Alicia Díaz is a dancer and professor at the University of Richmond. She studied at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, New York University, and other schools, performed all over the world as a member of various dance companies, and co-founded her own, Agua Dulce Dance Theater. Much of her work, such as her 2022 award-winning film “Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond: Women in Resistance Shall Not Be Moved,” uses movement and dance to elucidate and document the histories of racism and colonialism in her native Puerto Rico.
On March 25, she’s co-presenting “Arts for Climate Justice for Puerto Rico” at the University of Richmond. This event, a follow-up to a 2023 climate justice march and intervention, will focus on a 2024 student summer research trip to Guayama, Puerto Rico. During this trip, students researched the air and soil pollution caused by the coal-fired power plant owned by Virginia-based AES Corporation, one of the world’s leading power companies. Why UR? Because its Spider Solar Project, a solar energy project focused on lowering UR’s greenhouse gas emissions, is managed by AES.
I met with Díaz to talk about the upcoming event, but first asked how she came to be a dancer. “My mother is a dance artist,” she tells me. “I started dancing before I was born and training when I was 3 years old. In Puerto Rico, my mother had a dance studio in the lower part of our house. It’s always been in my life. My father is a professor, and so I feel like I am very much a combination of my parents. Both of them are very socially and politically minded in their work—these foundational lessons come from a family lineage.”
The blending of her inherited passion for dance, teaching, and advocacy is seen in “La sangre que sigue cantando / The Blood that Keeps Singing (2025),” a dance piece she choreographed for the University Dancers 40th Anniversary celebration last month at the Alice Jepson Theater. Dancer Brooke Gibson performs the solo piece which opens with Gibson standing before a huge projected photograph of an unprotected mountain of coal ash waste produced by the AES power plant. For most of the dance, Gibson is confined to a rectangle of projected light on the floor where paintings by Puerto Rican painter Rafael Trelles appear and disappear. With the rest of the stage in darkness, the tight, lighted area conjures the precarity of safety despite the strong, courageous choreography—the bold body saying to hell with the overpowering obstacles. In her artist statement, Díaz talks about how dance accesses the body’s knowledge, I asked her what she means by this.
“The first thing that I think about when hearing that question is that we live through our bodies,” she says. “When we are babies, we learn to push against gravity, to lift our head and look from side to side, to crawl. All of the stuff that’s called our developmental movement is yes, moving us and propelling us physically, and it also is wiring the brain itself.”
She goes on, “As someone who works with the body, there’s this clear awareness that bodies are not just neutral instruments that we use to [move]. We hold memories, we hold knowledge, both positive and negative. If I hold trauma, I also hold resilience. If I have a lineage of oppression, I also have lineages of liberation. And so how does the body manifest that when you allow it to express itself from the inside out?”
Díaz’s admiration for all kinds of knowledge, not just the body’s, is deep. She tells me, “I don’t see dance as its own kind of silo. I see it in conversation with visual art, film, and other disciplines.”
The Climate Justice for Puerto Rico project is emblematic of that. It’s co-created with another theater and dance faculty member, Patricia Herrera, as well as Mariela Méndez from the department of Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Studies and Mary Finley-Brook from the department of geography, environment, and sustainability. Díaz’s commitment to co-creation takes inspiration from dance that comes from the African diaspora like bomba and capoeira.
“In those forms there is always community. The distinction between the performer and the audience is very blurred,” she says. “Everyone participates, even if you’re not doing the physical part, you’re in a circle, you’re singing, you’re playing an instrument, or you’re just very present.”
During and following the 2023 climate event, students, faculty, and administrators discussed UR’s contract with AES, including the possibility of severing it. There were the expected conversations, negotiations, and presentations, and there were stories, rituals, dance, processions, and demonstrations. In the end, while UR did not sever the contract, it acknowledged the pedagogical value of having students work with and learn directly from the affected communities and the grassroots organizations working for change and accountability, and sponsored the 2024 summer research trip.
Negotiation, thinking and rethinking, proposing, changing approach, telling stories, and creatively positioning your demands are integral to organizing, creating solidarity, and pushing for social change. Díaz sees a direct connection between these actions and improvisation—a foundational tool in the dance she performs.
“There is deep listening that is required [with improvisation],” she says. “You have to be absolutely present in order to create, react, collaborate in the moment. There is the willingness to respond to others, to the environment—you’re not alone. You may have some preconceived ideas of what you want to do, but it all depends on who’s there, what’s happened, and what energies are formed. When thinking about social change and social justice, how do we listen to each other in those ways to create something that doesn’t yet exist? That’s what we can contribute as artists to this moment of so much turmoil and uncertainty, politically and environmentally. Art is not only a mirror of reality or a telling of something that is. It is: What else can we see? What else can we envision together?”
“Arts for Climate Justice for Puerto Rico” will take place on March 25 from 4:30-6 p.m. at the Humanities Commons on the University of Richmond campus. The event will showcase the student’s research work including a documentary (still in progress), photographs and other visual art, a podcast, and a poetry workshop.
