by Shermakaye Bass
Photography by Barton Wilder Custom Images

The diminutive dancer with the big schedule glides around the Wooten Elementary School cafeteria in North Austin, where twenty recent-immigrant grade-schoolers trail her movements and follow her bilingual commands-learning, in the process, the basics of geometry, language, biology, even physics and chemistry. Later that day, Bravo floats across the wooden floor at the Episcopal Seminary, rehearsing her upcoming duet with Sharon Marroquin, Huellas en el Agua (Footprints on Water). Still later, she dashes over to Ballet Austin's dance academy to teach children's and adult classes. Finally, usually long after dark, Bravo flies away home, where she may or may not get a full night's sleep.

It's all in a day's work for Toni Bravo, born Maria Antonieta Bravo in Mexico City.

Another twenty-four-hour period might find her at Johnston High School, leading a program sponsored by Ballet East Dance Theatre, where she directs outreach educational programs. Or it might find her brainstorming with dancer and choreographer Anuradha Naimpally about their collaborative dance-theater-music piece, Vruksha: The Mystical Tree, to be performed this summer in Toronto. Or it might have her working late into the night, alone, on details for a project for Kinesis Dance Theatre System, the multidisciplinary production company Bravo founded in 1991. That same, insane workday might demand that she put finishing touches on choreography for a play or an opera.

Bravo, arguably the hardest working woman on Austin's dance scene, is something like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady: She could've danced all night. She's like Brigitta in Sound of Music: She flits, she floats, she fleetly flees, she flies....

For her efforts, Austin Chronicle readers voted Bravo "Best Choreographer of the Year" in 1998, 1999 and 2000; and in 2001, the Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce gave her a Community Service Award in the Arts category. That's just the tip of the iceberg that is Bravo's career, her love, her life. The dancer, choreographer and educator has taught or performed around the country, as well as around the world (Germany, Israel, Mexico, Costa Rica, Spain), crossing borders and sashaying past boundaries.

So, Bravo, Toni.

Toni is probably one of the most prolific dance-makers in this community, hands down," says Phyllis Slattery, who met Bravo in the late nineteen-eighties and who has been director of Dance Umbrella since 1987. "I'm amazed at the number of people that she comes into contact with on a daily basis. I have a great reverence for her. She's like one of the nuns from my (Catholic) school."

Bravo certainly doesn't look like a nun. The tiny danseuse is stylish in black, the color she and her mother have worn since last April to honor Bravo's deceased father. But her mourning attire (it is more of an homage to her papa, during the traditional year's mourning in Mexico) consists of a chic gabardine blazer, slacks, turtleneck, dainty pearl earrings and a teensy black backpack. Her dark eyes are huge and run deep. Especially when she speaks of dance, theater, art-a composite world that, to Bravo, is spirit, soul, knowledge and religion all rolled into one.

In that sense, Bravo is rather nun-like: She has a profound regard for humanity and nature, and incorporates that into her art. Without sounding too cheesy or lofty, she speaks of the mythic side of life as expressed by ancient cultures like the Sumerian, or by twentieth-century writer-philosophers like Joseph Campbell. Bravo believes in an innate connectivity, a global camaraderie that, when sought, lays claim to all people. As she sees it (and more famous men and women have said it), everyone has the need to move, to migrate, merge, connect, transcend.

For Bravo, borders are made for crossing and rules are made for breaking. This reveals itself in her work, whether she is pushing genres and cultural stereotypes with her choreography or helping high school kids find a safe haven for their creativity. This spring and summer, Bravo is choreographing and/or dancing in at least three different pieces based on profound abstractions-concepts such as alternate realities, multiple permeable borders and organic, genderless entities.

Last month, with Marroquin she performed the Huellas duet, which dealt with crossing borders. Her piece with Naimpally, Vruksha, based loosely on the tree of life, will be performed this summer in Toronto and again in Austin next fall. And Kinesis' ambitious, yet unnamed piece, which deals with amorphous realities and entities, will be staged the first weekend in May at the Boys and Girl's Club of Austin and at the Episcopal Seminary in Hyde Park.

As Dance Umbrella's Slattery has said, "Her work is unlike anyone else's aesthetically. She's kind of like one of those things you blow in the wind…a dandelion, yes. As an audience person, she's mysterious to me. Her work is very ephemeral, and in a way I want to grab it and say, 'Don't be ephemeral!'"

Asked to elaborate, Slattery says, "The way she deals with content, for me, is not always accessible. But there's also something very lucid about it. I float around it. Sometimes she'll put up something and I don't really know what she's saying. And so I wonder, Is that her quest-the articulation of what she's communicating? Or is it simply to put these questions out there?"

Bravo's style of dancing possesses an ambiguity, an androgyny even. It's a blend of modern, balletic and dance-theatre, usually with a nonlinear narrative and a faint Latin flavor. She often punctuates her fluid, feminine lines with sudden, precise and slightly masculine gestures-a perfect synthesis of yin-yang (and an accurate reflection of her philosophical views about integration). Bravo is alluring and sensual but not exactly sexy. She is, for lack of a better phrase, a holistic dancer.

"I would say that Toni blends a mixture of styles, or fuses them, into her own language," says Marroquin. "I think that you could say that her pieces-or recent ones-are grounded in very particular ideas that inspire her to then create something that, while not completely abstract, is definitely abstract enough that different people see different things in it."

