Ohio State Dance welcomes Dr. Irvin Manuel Gonzalez (he/él/they/elle) to our faculty in autumn 2023 as a tenure-track assistant professor. Dr. Gonzalez is an artivist, scholar, community organizer, and teacher. He received his PhD in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside in 2021. Gonzalez’s scholarship analyzes how immigrant, queer, and working-class Latin American social dancers navigate hegemonic forces through feeling and creativity while situating creative constructions of/for belonging. In doing so, he examines how Latin American social dancing offers methodologies for social change, looking at how practices of resistance are embodied and embedded in the dance transmissions, dancing, and dance floors of Latine, working-class people. Gonzalez theorizes the possibility for these maneras de ser (ways of being) to inform new approaches to prison abolition work, migrant activism, and transborder belonging. He is a founding member of Primera Generación Dance Collective (PGDC) and a board member of Show Box Los Ángeles (SBLA).
As an artist, Gonzalez grounds his art approaches, strategies, and constructions in rasquachismo, a low-brow Chicanx sensibility, to generate collaborations and new potentials that upend the intended use-value of materials, connections, and being. His love for lo rasquache informs experimentation with the homegrown, minoritarian shortcuts and crafts he grew up with to develop choreographies of resistance that aid community engagement work with his collaboratives Primera Generación Dance Collective and Dancing Through Prison Walls Project. His work with these groups focuses on highlighting the complexities of Latine joy and loss in the United States, advocating for migrant rights, and dreaming of prisonless futures.
Gonzalez has had the honor of presenting work at Dance Studies Association conferences, Redcat (LA), HIGHWAYS Performance Space (LA), Kennedy Center for the Arts (DC), Bootleg Theater (LA), Dance Mission Theater (SF), Human Resources (LA), Judson Church for Movement Research (NYC), Odyssey Theatre Ensemble (LA), El Teatro Campesino (CA), and most recently at Critical Resistance in Oakland, CA. He has had the honor of serving as an Intention Foundry Fellow for the American Council of Learned Societies and is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant under Primera Generación Dance Collective.
“I’m looking forward to starting my role as a tenure-track assistant professor in dance at The Ohio State University," says Dr. Gonzalez. "I’m eager to bring in creative and scholarly research that is rooted in the working-class, Latine practices that I grew up with while adding a queer of color critical lens to center minoritarian knowledges and recruit more Latine students into higher education. In addition to this, I am invested in demonstrating how our lived experiences can offer routes to view dance as a tool for activism. I am fully convinced that the task of all dancers is to be agents of/for social change. I look forward to joining the Ohio State Dance community in order to help students highlight their potential to make a positive impact in the world through dance, strengthening connections between art and activism.”
