If you’re looking for an antidote to the current U.S.-Canada trade war, just turn to Rubberband, the Montreal-based contemporary dance company, which is set to make its San Francisco debut at the Presidio Theatre on March 23. The troupe was founded in 2002 by American-born Artistic Director Victor Quijada, the son of Mexican immigrants who made their home in Los Angeles — showing how cooperation and cultural exchange between countries is not just possible but positive.
Quijada’s background is proof that cultures colliding can be productive. In a phone interview with SF Classical Voice, he remembered his first exposure to dance growing up in the 1980s. “When I was 7 years old, there was this hip-hop explosion,” he explained. “I don’t even know if it was [officially] hip-hop — it was breaking, popping, and there was music, an energy, a way of dressing, and the graffiti. I fell in love with it all. I was a very young baby breaker in the circles with the older kids, and that took over my life for about two or three years.”
At Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, Quijada gravitated toward the dance department. “By the end of two years [there], I had [as my teacher] Rudy Perez, who became my mentor,” Quijada said. “He was part of the Judson Dance Theater group in the 1960s and was a pioneering figure in the postmodern movement. He would say, ‘We’re training the body so that we can control time, energy, and space.’ Meeting him changed my whole trajectory. I was introduced to art with a capital A.”
After high school, Quijada joined the Rudy Perez Performance Ensemble for a couple of years, and Perez was adamant that he should train more in ballet. So Quijada started at the beginning. “I had a girlfriend at the time who taught [ballet to] children, and I would take evening class with the kids,” he said.
Quijada ended up following his girlfriend to an audition in Los Angeles, got a callback for the final round in New York City, and was awarded a contract with Twyla Tharp’s latest project. “I didn’t really know what I was getting into,” he recounted. “I was part of a new ensemble, and I was the only one that didn’t have real training. Everybody was either a Juilliard graduate, from [George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet], or from Boston Ballet.”
Quijada said that eventually he decided, “They don’t know it, but I’m going to become the best classical dancer that they have ever seen.” Several years of intensive training led to a season performing with Eliot Feld’s Ballet Tech and then Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal.
At the latter company, everything came together for Quijada. “They had a choreographic workshop, so every year the dancers would produce their own show,” he said. “[And] when I got to Montreal, within the first few days, I could feel hip-hop culture in the air. I started developing work with some of the street dancers and also with some of the ballet dancers in the company. After two seasons, I proved to myself that I could do the classical [style], and it was time to leave the company.”
“We premiered the Rubberband Dance Group,” Quijada continued. “I was doing something very different, and there was so much for me to explore and investigate and experiment with. It felt like a bunch of seeds had been planted — that arts high school, my street dance culture. … It was time to tend to the seeds, water them, and see their fruits and how they flowered.
“Over the last 23 years [with Rubberband], a lot of different investigations have taken me to refine certain ideas. The program that we’re bringing [to the Presidio Theatre], ‘Vic’s Mix,’ I created in 2016 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the company. It’s like a greatest-hits album in two acts. The first act is work from the first three years of the company — all those first experiments and trials of putting classical know-how with street-dance energy and vocabulary.”
And then the second act, promised Quijada, is where things get contemporary.
