie; in Michigan, these include the Anishinabewaki , the Missisauga, and the Sauk. We are actively developing practices that seek authentic engagement with contemporary Native descendants, their ancestral homes, and other communities harmed by ongoing colonial injustice. To learn more about Parsons Dance’s commitments to antiracist, intersectional inclusion efforts within our artistic community, you can visit parsonsdance.org/diversity.

Indigenous Enterprise at the Joyce Theater

For most of the recent Indigenous Enterprise show Indigenous Liberation at The Joyce Theater, a bold projected proclamation ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS loomed over the stage as eight talented artists piped a joyful exuberance into an awestruck audience. Their performance and words, celebrating Native history and the role of dance in Native communities, was education and sheer excitement all at once.

November is Native American Heritage Month, and we at Parsons Dance are learning to focus on actions over words, too. The dance vocabulary we bring to the Joyce stage may be of a different style, but dance lovers of all kinds and ages can support Native arts groups like Indigenous Enterprise and the tristate area’s own Red Hawk Native American Arts Council. They share their culture and tradition in communities all over the lands now known as the United States and Canada, where they once danced freely before those lands were taken from them by settler colonialism.

Below, we are posting just a few Native-centered actions you can take to make your own actions louder than words:

LEARN about the true origins of Thanksgiving, in a five-minute animated short from the National Museum of the American Indian

EXPERIENCE Indigenous Enterprise online, and support them through Native-designed apparel purchases

SIGN the petition for New York City to recognize Indigenous People’s Day

DONATE to Red Hawk Native American Arts Council, and hire their artists

UNDERSTAND nonprofit funding better with Edgar Villanueva’s excellent book, Decolonizing Wealth

FIND your own address and discover which Native people(s) once called it their home

READ the Joyce Theater’s Land Acknowledgment

Image description: The bright neon glow of the Joyce Theater’s marquee proclaims “Indigenous Enterprise, November 9th through 14th”. On the sidewalk below, Indigenous Enterprise dancers Dominic Pablo and Nathaniel Silk Nez wear colorful Native regalia covered in head-to-toe beads, feathers, and fringe. On either side, Parsons Dance company members and staff lean in to smile and celebrate the performance we’ve just seen.

"Alice Sheppard Is Moving The Conversation Beyond Loss and Adversity" by Dance Magazine

As Disability Pride month comes to a close, we at Parsons Dance are reflecting on how our company (and our industry at large) can better serve and uplift disabled artists and audiences. We are proud of our disability-forward movement classes and nation-wide sensory friendly performances--but practicing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (I.D.E.A.) values means *continuously* improving and broadening our preconceptions of the possible.

A recent staff huddle, guided by our team of interns, featured a 2018 Dance Magazine article that highlights not just the powerful wheeled choreography and performance of artist Alice Sheppard, but the broader range of disabled participants in the field. Author Kevin Gotkin notes, “It’s not the shine of a single star that Sheppard counts as success. It’s the brilliant glow of a constellation of artists growing together that she imagines.”

We are grateful to our intern team @jennaeliora, @kendylspowell, and @sarahscribs for amplifying disability and other intersectional topics in our daily discourse. We are also aware that *much* more still remains to be done. Please contact us directly to learn more about the steps we are taking on our own journey of accountability!

 
 

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info@parsonsdance.org