Steven Melendez on Opening Doors to Ballet

magic tunnel. Over the course of that thirty minutes or forty minutes, I sort of rebuilt myself so that I could walk out on Park Avenue with all the people that belonged to on Park Avenue, and I would hold my chest different and I'd look at people differently, and I'd sort of imagine and pretend maybe I'd go into the ballet studio surrounded by mostly white people, and then at the end of the day, at the end of ballet class or whatever rehearsals, I'd get back in the train,

get back in the hole magic tunnel, and go back up to the Bronx and come out. And suddenly it was very different. I wouldn't look at people in the eye, and it just sort of keep to myself and keep my head down. I I think movement is really really interesting.

And I think that's really magical. I've spent my life dedicating myself to understanding movement. It is really interesting to me to watch the way somebody from the South Bronx moves compared to the way somebody from Parking Avenue moves. And it has been really interesting in my life to try to change the way I mix in and out of different cultures. When I was seven years old, my family lived for about three years in a New York City homeless shelter, and we got there in a sort

of roundabout way. My mother, a single mother, mad myself. My younger sister was to my memory at least a very successful person. She was a medical researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital. That doesn't change that she was a single mother,

and that New York is expensive. And one day the landlord in the home where we lived, a private home in Rosedale section of the Bronx and I SA area in the Bronx, he passed away suddenly, I think he had a heart attack, and we were kicked out of the home sort of overnight, and we ended up in

a homeless shelter. We stayed there for three years, and very very early on I was introduced to a woman named Diana Buyer, who was a director at that time of New York theater ballet, and she came into the shelter, She literally walked into the shelter and she said, I'm offering ballet classes to any kid who wants to come. Follow me. And my mother said, go follow that woman,

and I did. And I had the most incredible, weak long workshop of ballet classes and lunch, reading books and all kinds of cool things related to dance and art in the ballet studio. And at the end of the week, I didn't think ballet was for me, but my mother she said I had to do it because she didn't have childcare and it was free. And so I was taking classes for a year, you know, once a week

or twice a week. And at the end of the year, like every new young dancer, I was cast in The Nutcracker and I was casting the role of Little Mouse number two and I had a huge, huge mouse mask gone and a big fat suit for the mouse costume. And I was on stage for thirty seconds, maybe maybe a minute max a minute. But at the end of

the performance I got to take a bow. And that was the most remarkable, incredible experience, going out on stage and taking a bow in front of four hundred twive hundred people, and I at the time was very confident that everybody was clapping for me. Of course, now I know that they weren't clapping for me, they were clapping for the professional dancers behind me. But it was so exciting the idea that I could do something and people would appreciate it. At that moment, I was hooked. That

was the beginning of the end. I studied dance really seriously through the Lift program, which was the outreach program that Dana started with New York Theater Ballet. I was offered a spot in the Ballet Academy, and I joined the ballet company when I was fourteen. When I was a teenager, i'd wake up I don't know what time it was first period in public school, seven point fifty. I was coming from the Bronx, so i'd wake up with like five, get on the train at six thirty.

I'd go to first period, which was usually something ridiculous like chemistry, calculus, or something really impossible to do at seven fifty in the morning, and then I'd leave school and I'd go to ballet class downtown for ten o'clock company class, and then on some days I would stay in the ballet studio and rehearse, and other days I'd go back to school or you know, a twelve thirty period where I'd do ridiculous things like literature or something

really obscure and annoying that nobody wants to do there, at least that I didn't want to do. I much

preferred staying in the ballet studio. And then I'd go back to ballet after school for rehearsal, and then i'd have another class in the evening, and I probably wouldn't leave the ballet studio until another seven thirty or eight o'clock at night, and then I had the trek home and the magic tunnel back to the Bronx, and I'd get home at nine o'clock so that I could start homework and do homework until ten thirty or eleven after eating, and do it all over again. And I did that

for a really long time. Thirty years ago or a little bit more than thirty years ago, when Diana first started the LIFT program, she was really on the cutting edge of this kind of outreach work. But now thirty years later, my generation is graduating into positions of leadership, and it's now our responsibility to take up the flame and to do the work that the generation before me did. And the unique difference is that I have the opportunity to do the work from the perspective of someone who's

lived it. The messenger matters equally as the message matters, and it means something different when I walk into a shelter saying I lived here, Come with me, then when Diana walked into the shelter and simply said, come with me. The thing that I'm realizing that maybe needs to change a little bit is the attention that we spend exclusively on children, but the adults that they go home to, they need to have their minds changed as well, so that they can participate in the new experiences that the

kids are having. I love my uncle very much, but I remember when I was accepted to School of American Ballet, probably the greatest largest classical ballet school in the world, certainly in America, and his reaction to me was to sit me down on the stoop and to explain that he wanted to be sure that I didn't turn into one of them, and he was referring to the gay

