09/25/2025
"All over the world, dancers and choreographers are creating cross-cultural dialogue by blending movement traditions, which is really exciting. A form like ballet has a codified vocabulary, typically. Something like contemporary dance doesn't, necessarily, unless you're very strictly a Graham dancer or a Horton dancer, a lot of current contemporary artists are blending their influences.
A lot of contemporary artists, like myself, actually come from other cultures that have other movement vocabularies. Our bodies grew up with different movement expressions and different music influences. For me, it was Slavic dance. I worked to blend contemporary dance with Slavic dance in the piece Far From Home by distilling down the pieces of movement I feel are meaningful and emotional and that can resonate across cultures.
The beautiful thing about contemporary dance is that it allows any influence. Artists are free to bring all their traditions and experiences to create meaning because everything resonates across cultures. The body is the body—we are all working with the same tool. If someone rolls their eyes at you, from whatever culture, you know what that means. It's unspoken.
There are so many of these unspoken universal gestures: someone reaching their arms out usually means something like an embrace or an allowing of some sort because you're opening up your front of your body. There’s an innate, universal body language that we understand across the world." Regina Klenjoski, RKDC Artistic Director
Help us continue to give artists the opportunity to explore and participate in these cross-cultural dialogue by making a donation at RKDC.org/support
📸: Ryan Bruce, Fernando Salazar
