Reyes Dance describes itself as "a contemporary dance company dedicated to bringing visibility to BIPOC narratives through performance at the intersection of horror and humor." Intriguing, but what could that possibly mean?
First-generation Latinx artist Jocelyn Reyes, who founded Reyes Dance in 2017, shone some light on this enigma. On the large scale, the company addresses social ills, especially in the context of Latin American cultures. On a personal scale, she explained that she learned how to process her tumultuous childhood experiences through movement. The company has received a number of significant grants and Reyes is currently an awardee of the S.F. Arts Council’s Arts Impact Endowment Individual Artist Grant.
The world premiere of her latest creation, String Quartet No. ATE, the third of a trilogy, is being presented on May 21-23 at the ODC Theater in San Francisco.
The piece explores an unlikely subject — our often-complex relationship to food and health. It was inspired by Reyes’s recent diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes and her struggle to change her culturally influenced eating habits. The choreographer created it during a residency with Berkeley Ballet Theater, in 2023.
"I really wanted to capture this trouble of changing ingrained habits — how do you change the way you eat? So [the work is] really capturing that feeling of desire and temptation and trying to pull back, and that sort of teasing of an internal struggle. That's how the piece began," Reyes explained.
Although it’s a dark subject, she asserts that String Quartet No. ATE is full of surprises, and is also humorous, as the title suggests.
Reyes said, "There is also a lot of theatricality. My dancers use facial expressions and really play and push the humor and absurdity level as well." Slight spoiler alert — expect flying and dancing bananas.
The work, for four dancers is set to Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8, a piece that Reyes first heard in high school. "The second movement really captured that chaos and relentlessness and energy, but also this sense of power and resilience," she commented.
The music will be performed live onstage by members of One Found Sound, an innovative San Francisco-based, musician-led chamber orchestra that performs without a conductor.
"I reached out to them and we talked about the piece. We just had our first rehearsal two weeks ago and it was really cool," said Reyes. " It was neat to see how the musicians can take cues off of us versus using a recording. [We’re] able to talk about phrasing and collaborate."
Growing up, Reyes was inspired by Latin social dances. She also utilizes her unusual educational mix — a B.A. in dance and a B.S. in cognitive science from UCLA — to fuel her choreography.
"English was my second language so I had this difficult relationship to language and words, and I felt like dance was a way that I could communicate and express everything that was going on," Reyes said. "At UCLA, I started choreographing with this scientific method approach — you have a question, then you build a hypothesis for why this might be, and then you experiment in the studio with different choreographic phrases and movement."
When asked how this piece is different from the previous two in the trilogy, the choreographer said that in her prior work, she had mostly used cumbia, merengue, and salsa music that she grew up with. In this work, she’s returning to classical music. “I went to a performing arts high school and played violin for five years, and studied music theory for seven,” she remarked, “so I was working with classical music throughout college."
Reyes is quite happy about this work’s music, and especially enjoyed using live musicians, which adds a new dimension to the piece. But her ultimate hope is that sharing her story will help people in similar circumstances find a way to cope and process their feelings in a lighter way. When life gives you flying bananas, duck.
