Utah Events

Stories From Home is a series of dances embodying the oral traditions of Nuevomexicano, Chicano, and Mexican American communities in the American Southwest. Choreographer Yvonne Montoya, a 23rd-generation Nuevomexicana, and an all-Mexican American cast of dancers draw upon personal histories and ancestral knowledge, including stories from Montoya’s great-grandmother, grandmother, great-aunts, and father. With palpable theatricality, moving spoken word, a movement aesthetic informed by vibrant ancestral and contemporary sources, and universal themes of love, family, and home, Stories from Home brings largely underrepresented Southwest Latino American experiences and histories to the stage.

While Stories from Home is a vessel for personal and specific tales, the performance also offers a broader look at a variety of Southwest cultural traditions and accounts not often found in American history books. The work addresses historical themes such as the Mexican farm labor Bracero Program, the creation of the Atomic Bomb in Northern New Mexico and illness related to these US Government projects, loss of language due to 1940s Americanization programs, and the experience of the Sephardim people during and after the Spanish Inquisition.

Yvonne Montoya

Artistic Director & Choreographer

Yvonne Montoya is a mother, dancemaker, bi-national artist, thought leader, writer, speaker, and the founding director of Safos Dance Theatre. Based in Tucson, Arizona and originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, her work is grounded in and inspired by the landscapes, languages, cultures, and aesthetics of the U.S. Southwest.

Montoya is a process-based dancemaker who creates low-tech, site-specific and site-adaptive pieces for nontraditional dance spaces. Though most well-known in the U.S. Southwest, her choreography has been staged across the United States and in Guatemala, and her dance films screened, at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina and the University of Exeter (U.K.) Under her direction, Safos Dance Theatre won the Tucson Pima Arts Council’s Lumie Award for Emerging Organization in 2015. She is currently working on Stories from Home, a series of dances based on her family’s oral histories.

From 2017-2018 Montoya was a Post-Graduate Fellow in Dance at Arizona State University, where she founded and organized the five year dance advocacy project Dance in the Desert: A Gathering of Latinx Dancemakers from 2017-2022. From 2019-2020, Montoya was a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, and a member of the 2019-2020 Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists pilot program. She was also a 2021-2022 Southwest Folk Alliance Plain View Fellow. Montoya was a recipient of the 2019 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) POD grant, the 2020 MAP Fund Award, and the first Arizona-based artist to receive the 2020 New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) National Dance Project Production Grant.  Montoya won the Arizona Creative Excellence Award at the 2021 Arizona Drive-In Dance Film Festival. In 2022, her company Safos Dance Theatre received the National Performance Network Creation Fund Grant and the National Endowment for the Arts Grants for Arts Project Grant for her piece “Stories from Home.” Yvonne was also recently featured in KQED’s If Cities Could Dance.