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Sharing Cultures in the
Colorado Valley
By Lisa Traiger
 Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s Folklorico Mexicano program
Alexandra loves the
chance to travel and see new places. Iris loves to meet new
friends from other towns. Sisters Solana and Tavia love to
wear the wide-flounced skirts and make a statement, loud and
clear, with their feet.
As members of Folklorico Mexicano, a dance program for
kindergarteners through high schoolers sponsored by Aspen
Santa Fe Ballet, these children are being taught more than
traditional dance steps. Ask Francisco Nevarez, the program’s
director in the Aspen area. They’re learning about culture and
history, about perseverance and hard work, about friendship
and sharing. Folklorico Mexicano is more than an after-school
dance class. It’s a life class. But don’t tell the kids, up to
130 of them in the Roaring
Fork Valley of Colorado, home to Aspen and Snowmass,
playgrounds for the rich and famous.
In the valley, in towns surrounding these wintertime resorts,
resides an increasing population of Hispanic workers who have
joined the service economy as construction workers, gardeners,
and housekeepers to the rich and pampered. They commute from
Carbondale, Basalt, and Glenwood Springs. But who’s watching
the kids while their parents are pulling 10- or 12-hour
shifts?
Nevarez by day serves as community liaison to the Hispanic
community at Basalt Middle School. At 3:30
p.m. he changes
his shoes and becomes a teacher, instructing his willing
charges in the traditional dances he learned as a child
growing up in northern Mexico. At 14 he danced with a
professional folkloric company in his home state of Chihuahua.
After coming to the United States 17 years ago, he founded a
company, Mexico: Images and Traditions Folkloric Group, in New
York, which was made up of adults and children from the
community.
In 2002, when Nevarez arrived
in Aspen, the snowy mountains and vast valley reminded him of
his home terrain in Chihuahua. That first year he taught
after-school classes in Mexican dance to about 25 or 30 kids;
the next year, 70. In 2006,
under Nevarez’s direction, the troupe traveled to the third
Las Vegas International Folk Dance Festival, where it received
four first-place awards for best group, best production, duo,
and trio. Last season Nevarez had
about 130 children under his tutelage. In fall 2007 he started
with 80, and he expects that number to grow. They dance
a minimum of six hours weekly and perform in local festivals,
at church and community events, and in theaters a dozen times
a season.
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet director Jean-Philippe Malaty took a
break after a rehearsal in Santa Fe, where the 10-member
troupe is based, to explain the company’s commitment to the
Folklorico Mexicano program. “We are a ballet company, but we
are also an organization rooted in our community. We looked at
our community and decided it was time to break down the
barriers.” A former dancer who had had his fill of ballet
company lecture/demonstrations in school gymnasiums, he
expresses disdain for the typical arts-in-education assembly:
“Too many times a company tries to push its product on the
children with little or no success. A lecture/demonstration at
8:00 in the morning is not going to develop dancers or even
audience members. A lot of organizations develop in-school
programming simply to get the funding.”
Malaty worked backwards: “We have a large Hispanic community
and we looked at what they needed.” He’s not worried about
serving the ballet company’s artistic goals. Aspen Santa Fe
Ballet, founded in 1990 by Bebe Schweppe, is unique among arts
organizations for sharing its resources among two communities
that are a six-hour car drive away from each other—on a good
day, when mountain passes are cleared of snow. Malaty isn’t
looking to develop future ballet dancers from the Folklorico
Mexicano program. That’s beside the point. “We’re trying to
teach these children their culture, develop pride in their
background. While many of these children were born here, their
parents are from Mexico. We try to teach them that Mexico is a
very rich culture with European and Native American
influences; every region of the country has a beautiful
costume and a story.” Maybe, Malaty continues, some will grow
up to attend ballet concerts, or send their own children to
dance classes. But more important and more immediate,
he wants to instill pride in
children and teach them about their cultural heritage.
Equally significant is sharing this rich culture with the
Anglo population. Karla Teitler’s two daughters are huge fans.
