RUBBERBAND – the galvanizing, dynamic fusion of hip-hop, ballet and contemporary dance into one. Victor Quijada, artistic director of the dance group, founded the group in 2002. He started his work as an independent choreographer in 1999.
Quijada was born and raised in Los Angeles, being part of the hip-hop culture throughout trends in the 1990s. “When I was about seven to eight years old, I witnessed one of the big waves of hip hop culture that swept through the neighborhoods of the United States. The movement, the style, and specifically the dancing; breaking and popping. I fell in love with that as a child,” Quijada said.
Quijada went to Baldwin Park High School, taking a theater class in ninth grade. “It was another life changing moment. I was heavy into the hip hop scene, the dance scene, but this theater thing – the acting, that was cool. It called to me a lot,” Quijada said. “I heard about this school in downtown called the L.A. County High School for the Arts. I got myself into the school, but not for theater, for the dance department. They were trying to bulk up their numbers of Latino males.”
Quijada said, “My parents don’t have an artistic background, but at the arts high school, I learned about the way composers changed the way people work with sound, dissonance or silence as sound, I learned about painters, learned about dance forms and choreography. That’s what really made me question, what I was up to and where on this artistic timeline would we put ourselves?”
RUBBERBAND is an engaging dance experience, taking the audience away to another world. Quijada’s most recent dance pieces “Second Chances” and “Trenzado” explore themes of leaving home and identity, connection to culture and your roots, where you belong, and essentially, asking the question, what is culture?
“I was raised in Los Angeles, my parents were born in Mexico. I grew up speaking Spanish with my parents, but English to my older sisters. We’d go to Mexico and the kids would let me know that I’m not Mexican, you’re a white boy and you don’t speak spanish,” Quijada said. “Hip-hop, for me, connected many cultures together.”
“RUBBERBAND was necessary. I needed a place where I could be everything. Where I could bring all of those things together,” Quijada said. “This piece, ‘Trenzado,’ which means ‘braided’ in Spanish, is a piece where I definitely unpack a little bit of that.”
Dance is a forever growing art form, a tree with ever growing branches. It’s constantly evolving, with choreographers like Quijada breaking boundaries — exploring what it means to be intertwined with culture and identity, and communication through ideas and fluid movement.
RUBBERBAND was available to see on March 8. and 9. at the Eli and Edythe BroadStage. For upcoming performances, you can check their website. https://broadstage.org/
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