boys that were ballet dancers. And I remember that day so well that is the seared memory that I have of going home proud because I'd accomplished getting into school of American Ballet, and that was the reaction from my family. My mission now is to spend time targeting, in this case, new to dance audiences who are adult people, so that we affect generational change and make a generational impact from

all angles whole. I don't know one hundred professional dancers, and ninety of them are going to tell you some version of I started a dance because my uncle, because my grandmother, because my mother, because my whoever showed me a dance on TV or brought me to the concert or was a dancer themselves. And the result of that anecdote is that dance maintains a sort of ancestral relationship

with itself. It becomes a little ecosystem. If you're already in it generationally, then you're more likely to stay in it generationally. And if you're already out of it, it's very difficult to get in. And so if I can be successful at changing the makeup of the audience, the adult audience, then I think, secretly but not so secret, because I'm on the radio telling you right now, secretly I can change, ultimately the makeup of the people on

the stage. I am really really driven on a for accessibility. Got a taxonomy of inaccessibility, and it includes economic and geographic, which are pretty straightforward. Things are too expensive and things are too far away. Then it includes things like cultural and intellectual. Sometimes something is inaccessible because it's not resonating with the community that it's supposed to be speaking at.

And something like classical ballet with a long history of kings and queens and princesses and swans and whatever else, doesn't resonate with people who grow up in twenty twenty two in Harlem. That's just a reality. And there's no reason why we can't make new dances of and about the people today. And there's no reason why we can't contextualize the older master works that have been around for hundreds of years to explain to people why they're still

relevant today. A lot of times, the dance industry, the performing arts, the fine arts, all the things that people consider elite up with that d quotes, the opera, the ballet, the symphony, all that stuff. They create systems where it's impossible for someone who doesn't know to figure it out. Simple things like the marketing and the branding of new ballets.

When you advertise a new ballet by listing the choreographer's name and the name of the piece, well, if you don't know who the chographer is and you don't know the name of the piece, and that doesn't mean anything to you. The reviews the critics that talk only about the high level of technique that the dancers are employing

to portray the characters. But if you don't know anything about dance, it doesn't matter to you if the dancer's leg is at ninety degrees or eighty nine degrees, or if they're turned out, or if they're turned in, or if they have the perfect quase line or the AFOs a line. These are just French words, so it don't mean anything. But the thing that everybody does understand, I think is the humanity and the storytelling. I'm really really interested in all of the ways that we can tell

stories because I think that's what connects us. I think when I was younger, I was interested in that because it was a little bit of escapism for me. I'd go on stage with a new character and I could be that guy for a minute. I could be Prince Charming for three acts one night performing Othello. You'd go out there as Othello, and you could be really, really angry, you know, in a way that I would never be in real life. But on stage it was okay. In

the classical ballet canon. You go out there and you can be a bird. You could be bluebird because I know who all those characters are. But knowing who I am, that's kind of scary. I think I'm knowing toward figuring that out. I never knew my father, except that he made it so that I didn't speak Spanish as a kid. And I heard a piece of music during the pandemic time, and it made me sort of nostalgic for this memories of having a father, but I never had a father.

There were like daydreams that I was imagining, like you know, being on the bicycle and my father pushing it along or playing catch in the front yard or whatever, but I never actually had those experiences. And the music sort of compelled me to make this dance, and I thought, oh, I should make a dance about fatherhood. That'd be so cool.

And then it occurred to me that if I did that, it would be a very myopic view of that relationship between a son and the father, because not everyone has my experience with a father, and who am I to make a dance that says, this is what sons and

fathers are like? And so I decided instead that I would commission a series of ballets, all choreographed by different male artists, each one from a slightly different perspective, and each one a letter from that male artist to their father, and between the five or six or seven or eight pieces, over the course of many years, my hope is to prompt a dialogue in the public and the audience about the relationships plural that sons and fathers can have or

should have or shouldn't have or have had. And I think it's uniquely relevant to tell these stories now because we're at an inflection point generationally, and I think if we don't have a ballet like what I'm proposing now, we'll end up talking to ghosts. And I think that dance is so nuanced that maybe actually we as artists can from the stage shed light on these other experiences that the world needs to hear about, and I need to hear about it now. The truth is that I'm

scared every day. Being the director of a ballet company is really hard. I had one director of another ballet company, a very important ballet company, and he called me up after he'd heard the news that I was given this role. But all he said was my condolences. It's a lot of responsibility, but it's also for me at least, I feel the responsibility of being the artist in our community that are reflecting the community back at itself.

join us on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on your social media at Latino USA and remember lotoyas Bye.