Safos Dance Theatre performed Stories from Home on campus last month, which included a series of contemporary dances embodying the oral traditions of Nuevomexicano, Chicano, and Mexican American communities in the Southwest.

“One of the most touching parts of the performance for me was the contrast between sharpness and fluidness, between hard, rigid movements and soft, powerful voices,” says Shanti Harrison ’28, who attended the production with her mom who was visiting for Family Weekend. “When one of the dancers was battling himself, holding a piece of paper—of language—in his mouth without swallowing it, that made me tear up.”

Nine dancers from Safos Dance Theatre, a non-profit dance company in Arizona, performed in the production, which was hosted by the Southwest Studies Department on Sep. 27.

Safos Dance Theater Artistic Director Yvonne Montoya and dancer José José Arrieta Cuesta arrived on campus several days prior to the performance to lead and participate in community engagement events, workshops, and meetings. Montoya and Cuesta traveled to Pueblo to work with Mariachi Diamanté and some local dancers at El Centro del Quinto Sol Community Center (El Centro). They also went to Hillside Community Center in Colorado Springs to work with Dancing Your Stories, a community elder dance group who dance at the community center each week. Both community groups were able to perform in the Stories from Home performance on campus. Additionally, Pikes Peak Region Poet Laureate Ashley Cornelius read her poem, “Remember,” as part of the Hillside dancers’ performance.

Montoya, who choreographed Stories from Home, and the dancers used personal history as well as ancestral knowledge to produce and perform this piece. The performance included dances about the nuclear history of New Mexico and how that has impacted Nuevomexicanos.

Sienna Gaal ’29 says the dance that stood out to her the most was Braceros.

“The dancers' recurring movements created a moving narrative that enhanced my understanding of the emotional realities of harvesting crops,” says Gaal, who attended the performance with her class. “Additionally, the dance where the man had paper in his mouth created an uncomfortable symbolism of the experience of losing one's native tongue. I could feel the pain of trying to speak but knowing your words were being silenced by a racist system.”

Dr. Karen Roybal’s Art, Power, and Resistance, Dr. Sam Aros-Mitchell’s Embodiment Ceremony and Indigenous Futurities, and Dr. Liliana Carrizo’s Musical Embodiment and Ethnography classes participated in a three-way convergence course during Block 2, which discussed topics explored in the Stories from Home performance.

“I wanted my students to experience how performance can embody memory, migration, and cultural history in ways that theory alone cannot,” says Aros-Mitchell, who is a personal friend of Montoya. “My goal was to expose them to a living practice of survivance and story that resonates with our course themes of embodiment, ceremony, and Indigenous futurities.”

Students in the three classes prepared for the Stories from Home performance by watching Stories from Home sizzle reel clips and discussed shared readings, including Montoya’s essay, “Who Takes Center Stage?,” and Dr. Myrriah Gómez’s essay, “‘¿Tecolote d’ónde vienes?’: Preserving Querencia through Dance in Stories from Home." 

The convergence course, as well as students in Dr. Santiago Guerra’s Writing the Southwest Borderlands class, then attended the Stories from Home performance.

Brooklyn Colvin ’29 says that her favorite part of the production was the Braceros number, which she says was beautifully done.

Another one of Colvin’s favorite parts of the performance was a dance performed by Vincent Chavez. “This was another moment where I could see the trauma and fight of people in northern New Mexico, but it was a moment that was very uncomfortable to view,” Colvin says. “I think this was definitely on purpose, as many of my peers felt the same way in later conversations in and out of class. Chavez was choreographed with a paper in his mouth, and his movements were those of someone experiencing a deeply emotional breakdown. It was incredibly vulnerable, and I felt almost as if I shouldn't be watching it. While uncomfortable, I couldn't take my eyes away from the dance, which deeply embodied the generations of trauma—physical, financial, emotional, and especially linguistic in this scene.”

Colvin, who was in Carrizo’s Block 2 class, says the articles they read in class helped her understand the story of Tecolote and the journey to Querencia.

“Understanding the story of Montoya’s father's death and the ‘little owl’ that went from a death omen to something beautiful gave background information that prepped me for further knowledge that I would learn in the dance workshop with Montoya,” Colvin says. “In the workshop itself, my peers and I were guided through the process of embodied movement to tell our own personal story from home. In this I was able to understand that a lot of the dancer's movements were from Montoya's own family or from the research she had done. One repeated dance motion in Stories from Home was directly from her relative who was gathering research on their family at the same time. She motioned with her arm as she spoke, and Montoya included that motion in multiple dances. These discussions and background information from the choreographer herself related deeply to the actual dances, and I was better able to understand and truly feel what was happening on stage.”

Roybal says that she hopes her students understood that even if it wasn’t their story depicted in the performance, that it could incite them to learn more about it or to develop their own story from home.

“I was also interested in having them understand the concept and embodied experience of querencia, or a deep love, respect, and appreciation for the land and for understanding from where one comes—their raíces, or roots,” Roybal says.

Carrizo says students in her Musical Embodiment and Ethnography class embarked on a writing journey with each other that worked towards cultivating an awareness of life through practicing musical ethnography and writing.

“Stories from Home is a choreographed ethnographic performance par excellence — one that models for students the creative possibilities of digging deep within the wells inside of us to produce compelling writing through the craft of storytelling,” Carrizo says. “Through our engagement with Yvonne's work and process, students had the unique opportunity to draw inspiration for their own forms of auto-ethnographic research through understanding querencia and testimonio — in ways that have helped them envision how they might share their own unique stories and socio-cultural inheritances as part of our course.”

Students in the convergence classes participated in a session with Montoya and Arrieta Cuesta, who led the students through movement work to create their own stories from home. The classes discussed themes such as place-based pedagogy, the borderlands, and querencia.

Montoya stayed for several days after the Stories from Home performance to work with students. Last week, students were invited to attend an “eat and greet” and workshop with Montoya, where they participated in an immersive workshop about Montoya’s creative process and how she includes movement aesthetics of the Southwest.

Montoya will be back on campus in Spring 2026 to teach in the Theatre and Dance Department.

Readers can visit Montoya’s website to learn more about her work.