Overview
Dr. Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz’s research moves across the entanglements created by performance and critical dance studies, illegality and citizenship, borderlands studies, and critical phenomenology. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with a research and teaching focus on creative ethnography and (Afro)Latinx/Latin American undocumented cultural production. His writing can be found in Performance Philosophy, Theatre Research International, Dance Research Journal, and other publications. In addition to writing about performance’s role in transforming society and ideas of citizenship, he is a choreographer and dancer. Through a creative process he calls “The Expanse,” he makes bilingual performances that have been presented internationally. He’s past managing director of San Francisco’s Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers. He sits on the Board of Directors for the Dance Studies Association.
Research Focus
His first book project The Alien Commons: Choreography and Performance Beyond Citizenship analyzes performances related to immigrant experiences, emphasizing the "illegal." The book puts dance studies to work alongside queer of color critique, border feminisms, and disability studies to flesh out an understanding of belonging that is orthogonal to binary immigrant re-capacitation narratives that animate advocacy campaigns. It offers a sustained account of choreographers’ and dancers’ illegalized and shamed experiences in the growing and unceasing popular and critical discussions about undocumented cultural production, which favor literature and visual art. Rather than reclaim qualified forms of citizenship through calls for inclusion, assimilation, and re-capacitation with the aim of naturalization to get back in line, the artists animating the book are exemplar of the hope to be found in a mobilized sense of belonging: the alien commons. Artists featured in the book teach alien and citizen alike to decode movement on and off stage that oppresses despite being framed as liberating.
His second book project, Performing the Digital Border, fleshes out the terrains of new bordering technologies and their lively performative function, intertwining with the notion of the border as territorial and symbolic construction. This interdisciplinary book examines various performances (theatrical, social media, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality) to highlight and challenge the increased digitalization of border security and immigrant enforcement measures giving rise to an emergent culture of complete but silent movement surveillance and tracking. New control mechanisms manifest through fingerprinting technologies, artificial intelligence in border video surveillance, phone digital applications for asylum requests, facial recognition at airport screenings, citizenship NFTs, and access to (im)migrants’ social media accounts upon entry. All of these examples of escalating digital borders are performative utterances, or what he terms digital performatives.
As a choreographer, he produces and choreographs bilingual multimedia dance theater performances with the belief that the intersection of contemporary dance theater and social justice makes us think and move in more inclusive ways. His productions feature a fusion of (Afro)Latinx dance forms such as cumbia, bachata, hip hop, and salsa with Euro-American improvisational scores, contemporary concert dance, ballet, and release technique. His creative process has been presented throughout Mexico, Ireland, Serbia, England, and California.
He’s been a resident artist for venues such as the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (Tallahassee), FRESH Festival (San Francisco), Alfredo Zalce Contemporary Art Museum (Morelia, MX), 5 Acre Farm (England), STATION-Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade, Serbia), Zenon Dance Company (Minneapolis), and Sugar Space Arts Center (Salt Lake City).
He is the co-founder of both A PerFarmance Project and Dance Cloud. PerFarmances are site-specific collaborations between farmers and performers researching the concept of food security and labor from rural and urban perspectives. DanceCloud.org is a community of dance practitioners and researchers digitally sharing the places they explore and promoting an embodied way to think about the digital space around us. Also, he was a founding member of the Salt Lake-based improvisational dance company Movement Forum (aka MoFo).
He's had the pleasure of dancing for/with NAKA Dance Theater, Molly Heller, Dance Koester Dance Company, and Stephen Brown Dance Theater. He's appeared in works by Ronald K. Brown, Tandy Beal, Lindsey Drury, Eileen Rojas, Eloy Barragan, Eric Handman, Olga Pona, Jo Blake, John Jasperse, and Andy Noble.
For over a decade, he was part of the group Speak Your Piece... of Mind. Speak was a bias awareness troop that used forum theater, in the style of Augusto Boal, as a means of developing scenes that spoke to racism, sexism, and any other systemic inequalities. The group traveled to different schools and community centers locally and nationally.
Publications
"Choreographing Deportation in David Herrera's TOUCH." Dance Research Journal. Volume 56 , Issue 1 , April 2024 , pp. 20 - 35.
"Love and Theft in Dance Economies." Performance Philosophy 8 (2). 223-48. 2023.
“Forensic Performances: Searching for Justice in NAKA Dance Theater’s BUSCARTE: Duet,” Theatre Research International. 2022. 40 (1). pp 46-62.
“Pleasure in Circulation: Erotic Power on the Migrant Road to Amarillo,” Investigaciones en Danza y Movimiento, 2020, (v.2, n.3, July-December 2020, pp. 2-17)
“Violence and Performance Research Methods: Direct-Action, ‘Die-ins,’ and Allyship in the Black Lives Matter era.” Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact. Eds. Bruce Barton and et al. New York: Routledge, 2018. 311-332.
“The Global Graduate: Graduating in the Time of the Global University,” with Lisa Skwirblies, In International Performance Research. Eds. Sruti Bala et Al. Cham: Palgrave, 2017. 83-94.
“Choreographic Mobilities: Embodied Migratory Acts Across the US-Mexico Border,” In Attending to Movement: Somatic Perspectives on Living in this World. Eds. Sarah Whatley, Natalie Garrett Brown, Kirsty Alexander. Devon: Triarchy Press, 2015. 62-74.
Invited Book Reviews
2023 “To Feel and to Move: Tracing the Borders of Dance Studies and Refugee Studies” Dance Chronicle, 46(3), 271–273.
2021 “Moving Otherwise: Dance, Violence, and Memory in Buenos Aires by Victoria Fortuna” Investigaciones en Danza y Movimiento, August 2021.
In the news
LSP Courses - Spring 2025
- LSP 3215 : Performance and Immigration:Staging the Migrant, Alien, and Refugee in and outside the US