Moving Southwest Festival leaps into action this week
Jun. 28—It's a cloudy Monday afternoon, but it's starting to heat up inside a dance studio at New Mexico School for the Arts, where Sarah Hogland-Gurulé is leading seven people through a guided meditation during her Diversity in Motion class.
"I want this to be a space where you can feel an important feeling — and move," says Hogland-Gurulé, a core artist for Albuquerque dance company Dancing Earth Creations, before she encourages her students to grab a sweater and get comfortable.
Her class is part of the inaugural Moving Southwest Festival, which began Monday and runs through July 17. Organizers hope the eclectic lineup of classes, talks, films, dance parties and performances will encourage many Santa Feans to at least dip their toes into the wide world of dance.
"How dance is presented is oftentimes in a facility where people don't feel welcome, or it's very costly," said Hilary Palanza of Santa Fe, who is organizing the festival through the International Museum of Dance, which she founded several years ago in San Francisco and serves as its CEO.
Palanza and local dancers involved in the Moving Southwest Festival want to remove those cost and location barriers by holding dance events at a variety of venues, including New Mexico School for the Arts, SITE Santa Fe and the Jean Cocteau and Violet Crown cinemas.
The festival veers away from what Palanza describes as "Euro-centric" styles in contemporary and modern dance by highlighting the art of local dancers working in Indigenous, Black and Latin American traditions.
"I think approaching things from this perspective, of uplifting movement for everybody and all the different ways different cultures have worked with their own intelligence, is really important," Hogland-Gurulé said after her class ended. "It's important to uplift the diversity of approaches to movement."
Hogland-Gurulé, 30, who is of Indigenous Mexican and Irish descent, said the focus of Monday's class was about locating freedom and self-trust. She said much of that work was done through celebratory music from mostly Black and brown artists.
"I feel like things get stuck inside of us, and our dominant culture encourages things to get stuck and suppressed," she said. "I developed this class as a way of encouraging people to move some of that through them."
Palanza started dancing at an early age and was inspired when the National Dance Institute made a stop at Tesuque Elementary School, where she was a student, before the organization had a brick-and-mortar location in New Mexico.
"I loved the feeling I got when I took a class," she said. "How I'd get transported to this really positive, imaginative place."
Her love for the art form led her first to Colorado College, where she earned an undergraduate degree in dance. Palanza later co-founded her own dance company and helped design dance programs for youth in San Francisco.
After graduating from the University of California, Berkely with a master's degree in public policy, Palanza founded the International Museum of Dance in 2018 in hopes of making dance more accessible to all.
While the nonprofit is based in San Francisco, the organization does outreach all over the world — including in Santa Fe through the Moving Southwest Festival.
"The Museum of Dance is the very first museum of dance in the world," Palanza said. "We just really want Santa Fe to feel the specialness that we're here. To come out and move with us means a lot to us."
In addition to classes, the festival is hosting an all-ages, free dance party at Railyard Park from 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday with local DJ Spoolius Mélange.
New Mexico-based Earthseed Black Arts Alliance also is hosting "Free to Move," two-day mini festival July 2 and 3 for Moving Southwest at SITE Santa Fe. It will include two days of movement and dance workshops led by Black teachers and artists, along with dance parties, films and panel discussions.
For people less interested in moving their own bodies, Palanza said there are plenty of opportunities to watch and observe, including through several dance films and live performances.
That includes Intenciones on July 9 and 10 at SITE Santa Fe, a program including live performances from local flamenco artist Vicente Griego and champion Native American hoop dancer ShanDien Sonwai LaRance, followed by a series of Hispanic and Latin American dance cinema shorts.
While a lot of festivals and arts events focus on drawing faraway talent to a city, Palanza said she is digging into the dance landscape in New Mexico and trying to bring that out into the open.
While Palanza recently moved back to Santa Fe, she said the city also was selected for its vibrant Black, Latino and Indigenous dance scenes.
"We have award-winning dancers here in Santa Fe, and people don't always know they're here," she said.
Events include classes taught by local dancers like Hogland-Gurulé in styles including West African dance, flamenco and ballet. There are even body percussion classes taught by performance ensemble Molodi, which has its roots in Albuquerque.
Moving Southwest organizers want the classes, largely open to people of all skill levels, to help connect festival-goers directly with dance.
"I would say getting into a studio and just finding out, just showing up with curiosity ... I feel like it's a huge opportunity for any individual," said William Miglino, chairman of the dance department at New Mexico School for the Arts, who is overseeing live programming for the festival.
Classes are $16 per session, but Palanza said she doesn't want price to deter anyone from attending the Moving Southwest Festival. Organizers can be flexible as needed.
When Hogland-Gurulé's guided meditation wrapped up Monday night, she tore open the quiet with some music for her new students — an energetic Fatboy Slim song featuring Macy Gray — before leading the room through a series of free-flowing twirls and sweeping movements inspired by different materials: water, helium, honey.
The mood was uninhibited.
"You can take up as much space as you want," Hogland-Gurulé said, music blaring.
