Diego Vega Solorza does not want people to think of him as a visual artist. He is certainly not a sculptor, he insists, nor a photographer or videographer — even though he will exhibit that kind of work in a showcase for emerging talent at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, the visual arts mega-fair running Friday through Sunday.
He is a choreographer and dancer — and only that — and everything he creates is in service to dance making, said Vega Solorza, who lives in Mexico City and is a star in his native country. Those objects, which will be displayed by Llano gallery in the fair’s Positions section, were a “material response” to the works he devises for the human body, he said.
They may include props from a performance piece he has dreamed up, like a horse saddle (custom-made for two riders facing one another), or video of a new dance, or still images that capture dancers in action. But no matter what form they take, these objects function as “a kind of evidence that the dance existed,” Solorza said, and they keep the ideas expressed during a theater performance alive, even after the show has ended.
Audiences cannot take dancers home with them, but they can acquire these set pieces and costumes, or pictures that spark a dialogue on a topic he wants to explore. “That conversation happens when someone sees that object and asks what is the value of it, or where does it come from,” he said.
Such fare represents a conceptual leap at a marketplace like Art Basel, where many high-profile sales revolve around two-dimensional paintings by established artists. For Llano, there is some risk in producing a solo presentation by a dancer who is largely unknown outside of Mexico.
But within Mexico, Vega Solorza, 34, is one of the country’s top choreographers, creating dances, and selling out theaters, for most of his decade-long career. He is known for tense and dramatic contemporary dance pieces, featuring small groups of perfomers — sometimes as few as three or four, and usually including himself — that take on themes of the human experience, including most recently, violence in its various forms.
Llano’s owners — Mauricio Cadena and Sergio Molina — have been longtime fans and saw potential in translating the objects used onstage into art world commodities. The pieces were a critical component of the choreography, they said during a recent interview in their gallery, and retained the energy and significance of the dance when separated from the actual live event. They hope collectors in Miami will see it that way, too.
Also, they noted, Vega Solorza was already building bridges with the visual arts world on his own. In the past few years, he produced performances at galleries during exhibitions by the well-known painters Ana Segovia and Omar Rodriguez-Graham. No matter the show, the dance related directly to the work, animating its concepts through movement.
“It took us a while to convince him to get into the art world, even though we were seeing presentations by him at studios of artists that are our friends,” said Cadena. “And we could actually feel the connection that the people from art were having with his work. His presence is incredible.”
“This is an opportunity for us to launch Diego internationally, because he already is sort of a celebrity here in Mexico,” said Molina.
That strong belief inspired them to provide financial support for a new dance work by Vega Solorza titled “Basoteve,” from which they have culled objects for sale through their gallery, such as the custom-made saddle. The new dance work provides insights into both Solorza’s creative process and his personal biography.
Basoteve is the name of a tiny town (Vega Solorza estimates a population of 113), in a deeply rural part of the state of Sinaloa, where his grandparents have a ranch and where he said that he spent every weekend growing up.
“It is quite primitive, a place where people took a piece of land and created their houses in a very humble way,” he said.
But it did have animals, including pigs and chickens — and most crucially for this new dance, horses.
“My family was a working-class family, rooted in very traditional ways, with little information about what is going on in the outside world,” he said.
Solorza explained that strict gender roles were fundamental to those traditions and included informal social rituals, among them a rite of passage for boys, from the ages of about 9 to 11, moving from adolescence to maturity. Adults would place them in the saddles of special horses — that only males were permitted to mount — where they were expected to ride and show off their emerging masculinity. (Basoteve is also the Spanish word for a saddlecloth.)
“The age at which you got on a horse varied a lot depending on the type of masculinity, energy and personality that they could see in you,” he said.
Vega Solorza does not remember his exact age when it was his turn, but he does recall that it went badly.
“The way I moved, rubbing against the saddle, the way I arched my back, was much more toward a feminine energy,” he said. “The way in which I was discovering the object was very, very feminine.”
His reactions were met with what Vega Solorza experienced as overwhelming disapproval and signals of shame. He remembers, he said, that “the family was watching and saying you can’t behave that way.”
It was, Vega Solorza said, one of those moments when gay males like himself realized they were different. “For me, there was a feeling of a displacement,” he said.
Looking back, he perceived the reaction to his ride on the horse as a subtle form of violence that invalidated the nonbinary version of gender that he embodied. It taught him that gender roles were arbitrary, assigned by society rather than assumed naturally.
“Masculinity is a thing that is artificial, that is actually completely constructed,” he said.
That experience is the root of the dance “Basoteve,” an hourlong piece that was produced in a studio and recorded on video over the past few weeks. The work starts with a 15-minute prologue featuring a solo dancer whose character represents violence. The dancer is covered in blood, in an exaggerated way that mimics the cartoon violence of horror films.
The piece goes on to feature two male dancers, wearing body suits that inflate to exaggerate their muscles, who interact physically together. Much of the movement takes place on a saddle, which appears to be two saddles joined together and facing one another. The object, made of black leather, forces the dancers’ bodies to come close to one another. The work evolves into an exploration of sexuality that veers into the homoerotic.
For now, the dance exists only as a video, though there are plans to present it live at a Mexico City theater in February. The performance will coincide with a larger exhibit at Llano’s gallery, located in Doctores, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood near the city’s downtown (and home to Arena Mexico, the venue famous for hosting lucha libre matches).
The gallery occupies a plain, rectangular space on the first floor of a 1920s textile factory that has been renovated into a hive of spaces for creative businesses and renamed Laguna. Llano plans to put more pieces on sale, including the inflatable costumes, as Llano tries to position Vega Solorza firmly in the visual arts environment.
There is precedent for the worlds of visual art and contemporary dance to overlap, Llano’s Molina noted, and that includes the landmark collaborations between the choreographer Martha Graham and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi in the mid-20th century. She invented the moves while he designed her sets.
The connection appears to be trending at the moment, with “Edges of Ailey,” an exhibit about the choreographer Alvin Ailey, running at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, through Feb. 9, and the show “Ceremonies Out of the Air,” focusing on dance maker Ralph Lemon, up at MoMA PS1 in Queens, through March 24.
Whether that translates into the commercial art market at Art Basel remains to be seen. Llano is a young gallery — it opened in November 2020, a fraught time — and this will be just its second time in Miami Beach. It is still building its global reputation, and showing an unexpected artist like Vega Solorza is part of its growth strategy, whether buyers respond with purchases or not.
“When we were accepted to Basel a second time, we went in with the philosophy of ‘let’s not think about the market and let’s think about the program and what would remain on people’s minds,’” Molina said.
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