Elsa Figueroa Q & A: Bellydance Artist, Performer and Writer
Photo of Elsa Figueroa
Short Bio of Elsa Figueroa
Elsa Figueroa is a bellydance artist, performer and writer from Puerto Rico. She began her dance training in 2010 in California while pursuing a Master’s Degree in Translation and Interpretation. Over the past ten years, she has trained with world-renowned dancers including Soraia Zaied, Ranya Renee, Florence Leclerc and Mira Betz, whom she considers her mentor.
Her dance training also includes ballet, jazz and modern dance, which she has incorporated into her elegant and flowing style. An eternal student, she constantly reads and researches about the history and development of bellydance, which she shares through her writings and in her classes. As an instructor, she empowers her students to become independent dance thinkers with knowledge about anatomy and movement mechanics with a strong focus on self-care and self-compassion. Through her studies with bellydance fusion master Mira Betz, Elsa has delved into contemporary fusion to explore themes of connection and the human experience. In 2018, she opened her very first dance studio and rehearsal space, Almacén 63, in her native San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Interview
Shauna Kelly: Elsa, you and I have been on a similar journey. We were both artists and then we went to grad school (where we met) for something seemingly unrelated. We have circled back to our love for the arts. Furthermore, we have found a way to have all that we have done, compliment our lives. We don’t treat our pursuits as deviations, but rather another layer. We both decided that a website was a way to share our deep, written reflections of our art, to include the personal (introspection), our experience performing, the artists we admire, the impact of the arts, and the lifestyle, to name a few.
Elsa Figueroa: I definitely agree! It’s funny, because I always knew I wanted to be an artist. When I was little, I imagined myself in front of a big easel with watercolors. I drew everywhere and invented little stories with my toys all the time. I discovered my storytelling urge when I was 8. But then due to the circumstances of my life, I hid my artistic desire. I deeply absorbed society’s message that I needed to pursue something more “practical”, more “realistic”, that I would “starve” if I pursued only art. My career in translation became that compromise, but in the process of pursuing that I forgot what I wanted to do in the first place. Dance brought me back to art in a very real way.
SK: What memorable dance performances have you seen? What is your relationship to performing dance and being a spectator of it? Are you particular about what you see?
EF: One of my most memorable dance performances was actually Mira Betz’s piece for the 2017 Massive Spectacular, it still brings tears to my eyes. Another dance I will never forget was my first time seeing Antoine Hunter, an American Sign Language, modern dance performer. I have seen him perform twice and it feels like a spiritual, otherworldly experience.
SK: In addition to performing, you teach bellydancing online and multilingual. What does teaching dance mean to you?
EF: Teaching dance is a way for me to explore my knowledge and to connect with it. I am fascinated by the ways in which we “translate” dance expression into spoken language. So often I have heard dancers say they are not very good at spoken language, that’s why they dance. But as a dance teacher you have to be both precise and poetic with your language. I love that balance. I love making up metaphors and coming up with tools to explain things to students.
SK: In addition to dance, you love language?
EF: When I was an undergrad, I became obsessed with languages and linguistics. I did my Bachelor’s in something called “Interdisciplinary Studies”, which contained my chosen track called “Pre-translation studies”, with a second major in Foreign Languages. I studied French, Portuguese, Latin and German and became fascinated by the field of linguistics. I spent my time in college taking lots of grammar, writing, literature and translation courses. I read every linguistics text I could get my hands on. I collected words, idioms and phrases, was fascinated by the history of languages.
SK: But now dance is your focus?
EF: This obsession [with language] faded quite a bit when I found dance. Now I am obsessed with the language of the body, its myriad modes of expression. The human body is mysterious, vast, fascinating. I am awed each day by all that it is capable of. I am fascinated by the contrast between these two fields that I am passionate about, how far apart they seem.
Artists I look up to show an appreciation and understanding for the times they live in and are sensitive to the human experience and their place in the world. -Elsa
SK: How do you view the intersection of dance and language?
