Bringing Rubberband Back to LA

When the Montreal-based contemporary company Rubberband Dance takes the BroadStage on March 8 and 9, 2025, it will be something of a homecoming for artistic director Victor Quijada.

Growing up here in the early 1990s, Quijada moved between two different, equally exciting dance worlds. At the LA County High School for the Arts (LACHSA), Quijada was introduced to the dance spectrum from classical ballet to contemporary, including postmodern dance with the legendary Rudy Perez. At the same time, Quijada was active in the world of LA street dance and hip hop. Starting his professional career, Quijada danced with Rudy Perez’ company for three years before moving to New York City to join Twyla Tharp, followed by Ballet Tech, and then Montreal’s Les Grands Ballets Canadiens.

In 2002, Quijada founded Rubberband Dance, committed to danceworks that synthesize the genres he had mastered separately into a coherent approach. The company’s training and choreography capture the energy of hip hop, the refinement of classical ballet, and the angularity of contemporary dance.

On a 40 degree day in Montreal, Quijada recently spoke with LA Dance Chronicle’s Ann Haskins about the upcoming visit by Rubberband Dance.

Haskins: First, please talk about the name “Rubberband Dance.”

Quijada: There are a few different, long winded answers, but the simplest answer is when growing up in LA, my street dance moniker was ‘Rubberband.” In the window of time from 1990 to 1996, a lot of different influences were coming together in Los Angeles in the hip hop street dance culture, and at the arts high school where I was studying classical ballet, highbrow art with a capital “A,” and postmodern influence from Rudy Perez. For about a half dozen years in the street dance world, everyone knew me as “Rubberband,” and nobody knew me by “Victor.” When I started my company, I wanted to build something that would somehow honor and pay homage to that certain period in my life.

Haskins: Your company was here for the Laguna Dance Festival in 2019. Is this the first visit since then?

Quijada:  For the company, yes. Actually, I did come by myself last April for the memorial for Rudy Perez, to celebrate his life and his contributions. I performed one of his signature solos, Countdown.

Haskins: Please tell me about Second Chances, the work you are bringing to the BroadStage.

Quijada: Second Chances is one of our newest and has two acts. The first act is a mash up of two different works. One is Physical Linguistics, a 2010 commission for Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago, and the other, Second Coming, was commissioned in 2014 for Scottish Dance Theater in Dundee. The first act’s name became Commission Suite because it is from two commissions. The second part of the evening is a new piece, Trenzado, that premiered during the dark times of the pandemic. It put me back onstage in a solo with a supporting ensemble. So I’ll perform in that with the company.

Haskins:  I understand Trenzado roughly translates as braided like hair or a bread. Does that type of translation factor into the work?

Quijada: Trenzado looks at issues of culture and roots, home and leaving home, and identity and migration. It reflects my adventure of leaving Los Angeles and traveling north into Canada, and French Canada specifically, and transposes that on to my dad’s story of leaving Mexico and coming to Southern California. It’s about growing up in a multi-language home and trying to figure out where home is and who you should be. I’m also going through figuring that out as a father with my daughter in a house where we speak English, Spanish and French. What parts of my culture or my parents’ culture that I grew up with, do I want to share with her, and what parts of their culture did my parents share with me? Trenzado is very personal and a change of pace for me.

Haskins: How is Trenzado a change of pace?

Quijada: The kind of work that I was preoccupied with creating was based on developing a physical movement language that was taking influences from diverse and very disparate ends of the dance spectrum–street, classic, and postmodern approaches. I was really obsessed with the experimentation of what that would lead to. When we were leading up to celebrating our 20th anniversary, I had been working on this for quite a while, but it was time to do a piece that spoke about things that were important in a different way for me. It became Trenzado.

Haskins:  Do you think the way you have grappled with melding the various dance styles, echoes in some ways what Trenzado explores about melding the different cultural and geographic backgrounds?

Quijada: Well, yes. There are identity crises that have led me to one step and the next step and the next step. Being a misfit, I’ve tried to figure out where to fit the composites, how to put them together, where they overlap, and how to go beyond being simply a cut and paste, more than just a collage of things. It’s a new something that is a sum of all those different parts. That is not obvious all the time. Your environment plays a big part, and what’s expected of you plays a big part. As you move through life and you move through environments, spotlights might pick up different facets of you, and those might need to shine brighter than the others but finding what is the harmonious shining of all the facets, I think could be a lifelong quest for many people. Generally I think if people step back, it is what enriches both the art form and the culture. There is a role for classicism, but if everything is just repetitive of the past, it ignores that people evolve, cultures evolve, the arts need to evolve.

Haskins: Street dance is generally considered an individual art form. While there are competitions, the focus remains on the soloist. How has street dance and these other dance forms evolved or melded within your company since you started in 2002?

Quijada:  I was part of the street dance community in Los Angeles in a very specific time that doesn’t exist anymore. Street dance has evolved from what it was then. Rubberband Dance gives homage to that certain period of time, but I’m not necessarily trying to take the world that I was a part of and put it on stage. Part of what my experiments, successful and failed, that I’ve been working through over two decades, is the idea of the authenticity of what happens in a place where the only spectators are the practitioners as well. How do you take that and put it on a stage for presentation? Well, you can’t take that exact thing. Something has to change. There is a dichotomy between wanting to share or give a spotlight to that, but as soon as you take it out of the environment, it changes. So less than specific moves, my work seeks to bring together very radically different dance philosophies and textures and approaches and strategies. Sometimes like parents of a child, you know that genetic information comes together, and it’s not literally his nose and her eyes, but you recognize the child combines them into its own thing. I think that is a good analogy for what I’m doing. Anybody that was thinking, “Oh, I want to see street dance on stage.” This is not that. There are other companies that are doing that, but that is not what my goal is. My goal is to take what I experienced in those street dance cyphers, then what I acquired and learned during my time with Rudy in that postmodern approach, with Twyla in that neoclassic approach, and with the people that I worked with at Grand Ballets Canadiens, and the dance theater that I was exposed to, and see what would happen if I let these things that I’ve been profoundly a part of and it had profoundly affected me, if I gave them space to coexist, what would happen?

Haskins: What do you feel has happened after two decades?

Quijada: Well, I feel I’ve been developing different facets of what I believe it could be. In my early choreographic career, it was tests and experimentations and trials and juxtaposing very explosive physicality with classical music and jazz music or electronic music and seeing what that juxtaposition was. Then I went further into the contemporary and then sharpened it with these different accouterments that come from the approach to the floor. Then it was focusing on creating this physical bridge where you couldn’t tell where one influence ended and the other began. And then in 2023, instead of having the company continue exploring where things meld so seamlessly into one another, I created Reckless Underdog, a triptych. The first act is basically a ballet piece; the second is a postmodern piece; and the third is street dance. It was the first time where I went away from bringing things together, and I go back to the original sources, and in a way, parse them. They’re not the original sources anymore. They’re those original influences, but through the lens of what I’ve discovered and created over the last 20 years.

Haskins:  Thank you for your time. Have a safe trip.

Quijada:  Thank you.

RUBBERBAND – Second Chances at the BroadStage, 1310 11th St., Santa Monica; Sat., March 8, 7:30 pm, Sun., March 9, 2 pm, $40-$85. https://broadstage.org/tickets-shows/calendar/rubberband/

To learn more about RUBBERBAND DANCE, please visit their website.

To find out more about what is happening at BroadStage, please visit their website.

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Written by Ann Haskins for LA Dance Chronicle.

Featured image: RUBBERBAND Dance – Vics Mix by Victor Quijada – Photo ©-Bill Hebert.