Miguel Gutierrez Uses Movement to Make Sense of the World

Miguel Gutierrez calls artmaking “a lifesaving project and a soul-sustainability project.” This ethos is ever present­ in his densely textured, arrestingly human works, which play with abstraction and perception to command attention and sustain connection. A maker of dances, music, drawings, and writings, the 54-year-old Gutierrez attends to the many dimensions of creativity and experimental performance. He choreographs constellations of expressive bodies: not just bodies of flesh, but bodies of sound, light, words, sensation, and emotion.

As a queer artist of color, Gutierrez describes his work as “here to affirm and give spaces of recognition to the people who need that.” He feels this need ever more deeply among his collaborators and communities today. Making dances gives him a reason to show up in the world for himself and others—it keeps him alive—and he hopes that his work might help do the same for others.

An Unruly Path

Growing up in New Jersey as a child of Colombian immigrant parents, Gutierrez came to dance through play with his sister, which allowed him to connect with his body and himself in a different way than formal dance training. “I always cite this as my introduction to improvisation, and my proto-queer liberation experience of owning my body, offering my dancing as a gift to the person I loved most,” he says.

Dance ended up steering his life in unconventional directions. After studying acrobatics, ballet, jazz, and modern dance, he tried college, but ended up in San Francisco, where he dove headlong into the city’s queer activism and the experimental performance scene. After another try at college on the East Coast, he returned to San Francisco for a job with dance-theater artist Joe Goode, whose summer workshops offered him an early creative platform. (Decades later, he did finish his college degree, becoming a member of Brown University’s class of 2021.) In California, artmaking felt like an imperative with social and political undertones. Eventually he came back to New York City, where dancing with choreographer John Jasperse exposed him to a new set of methods and values as he continued to experiment on his own and in collaboratio­n. These experiences influenced his approach to form and content in his work. “California has always represented heart and feeling and value, and New York has more to do with craft and fame and success, and I’ve always been very shaped by those different ideas converging,” Gutierrez says.

Donna Faye Burchfield, former dean of the American Dance Festival, witnessed Gutierrez’s early development in his teaching practice and creative experiments at ADF. “He was activating the edges,” she says, “and he was always thinking with and alongside others.”

Making and Sharing a Life in Dance

That commitment to experimentation and cooperation held true as Gutierrez began to make a name for himself in dance and performance art. He created works that frequently melded movement, music, and words, and continues to make work in this vein. He finds that the idio­sync­rasies of individual performers create an irreplaceable “alchemy,” as he describes it, that blooms in their movement languages, dramatic qualities, and interactions. 

“It’s in the task, it’s in getting lost in the task, it’s in the task getting lost entirely and becoming something else. It opened up a whole new way of expressing for me in my own work.” 

Laila J. Franklin, Gutierrez’s co-performer in I as another, on his process

“He works with people that are interested in surprising him,” says dramaturg Stephanie Acosta. This opens his collaborators­ to being surprised in turn. “I found a home in his work,” says longtime performer Michelle Boulé. “He gave me space to explore the depths of who I am.”

Choreographer and performer Ishmael Houston-Jones has felt renewed by the clarity and challenges Gutierrez has presented in their numerous collaborations. “He has a very strong vision,” Houston-Jones says. “He comes in with an idea and then he’s willing to mine it and transform it, allowing the performers to transform the work as well.” 

Feeling Over Form

Gutierrez has now made three decades’ worth of thematically voracious, viscerally virtuosic work. No two pieces are alike: He drew inspiration from the life and work of James Dean in Last Meadow (2009), mused widely on queer bodies and time in the three-part suite Age & Beauty (2014–15), questioned portrayals of Latinidad in This Bridge Called My Ass (2019), reckoned openly with his father’s death in Unsustainable Solutions: Duet with My Dead Dad (2019), and much more.

His work’s diversity is rooted in his unshakable authenticity.­ “You cannot categorize or hold Miguel down to one particular spot, and that continues to excite me,” says Janet Wong, associate artistic director of New York Live Arts. “The rigor of his thinking is manifested in such different vocabularies—in the physical, in text, and in music.” 

Across this broad range of expressive registers, Gutierrez’s work probes themes of painful loss and joyful rebellion, supported by a deep sense of love. “There’s always a choice where light can come through, and he’s not afraid to go through the darkness and the ugly and the disgusting and the wrong,” says Boulé. “He’s fearless.”

Though he frequently performs in his work, Gutierrez sees his dances as more than just a product or reflection of himself. “I’ve always had a mortal terror of becoming a ‘style,’ a stylized person or maker, something that’s instantly recognizable,” he says. “I’ve always just wanted to be influenced by the place I’m in and to be changed by it.”

A Purpose-Driven Future

Today, Gutierrez is based between New York City and Los Angeles, where he is an associate professor and vice chair of the MFA in Choreographic Inquiry in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Despite his steady stream of creativity, buoyed by a host of awards and commissions, he has only recently crept (or clawed) his way to relative stability. 

But the challenges of Gutierrez’s life and career, as well as the triumphs, continue to guide his working ethos of empathy and collectivity. Change is integral to his growth, says Acosta. “He doesn’t really let moss grow under his feet. He’s on the move, but it’s not really chaotic. There’s always the consistency of having sincere curiosity under it.”

Burchfield continues to track Gutierrez’s creative arc and the abiding purpose behind his work. “He’s an open source and he’s an interrupter,” she says. “He’s trying to make sense of things through dance.” And while Gutierrez and his communities face an uncertain future, “I hope that the world can sustain an artist like him who is still in evolution,” Wong says, “who is constantly revealing new sides of himself and the world to us.” 

Methods of Making in Super Nothing

Gutierrez’s most recent work, Super Nothing—touring to Seattle and Los Angeles in May and the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, in July—probes themes of grief and joy to explore modes of embodied support and survival. It’s a quartet for two New York City–based and two Los Angeles–based performers that, Gutierrez says, “is about bridging location and working methods” in his current bicoastal reality, connecting artists who draw from different lineages.

“The process felt both joyful and like deep embodied inquiry,”­ says Los Angeles–based performer Jay Carlon. “He wanted to figure out how this piece can serve the constant onslaught­ of grief, and how we can persist together in interdependence.” With this in mind, Gutierrez says he treated rehearsals as “a space of sanctuary—a protected environment where survival is implicit in who’s in the room.” 

During the Super Nothing creative process, Gutierrez says, “working with queer people and people of color in the studio, we got to determine our own world and a way of being in relation with care with each other.” The resulting piece owes its purity and vulnerability to this process. “The method is the work,” says Acosta. “He doesn’t give up on himself, and he doesn’t give up on artists.”

Speaking Out on Money in the Arts: The Are You For Sale? Podcast

Shaping a sustainable life in dance is anything but easy, and Gutierrez is no stranger to the hustles and windfalls that make it possible. As he witnessed the financial realities of the COVID-19 pandemic devastating the dance community, he decided to channel his rage and grief into research, conversations, and reflections, which eventually became his Are You For Sale? podcast. “I knew making the podcast was important because of how scared I was to make it,” he says. 

The six episodes illuminate the economic realities of artmaking by examining historical patterns and current trends in philanthropic and governmental funding structures. Gutierrez sought to question existing paradigms. “I have always been compelled by looking at how power moves and how influence and money shape our experience,” he says. 

Are You For Sale? incorporates the personal experiences and perspectives of dancers, dancemakers, scholars, funders, and policymakers. Gutierrez and his guests interrogate global funding models and air their frustrations with these systems. While they don’t come to a solution—that’s not really the point—the podcast stands as a collective exercise in generative critique.