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By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on January 13, 2025
Nélida Tirado and company; Photo: Maria Baranova
Choreography: Nélida Tirado*
Dancers: Nélida Tirado with Adriana Olivares, Alondra Matamoros, Mariana Gatto, Bruno Rodríguez, Joselito Alcantar
Musicians: Gonzalo Grau (Composer/Musical Director/Multi-Instrumentalist), Manolo Mairena (Percussion and Latin Vocals), Amparo Heredia (Flamenco Vocals), Marcos Torres (Percussion), Ricardo Sanchez (Flamenco Guitar), Felipe Fournier (Percussion)
Lighting: Alexandra Vásquez Dheming
Dramaturg/Stage Consultant: Marcus Gualberto
Assistant Stage Manager: Walid Guzmán
Costume Designers: Lily Vestuarios, Bella Chavez
Producers: Ali Rosa-Salas, Harry Poster, Mary-Elizabeth Esquibel
* “Mi Sonriquete” collaboration with Eddie Torres Jr.
Diaspora is a global historical phenomenon that finds its most poignant expression in cultural production, most recognizably through the live, embodied, social arts of music and dance. People of Latin American origin and descent experience diaspora through echoes of Spanish colonization, Indigenous oppression and resistance, African enslavement and liberation, and political and social revolutions and interventions that continue to drive patterns of migration across the Atlantic and throughout the Americas. Over centuries, these collisions have shaped slippery, multifaceted diasporic identities that are far from homogeneous, crisscrossing and layering dimensions of race, class, gender, language, nationality, and culture.
New York City is home to millions of people who claim belonging within the constellation of the Latin American diaspora, among them the dancer and choreographer Nélida Tirado, a native New Yorker of Puerto Rican heritage who specializes in flamenco and Latin styles. With “Dime Quién Soy (Tell Me Who I Am),” Tirado explores and celebrates diasporic identity through music and dance at deeply personal and joyously collective levels. Developed over years from its origins as a solo show—with key support from a 2021 residency at Jacob’s Pillow—the choreographer’s own story remains at its core, while shaping the onstage community around her from the identities and experiences of her dancers and musical collaborators. Tirado’s project ventures beyond the stage as well, with her presentation at Abrons Arts Center including a series of community events and partnerships aimed at sharing diasporic traditions and activities with audiences of all generations.
“Dime Quién Soy” is positively captivating, with intricate rhythms and infectious joy that burst from each of the dancers and the onstage band, led by composer and multi-instrumentalist Gonzalo Grau. Tirado communicates her journey across histories and geographies through shifts in sound, movement, and stage environment; each section feels both contained and connected, and together the vignettes express how identities can become well-defined only as part of a dynamic whole. Dance takes the foreground with vibrant group numbers and impassioned solos for Tirado, with costume and shoe changes to match stylistic shifts, while extended musical interludes highlight the band’s parallel range in Grau’s masterfully genre-crossing compositions.
The primary ingredients of the mixture on display are Spanish flamenco and Latin music and dance, namely the Puerto Rican diasporic forms of salsa and bomba y plena. In a true marriage of music and dance, Grau and Tirado tread seamlessly across styles and techniques with the full confidence of personal experience and cultural ownership. Each lead creator finds the support of five colleagues, with percussionists, a flamenco guitarist, and flamenco and Latin vocalists playing alongside Grau, and an energetically shapeshifting, genre-defying troupe of dancers who more than keep up with Tirado’s virtuosity and verve.
While the show’s arc is not narrative or linear, it succeeds in communicating the particularities and interconnections of time, place, and community in the shaping of identity. A dramatically lit, moody duet for Tirado and flamenco guitarist Ricardo Sanchez opens the program with sonic and embodied explorations: Tirado’s articulate hands and fingers move playfully and pensively through air thick with the fluttering, tactile reverberations of Sanchez’s tense guitar strings and the heels of her hard-soled shoes. From this abstracted space, the stage world opens into landscapes and cityscapes: the simplicity of island campesino life, the bustling streets of youth, the dreams of MTA commuters and bucket drummers, the unique sabor of house parties in the barrio. Whether in sneakers and tracksuits or heels and ruffled skirts, Tirado and her comadres Adriana Olivares, Alondra Matamoros, and Mariana Gatto stand out in their versatility; equally exuberant, though somewhat less high-contrast, are Bruno Rodríguez and Joselito Alcantar, who build and shape their world through the drumbeats of their bodies.
ect Tirado and Grau’s deft stylistic maneuvers, the artists’ message remains amply accessible to the senses and bodies of a broader public. The powerful presence and assured meanderings of Amparo Heredia’s flamenco vocals speak volumes of the form’s own multicultural history, just as Sanchez’s percussive, garrulous guitar melds and transforms with the intervention of a chorus of drums. Likewise, the erect carriage, proud shoulders, sharp footfalls, and decorative flourishes of flamenco dance reroot and reroute through the undulating spines, figure-eighting hips, fleet footwork, rolling shoulders, and polyrhythmic body percussion of Latin diasporic and contemporary street dance styles. Flamenco weaves throughout as both an ancestral call and a cultural touchstone, stronger and realer than nostalgia; one wonders how the diasporic portrait might be made more complete through clearer contact points with African and Indigenous forms. Tirado’s reach from her own identity and experience to others in the Latin American diaspora is generous and rich, yet it contains potential for further exploration, for which New York’s dynamic diasporic cultural diversity can provide the perfect stage. I remain confident that this will be one of many future iterations and presentations of the work.
“Dime Quién Soy” fills the soul (particularly for me, a member of the Latin American diaspora with a many-layered cultural heritage) because every artist on stage carries in common a commitment—perhaps an imperative—to dance, sing, and play across different styles from the same heart. This story of cultural self-discovery and communal celebration is perhaps best summed up in one line from Grau: “mi pureza está en la mezcla”—my purity is in the blend.
