We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Adam Castan͂eda. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Adam below.

Hi Adam, thanks for joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

When I got into the dance community in 2011, there seemed to be an established model of producing. If you had a dance company, you presented at least two dance concerts a year. One would be in the spring, and the other in the fall. Concert-style projects take place on a traditional stage, usually in a theater, and are fully produced works. Over the past twelve years, inflation has made producing dance concerts an expensive endeavor, and funding at the city, state, and national levels is still hard to come by. Many artistic directors have scaled back their rate of production. I’ve taken a different approach, especially in recent years. The life that I have built for myself is one where I want to be in a creative process at any given moment. I want to be able to wake up in the morning and know that I have at least one project that I’m choreographing or producing. While I love dance concerts created for the proscenium stage, I also know that I don’t have the funding for them. Rather, I’ve shifted my focus to site-specific work and community collaborations. For example, this fall I will be creating choreography for three projects in conjunction with initiatives from the Greater Northside Management District. I am a lifelong resident of the Near Northside, so I’m invested in fostering the performing arts in this community. I’ll be creating dances for the Management District’s Tour de Northside Festival, a Better Block project incorporating an abandoned Church’s chicken complex, and a visual art unveiling at Irvington Park. As a choreographer, I’m able to create as many dances as I want without the burden of producing concerts, and dealing with venue rentals, designer contracts, marketing, administration, and stage management. I can just create, focus on the dances, and pay myself for my work.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am the Executive and Artistic Director of The Pilot Dance Project, a non-profit arts organization with the mission to empower and transform communities through innovative dance and performing arts experiences. On the dance side of things, the professional company focuses on producing new Modern dance works from local choreographers. I also produce a robust festival program that includes the Houston Fringe Festival, Queer Fringe Houston, and the Texas Latino/a/x Contemporary Dance Festival. These platforms provide both emerging and established artists with opportunities to present their work in a professional format. These festivals are usually produced at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston (MATCH), and provide participating artists with video documentation of their work. Depending on funding, certain festival presentations come with an artist stipend.

I’m also fortunate enough to have a rich creative life outside of my own organization. In addition to dancing for The Pilot Dance Project, I am a dancer-for-hire for other choreographers. This month, I’ll be dancing in Keeley Dunham’s “Into the Shimmer,” which will be presented at Dance Source Houston’s BarnStorm Dance Fest 2023. I am also hired to choreograph in the theater world. Two of my favorite projects last year included Afsaneh Aayani’s Innominate for The Catastrophic Theatre, and Last Stop on Market Street, directed by Laura Moreno for Main Street Theater. This past spring I created movement for Cleansed, by Sarah Kane for The Catastrophic Theatre. Due to an unexpected tragedy, the play was postponed to next spring. The work was so challenging, but I loved working with directors Jason Nodler and T Lavois Thiebaud, and I think there interpretation will be loved by the Houston arts community when it opens.

I got into dance at the age of twenty-five. I started taking classes at Houston Community College the same semester I started working as an adjunct instructor in the English department. At the same time, I started writing about dance for local media outlets – that was my dance education. I absorbed so much in such a short amount of time. I stepped into my own as a creator in 2019 when I was one of Dance Source Houston’s artists-in-residence. It’s been four years of non-stop creation ever since.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I want people to fall in love with Modern dance. In our culture, there is a rather limited scope of the word “dance.” People think of ballet and the commercial dance forms, like hip-hop, Broadway, and music videos. Most people don’t really know what Modern or contemporary dance is. People often call it “interpretive dance,” which is a lay term that is not used in the dance field. I don’t like that term because all art is interpretive at some level. The beauty of Modern dance is that it speaks to human impulses that cannot be contained through narrative or expressed through words. However, that is a difficult sale. I think Modern dance requires a level of metacognitive reflection that our society doesn’t make room for. Everyone wants to be entertained. They want to get to the point immediately, and then move on to the next item to consume. Modern dance does not fit into that capitalist mode of art-making, so choreographers working in the form really have to do double duty: we not only make the work, but we’re in charge of introducing these concepts to our audience. I’m very fortunate that presenters all over the Greater Houston area frequently ask for my work. I have shown dances in Friendswood, Missouri City, the Woodlands, Midtown, the Near Northside, and anywhere people ask me to show up.

Part of my success is that I try to create dance that is enjoyable and accessible for all audiences. I draw on a lot of human emotion and everyday movement to get my audience to relate to the dance, which is almost always in an abstract form. In 2019, I started creating what I call “community dance works.” These are large-scale dances that include movers of all experience levels, including first-time performers. These works are created through choreographic tasks and improvisation tools, and, in my opinion, are some of my most beautiful, thoughtful works. Part of my work in dance is breaking down some of its elitist concepts and assumptions, which often dictate who can call themselves a dancer, and who has earned the right to be paid to dance. In these community works, everyone dances and everyone gets an honorarium for their time and commitment.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The Pilot Dance Project used to be housed in its own black-box theater space in the East End. The organization would rent its space as a service for other non-profits and independent artists to rehearse and produce their own works. We generated quite a bit of rental income, which was then used to support overhead for our artistic programming. In 2017, due to rising rents in the East End, we had to give up our lease, move out of our own space, and effectively became an itinerant dance and arts producing company. We ran our operations from a cubicle space at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston (MATCH), but we let that go at the onset of the pandemic. In order to generate income, we started to put our resources behind new festival programming. This allowed us to continue to serve the arts community with presenting opportunities, while also giving us the income to produce our own in-house dance works. Not having that rental income from our space was a definite hit, but six years and a pandemic later, we think we’ve found our footing again.

Now that we are not encumbered with our own space, we can also think outside of the box as far as producing is concerned. For example, on June 30 and July 1, The Pilot Dance Project will be premiering The Delicate Space, a new evening-length work by acclaimed choreographer Ashley Horn. The piece is an intimate dance work set on the premises of my childhood home in the Near Northside, one of the city’s historical Latinx neighborhoods. The dance will be staged as a garden part of sorts, and limited to only twenty-five audience members per showing. By thinking intimately, my team is breaking down assumptions of where professional dance can be staged and produced.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.pilotdanceproject.org
• Instagram: Instagram/thepilotdanceproject
• Facebook: Facebook.com/PilotDanceProject
• Other: Tickets for The Pilot Dance Project’s latest production, The Delicate Space: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-delicate-space-tickets-630166293347

Image Credits
All Production Photos by Lynn Lane Promotional Photos for The Delicate Space by Ashley Horn