The girls, Solana and Tavia, tried ballet classes when they
were younger, but they weren’t all that interested or
impressed. When they saw the
colors and swirls of the skirts and heard the rhythms of
Folklorico Mexicano, they were hooked. “My children go to a
school where they are a minority,” notes Teitler, a
pre-kindergarten teacher at Crystal River Elementary, which
her girls attend. “This program allows them to see other
children’s culture and background, and it helps us as parents
break down cultural barriers and interact with other parents.”
Nevarez also appreciates the mix of Hispanic and Anglo
students he teaches. Though Anglos number only about 10
percent in the program, he is adamant about including anyone
who desires to dance. When he instructs, he teaches dances
using both Spanish and English, which is perfect for the
Teitlers, who are being raised in a bilingual household. It’s
also great for Ivan Loya, 11, a sixth-grader who also plays
soccer. Loya enjoys the exercise and friends he has made in
Folklorico Mexicano. He also gets to reinforce his Spanish,
which he speaks at home, while practicing English in a
non-academic setting. It’s equally effective for children of
Spanish-speaking immigrants, who hear their mother tongue and
English side by side. Anglos, too, pick up Spanish words—derecho,
izquierda, vuelta en circulo—right,
left, turn in a circle.
While parents pay only a $25 annual registration fee for their
children and shoes and costumes are provided on loan from the
company, they and the children must commit to attending
rehearsals and performances. But that’s not all; parents are
expected to help in some other way, with costumes, driving,
concessions, fund-raising, or as extra hands backstage. And
the children, too, must make a commitment to maintaining good
grades. The program costs the ballet $140,000 annually,
according to Malaty, much of
it for costumes and transportation. But with funding initially
from the Colorado Trust Foundation and now from a consortium
of Aspen-area funders, Folklorico Mexicano continues to grow.
A sister program six hours away in Santa Fe has just begun its
second year.
Christian Kingsbury, Basalt Middle School’s principal, loves
the program and the work Nevarez does, during school and
after. “Folklorico Mexicano really gets kids hooked into the
school, working hard, being part of a team,” Kingsbury says.
“These are elements that help kids succeed in school and later
on succeed in life: they show up and they work hard.”
Nevarez, or Paco, his nickname among the children, is a
tough taskmaster. The children rehearse from 3:30 to 7:00
p.m. twice
weekly and meet on Saturdays when a performance nears.
The day report cards arrive,
the students must line up to show Paco their grades. And if
he’s not happy, they don’t dance again until their grades come
up. He’s been known, he admits, to call a teacher to get the
full report on a slacking student.
Iris Flores, 12, is in her fifth year with Folklorico Mexicano.
A seventh-grader born in Veracruz,
Mexico, but living in Aspen, she relishes the time
spent dancing with friends. “It keeps me connected to my
culture,” she says. “I want to keeping dancing at least until
I finish high school.”
Tivo Loya, from Carbondale, has two children in the program,
Andy and Ivan. “I think it’s a really good program for kids to
do after school,” he says. “It keeps them away from the video
games.” As a youth Loya too was a dancer in a folkloric
company back in his native Mexico. Today he drives his kids 15
miles, some days across snowy passes, for rehearsals. A
painter, he pointed to a recent graduate of the Aspen Santa Fe
program who used his experience performing with the
award-winning dance troupe to enhance his college application.
It’s something he hopes will help his children one day as
well.
Malaty is proud of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s growing prominence
and increasing critical acclaim on stages across the country,
but he believes in his heart that Folklorico Mexicano may
ultimately be his company’s most important contribution. “We
have zero crossover in our folklorico program and our ballet
program,” he notes, “which shows us we were right in our
approach.” Folklorico Mexicano wasn’t intended to create
ballet dancers, and since its founding in 2000 it hasn’t.
Nevarez appreciates the way the children from different towns
across the valley and different cultures across the border can
dance so easily together in school cafeterias and gymnasiums
and onstage. “When we have a performance,” he says, “I tell
them, ‘You’re not from Basalt; you’re not from Carbondale;
you’re not from Aspen. You’re not Americans; you’re not
Mexicans; you’re not Salvadorans. You’re all Aspen Santa Fe
Ballet Folklorico Mexicano.” And they are.
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