Wednesday, April 26
I :00pm-2:20pm Kaufman Hall, Room 208
Gina Cabeza De Baca-Cifuentes is an activist, dancer, and the director of the Santa Monica Ballet Folklorico Dance Company. Founded in 2005, the Santa Monica Ballet Folklorico Dance Company aims to preserve, promote, and present Latinx and Indigenous cultures, which have a crucial historic and continued presence in the area known today as Santa Monica and throughout Los Angeles broadly. The Santa Monica Ballet Folklorico Dance Company was created in response to rapid gentrification in Santa Monica and is currently the only folklorico dance company in the city. In addition to ballet folklorico, De Baca-Cifuentes and her colleagues also teach Aztec dance, Hawaiian dance, and belly dance, engaging all four dance styles to empower a wide range of dancers-from young children to elders -and create relationships across diverse movement forms and their associated cultural histories.