EF: I have often heard dancers say they dance to express that for which they have no words. But we use language to communicate movement, to teach steps and choreography. I enjoy the poetry in the metaphors dance instructors often use to convey movement. Each individual instructor develops their own language to explain what they want others to do.
We use words to describe a dancer that enthralls us, and even if words feel like they fall short, they are our ultimate tool for communication. We make do. Perhaps words and movement are not so distant after all. To me, they are the most human of endeavors.
Simultaneous interpreting is a lot like improvisation, except instead of dancing you speak to the “music” of spoken word.
To me language is still the cornerstone of human communication. Especially if you are a teacher, you are also a communicator. And human beings rely on language to communicate sophisticated, complex ideas. In a way, dance is a way for me to explore yet another dimension of language.
SK: How do you feel about (and balance) individual versus collaborative dance projects?
EF: I love collaboration, but I don’t think I can do it with everyone. My process is very fluid and a bit messy, it usually revolves around asking questions, going from the general to the specific. Therefore, for the most part I have a hard time working with type A personalities who have very strict ideas about what is right and wrong. I love subversion, asymmetry and contrast, telling stories and using elements from other art forms to inform my choreographies. I am also very diplomatic and yielding, I don’t like to force my will, so if someone comes in with very rigid ideas and a strong will then I end up doing what they say in order to avoid an argument.
SK: You feel you are making a statement about body type as a dancer.
You write:
You don’t have to look a certain way to dance (or even to perform your dance), I’m proof of that. People will always have opinions. Dance teaches us about the movement possibilities in our bodies, and that is a gift.
You also write:
SK: In a way you are defying close-minded expectations of what a dancer looks like. I too take every opportunity to defy stereotypes. To what extent is this aspect of your dancing at the forefront of your mind?
EF: This approach is what has allowed me to keep “putting myself out there”. I went through a very difficult phase a few years ago related to body image. When I became fully aware of the lack of diversity in terms of ethnicities and body types in bellydance I became very depressed. I struggled a lot with this because I was in a place (the San Francisco Bay Area) that appears to be very open to everybody, but is actually not. Approaching my dance as a form of resistance has motivated me to keep putting myself out there. I realized that because bellydance is so often associated with femininity, and most of the representatives of this dance fit a specific mould that has nothing to do with me, there was great opportunity in showing up as a curvy, brown body in a dance that is a site of femininity.
SK: You write:
Expressive movement brings you back to your body, to the here and now, and connects you even more deeply to your feelings and emotions.
SK: I quite like the common notion ‘in order to change your mood, change your shape.’ The body position informs the mind. This can apply not only dance but movement and even posture or poses. Does movement/posture inform our minds?
EF: Definitely! I remember a few years ago one of my teachers told me that I really needed to focus on strengthening the pelvic floor. She promised standing firmly in my pelvic floor would help me with my posture and give me greater confidence. She was completely right. You show up in the world differently, and people perceive you differently. Movement can also completely alter your mood.
SK: How do you describe ‘expressive movement’? Is it skilled movement?
EF: Expressive movement is about intention. In my journey through dance, I have had to completely overhaul the way I move and interact with space. I have noticed only people with training or exposure to a physical discipline seem to move their body intentionally. Most people seem unaware of how they walk, how they carry themselves, how they move in space. Dance, martial arts, yoga, even sports, bring you back to your body, to the intention behind your movement.
SK: You have studied under Mira Betz and you said it transformed your journey with dance. You write:
SK: Were you mining your past, emotions, fears, joys? How did those things inform your dance choreography? When it comes to acting technique there are many schools of thought. Some are mining for emotions and others are purely physical, highly choreographed, and not rooted in emotion per se. The physical is informing the rest. Is your dance ever purely technical and not rooted in emotion? In other words, what technique do you appreciate and practice?
EF: I have come to a place where I try to find a balance between emotion and technique, between the mind and the physical. I used to be pure emotion, but emotion alone can actually get in the way of the creative process. I had to learn to temper my emotion with technique.
