Video Credit: "Film + Edit by Jenna Maslechko
Artist Statement:
I identify first and foremost as a person that makes dances. My dances, like me, are hybrid creatures: part classical, part improvisational, and personal. I was trained in Western ballet in Los Angeles and New York City. Yet, these canonical movements map differently on my body, a body that has been underrepresented in the canon. I make modifications, bend rules, and break them, as I search for movement that feels authentic, and I innovate inside the dominant paradigm. This is a gift that immigrant voices give to the field. We revamp the rules and interrogate the forms, in order to bring together multiple histories on our bodies.
Born in the Philippines and raised in California, my desire to create is an obsession that keeps me alive, engaged, and helps me belong inside this challenging world. I find companions along this path and we co-exist through collaboration, care, support, solving problems, and engaging in creative dialogue. My work draws from and brings awareness to the movement of each of our everyday lives. I marvel at our innate ability to reach, walk, stand, and gesture and am inspired by the empathy that forms between people who share space.
As a dance maker, I offer artists the opportunity to work in a multitude of ways regarding how form and improvisation can help support movement manifestation, studio practice, and performance. My work as an artist invites processes that encourage the collective experience of the group to help shape the content of the work. At the core of my creativity and pedagogy, I want to conjure an awareness about what it means to have a body. And to remind people that dance is a vital part of living, breathing, bleeding, sweating, mourning, and celebrating our time as temporary residents of this planet.
My interests are vast: from the limits of representation, post-migratory identity, the depths of our contemporariness, imperfection, queerness & desire, loneliness, ceaseless liminality, and my endless desire to make everlasting art, I strive to make the invisible visible. I want to be a representative of the dance world for my communities and to represent my communities in dance, casting my work as an extension of them. I want to be living proof that a little, brown, middle-class, queer, immigrant man existed and tackled the complexities of navigating a place in Western dance.
- Norbert L. De La Cruz III
Born in the Philippines and raised in California, my desire to create is an obsession that keeps me alive, engaged, and helps me belong inside this challenging world. I find companions along this path and we co-exist through collaboration, care, support, solving problems, and engaging in creative dialogue. My work draws from and brings awareness to the movement of each of our everyday lives. I marvel at our innate ability to reach, walk, stand, and gesture and am inspired by the empathy that forms between people who share space.
As a dance maker, I offer artists the opportunity to work in a multitude of ways regarding how form and improvisation can help support movement manifestation, studio practice, and performance. My work as an artist invites processes that encourage the collective experience of the group to help shape the content of the work. At the core of my creativity and pedagogy, I want to conjure an awareness about what it means to have a body. And to remind people that dance is a vital part of living, breathing, bleeding, sweating, mourning, and celebrating our time as temporary residents of this planet.
My interests are vast: from the limits of representation, post-migratory identity, the depths of our contemporariness, imperfection, queerness & desire, loneliness, ceaseless liminality, and my endless desire to make everlasting art, I strive to make the invisible visible. I want to be a representative of the dance world for my communities and to represent my communities in dance, casting my work as an extension of them. I want to be living proof that a little, brown, middle-class, queer, immigrant man existed and tackled the complexities of navigating a place in Western dance.
- Norbert L. De La Cruz III
Upcoming:
2025
January 23, 2025
Live Performance
MOVE(NYC) Performs Repertoire
The International Association of Blacks in Dance Festival
Pittsburgh, PA
Live Performance
MOVE(NYC) Performs Repertoire
The International Association of Blacks in Dance Festival
Pittsburgh, PA
Universal Ballet Competition Tour
2/14-2/15: Austin, TX
3/14-3/16: Atlanta, GA
4/11-4/13: Pittsburgh, PA
4/25-4/26: Houston, TX
universalballetcompetition.com
2/14-2/15: Austin, TX
3/14-3/16: Atlanta, GA
4/11-4/13: Pittsburgh, PA
4/25-4/26: Houston, TX
universalballetcompetition.com
April 21 - May 9, 2025
Creative Residency/New Work
St. Louis Dance Theater
(St. Louis, MO)
Creative Residency/New Work
St. Louis Dance Theater
(St. Louis, MO)
May 19-30 2015
Creative Residency/New Work
Pegasus Contemporary Ballet
Dallas, TX
Creative Residency/New Work
Pegasus Contemporary Ballet
Dallas, TX
June 22-July 17, 2025
Trentino Music Festival Young Arts Program
Pier Dance Group
Trentino, Italy
More info Here
trentinomusicfestival.org/project/dance/
Trentino Music Festival Young Arts Program
Pier Dance Group
Trentino, Italy
More info Here
trentinomusicfestival.org/project/dance/
July 21-Aug 5, 2025
Creative Residency/New Work
Repertory Dance Theatre
Salt Lake City, Utah
Creative Residency/New Work
Repertory Dance Theatre
Salt Lake City, Utah
FALL 2025
October 10-19 2025
Creative Residency/New Work
Vassar College
NY
Creative Residency/New Work
Vassar College
NY