AlphA:ArenA (AlphA excerpt)
Joshua D. Estrada-Romero
AlphA:ArenA
(AlphA Excerpt)
Performed by
Jet Dagdag, Brian Domino, João Ducci, Joshua D. Estrada-Romero, Phillip Lu
MUSIC
Christof Littmann
COSTUMING
Joshua D. Estrada-Romero
Joshua D. Estrada-Romero began his dance training at California State University, Fullerton and received his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Dance in Fall of 2008 and his MFA in Dance from the University of California Irvine in 2017. He has performed with Palindrome Dance Company, RhetOracle Dance Company, BARE Dance Company, Nickerson-Rossi Dance, Kelly Alvarez & Artists. He continues to perform with Tustin Dance Center as Snow King, Spanish Lead, and Arabian Lead for the their Annual Nutcracker.
Joshua is the founder and artistic director of FUSE Dance Company based in Orange, CA, whose mission is to support and foster the growth and development of the performing arts in Southern California through performances, dance education, and dance community collaboration programs.
Joshua is a certified yoga instructor through CorePower yoga and Nutritional Coach through NASM. He is a photographer focusing on capturing dance, movement and sports. Currently, Joshua shares his passion as an instructor/choreographer to all dance students of California State University Fullerton, Mt. San Antonio College and Santa Ana College.
PROGRAMME NOTES
AlphA made its debut at the Men In Dance Festival in 2012. It’s conceptualization was inspired by wanting to explore social constructs and mental models surrounding masculinity through movement. A narrative of power struggles and dominance was built around the initial cast of five male-identified dancers. After its debut, AlphA appeared in other events that eventually led to further exploration in composition research. After using a cast of only female-identified dancers, this led to expanding further in exploring gendered movement and challenging restrictive binary roles. By 2018, AlphA progressed into being conceptualized as a full-length staged work that was to be performed by a cast of male dancers, followed by an intermission, and then replicated by an ensemble of female dancers. The juxtaposition of the performances would serve as an apparatus to challenge and dismantle the viewer’s biases in assigning gendered and stereotyped movement based on the dancer’s body. Concepts around costuming provided an additional layer in expanding the spectrum of gender expression on the dancer’s body, challenging the binary, and ultimately, dissolving the lines that separates and categories of sex, gender, and expression. The Covid-19 pandemic hindered the showcasing of the completed work and was only recently resumed. After 10 years, Fuse Dance Company returns to this year’s Men In Dance Festival and will be presenting “ArenA,” an excerpt from Alpha. In ArenA, individuality and autonomy are challenged amongst the dancers as they seek the title and the status of the new AlphA.
Description written by Company member
Phillip Lu, LCSW ( he/him)
California State University, Los Angeles
B.A Psychology and Social Behavior
University of California, Irvine
