2025 ARTISTS

Paige Cunningham Caldarella (she/her) is a dance educator, choreographer, performer, and mother whose research interests include contemporary ballet and codified modern dance techniques. She’s presented her ballet research entitled Barre Lab: Embodying Change with educator Emily Stein at NDEO, ILDEO, and CORPS de Ballet International. Caldarella joined the dance faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2022, after fifteen years on faculty at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago where she also served as the Associate Chair. During her time in Chicago, she received a Chicago Dancemakers Forum grant, DCASE Individual Artist grants, and a Teaching Excellence Award from Columbia College. In 2019, she was profiled in a cover story in the September edition of DanceTeacher magazine, an issue focused on dance in higher education. She is a 2023 Merce Trust fellow and a recent recipient of a fully sponsored artist retreat from Bearnstow in Mt. Vernon, Maine in collaboration with dance artist Mandy Salva. Caldarella performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, touring nationally and internationally, and worked with The Seldoms, Darrell Jones, Timothy Buckley, and Onye Ozuzu among others. She holds a B.F.A. from the Juilliard School and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Alfonso Cervera (He/They/Él/Elle) is a current Assistant Professor of Dance at The Ohio State University, where he shares his research interests and movement practices. Being a Queer first generation Mexican American practitioner and choreographer, his research and specialization as an artist focuses on the conversation between queerness, Ballet Folklorico, and Afro-Latine social dances in a contemporary auto-biographical embodied experience that he calls Poc-Chuc. Poc-Chuc, an emerging and inclusive dance technique developed by Cervera, weaves these techniques as a pedagogical tool to adhere to the current times and to create representation for marginalized communities. Cervera is both a founder and collaborator with Primera Generación Dance Collective located in Los Angeles, where they create works that represent Mexican American identities, corporeality, and social justice dances, that utilize a pastiche of hybrid social dances and aesthetics. Among other things, he has been awarded grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, Artist Trust in Seattle, and Department of Cultural Affairs in Los Angeles, and is now one of the four Executive Directors of Show Box L.A. 

During their residency with Dance Initiative, Cunningham and Cervera will continue developing our collaborative duet, entitled Ponzy Scheme. This work grew out of their shared desire to get in the studio and move together. Their weekly rehearsals became a cathartic ritual in which they shared sweat as well as stories of their various dance histories and training lineages. It is intended to be experimental, replicating elements of our rehearsal process and conversations while employing each of our specialties of contemporary dance (Ballet Folklorico, Release, Cunningham technique, and ballet) to build phrase work that allows our separate histories and identities to co-exist in the space.