This question brings me to something I read in the book “ Viewpoints “. The authors explain that in acting, trying to always pursue emotion makes you a slave to it. The Viewpoints method is rooted in action, in performing an action in order to investigate and experiment. I love that. Too often I have found myself “stuck” and unproductive precisely because of emotion. Things like shame, fear, despair can become enemies to the creative process. Jumping into action, often through specific exercises or tasks, can break the spell of those more destructive emotions. Having said all that, I only ever feel motivated enough to complete choreography if I deeply care about the story I want to tell. Creating something is massive work, and so the motivation needs to be high. But in the actual day to day process of creating the work, emotion can be detrimental. It’s a conversation I guess.
SK: You write about your teacher Mira Betz:
SK: Sometimes in the arts we don’t label teachers and directors as leaders, but I think they are because they are leading us to a certain place, result, or an end product. Would you describe Betz any differently as a leader than you do as a teacher?
EF: I don’t think I would. Mira is first and foremost a teacher and her role as a leader flows naturally from that. In the past, I have had very unfortunate encounters with teachers who saw themselves as leaders, and their interpretation of leadership twisted their role as teachers, making them cruel and greedy. I think Mira is perpetually terrified of that. She tries to make herself our equal, a seeker in this journey. She is there to show us the way up to where she is, but she has never promised to do more than that. But that to me is precisely what a true leader should do.
SK: What do you mean when you mention cruelty?
EF: I feel that most of the cruelty comes from the immense amount of pressure and competitiveness in the bellydance scene. There’s a pervasive narrative about sisterhood and support, and though it might look like an inclusive and supportive community on the surface, it’s much, much different when you’re competing for a market. But I think Mira has honestly sought to maintain artitstic freedom by not pursuing what sells and has tried to teach in a way that supports her students’ development, rather than only looking for what makes more money.
SK: In highlighting black dancers throughout history, you write:
EF: “Katherine Dunham was a 20th century African American dancer and choreographer who developed Dunham technique in modern dance. Dunham also did ethnographic work in the Caribbean and became an innovator not only in the field of dance but also in the field of dance anthropology. She especially spent a lot of time studying the dance forms of Haiti, particularly those related to Vodun practice. She not only contributed to dance scholarship in this way, but was also heavily influenced by these studies in her choreographic work.
After beginning her ballet studies in 1928, she started her first company when she was 21 years old: Ballets Nègres, which was one of the first black ballet companies in the United States. She was also known for her activism, and used her success and visibility to speak out against segregationist policies and to choreograph political works.
I encourage people to read more about her trajectory because she had an incredibly rich and interesting career.
I learned about Katherine Dunham during my year training in the dance department at Laney Community College in Oakland. Their modern dance program is based on Dunham Technique. I was able to train in a very diverse environment with a large African American population, a breath of fresh air and something I had not commonly experienced in other dance spaces in the Bay Area. Laney College allowed me to expand my dance training outside of bellydance very affordably in a highly inclusive environment.”
SK: This shows your interest in dance history, your knowledge about your craft, and your appreciation for the careers of others who have done groundbreaking work (and have been activists as well as artists). What other idols, mentors, dancers should we look to? In your writing you name Mira Betz, Martha Graham, and …. What qualities do your mentors, idols, and collaborators have that you admire?
EF: I am one of those persons that believes that all art is political. Nothing that human beings do is done in a vacuum. Everything is informed by an agenda, even if it’s unconscious. Coming to your craft fully aware of what your work represents, where it is placed in history, and the effect your work has on others is being an activist artist. Artists I look up to show an appreciation and understanding for the times they live in and are sensitive to the human experience and their place in the world. In this particular moment, we should try to look to art that challenges hierarchical structures and gatekeepers that are seeking to preserve the status quo. We need to defend art’s place in the world, to ensure that we keep opening doors for those who are not heard so often and that we keep connecting everyone to art and cultural experiences.
Originally published at https://www.framedperformances.com on September 24, 2020.