No doubt about it, Bravo is a woman who likes to dance the line between static and fluid, hither and yon, what we see versus what we imagine. If Bravo believes that art is the manifestation of the artist's dream-life-and thus the inner life of the world itself, the collective unconscious-then she believes that movement in particular is the ideal vehicle for expressing, and apprehending, the ephemeral.

Perhaps through movement, we can best grasp the spiritual. Through movement, borders and barriers do indeed crumble.

Bravo herself says it best when describing the piece with Marroquin, Footprints on Water. "It's a Biblical reference, walking on water, but it's really a reference to women who cross borders: the physical borders between countries, intellectual borders, even spiritual borders. It's about the fact that when you cross a physical border, you can't stop there. You have to move to other ones-social, cultural. All the borders must be crossed then."

As heady as that sounds, Bravo strives to bring those sorts of complex notions to a digestible level when she teaches grade-school kids as part of Ballet Austin's "Leaps and No Bounds" program, which the company calls curriculum-based movement that integrates academic, cultural and social information. Example: One morning in January after two, forty-five-minute classes at Wooten Elementary, Bravo points out that she has touched on very complex concepts with the first-through-third graders.

While asking the children to join her in imitating the movements of plants and animals in specific environments-the rain forest, the tundra, the desert-she incorporates basic elements of chemistry and biology, such as photosynthesis. "What do we use trees for," she asks the kids in Spanish. They respond, "paper, houses, furniture, tables." Then she explains that plants also give off a "substancia chemica"-oxygen, which is what humans breathe. Conversely, she tells them that people breathe out a substance that helps the plants to grow.

After class, flushed and pleased with the progress, she says, "If I ever get my dream to have several schools doing the whole program with first-, second- and third-graders, by the time they're in the third grade, they will know a lot more about their bodies, how to talk about math and geometry, how to relate to ideas of shapes, how to appreciate the environment, and how to understand spatial relationships."

Bravo! movement is more stream-of-thought than a linear type of logic," Bravo explains later, while taking a late lunch at Texas French Bread, near the offices of Ballet Austin. "In a lot of music, in symphony or opera, you have to have an intro, you have to have an overture...In dance, you can start anywhere. In dance, it's gotten to where anything is accepted almost."

Bravo's long-time colleague, Rodolfo Mendez, artistic director of Ballet East Dance Theatre, describes her style of dance as "avant-garde with structure."

From an early age, Bravo knew that movement was her nature-although years ago, while completing her bachelor's degree in chemistry at Mexico City's Universidad Iberoamericana, she couldn't have anticipated where it would take her. In the mid-seventies, love of movement would propel her into the Ballet Classico Setente, the little sister company to Mexico's Ballet Folklorico, followed by a stint in the student academy of England's Royal Academy of Dance.

But in 1979 her love of movement would compel her to cross her first major physical border, when she moved to the United States.

When Bravo left Mexico to dance in Urbana-Champagne, Illinois, then Memphis, Austin, New York and Houston-she figured she would incorporate dance and dance theater into her pursuit of academia. Eventually, she settled back in Austin with her then-husband, whom she'd met at university in Mexico and who had started a career in Austin. In 1987 at the University of Texas, Bravo took her master's degree in theater history and criticism, with a minor in dance pedagogy. She was working toward a PhD when, in 1989, for her dissertation, Bravo took an internship at Pina Bausch's Tanztheatre Company in Wuppertal, West Germany. There, she also taught at the Folkwangschule (a performing arts college) and the Werden Gymnasium. Soon, the dancer realized that the cerebral and bureaucratic strictures of academia would never satisfy her.

"I didn't want to write about it, I wanted to do it." she explains.

When she returned to the States from Germany, Bravo bid adieu to academia once and for all, and struck out to explore movement in all its facets-metaphysical and physical. Looking back, she observes that dance was always her destiny. Dance and education.

"Movement was a way of relating to the planet-more than (for) other kids maybe," she says. "I was the girl who wanted to climb the tree, who had to move. I was the kinetic one."

After school every afternoon, Bravo says that she, her cousins and siblings, and her mother and father would put on records and dance. And when her need to express herself through dance was reinforced by a ballet teacher at her elementary school, Bravo knew she had found her niche.

"I was always fascinated by this (discovery) of not only being able to do what I enjoyed, which was moving, but to be able to do it in an acceptable way, a formal way. And people would recognize you and admire you. You always had attention!" She giggles. "Most kids get into trouble for moving. But I got praised!"

Throughout her adult career, Bravo has been praised. But she also has been criticized. For all her good work and commitment and her big heart and philosophy, there have been times when Bravo has set herself apart, whether intentionally or unintentionally. "She's kind of a lone wolf," one observer says. "I think she is very self-contained, but I also think she has been isolated sometimes because of that. Maybe it's just that she's always so busy."

If her dance style has made her different, Bravo also concedes that she has occasionally been criticized by Latino artists for being too experimental, too nontraditional. (Too New York, too European, too Anglo, perhaps?) Sometimes pushing boundaries can be misconstrued as elitism or misinterpreted as a renunciation of one's own roots. It happens to almost all artists who aspire to go beyond what they grew up knowing.

For instance, after rehearsal for Huellas en el Agua, Marroquin discusses the multi-scene piece and what it says about women. "We're not only talking about Mexican women or Latin American women, but (saying) that transitions and crossings happen with everyone...When Toni first came here, other Latin artists would ask her or berate her, criticize her and say, 'Why aren't you doing Latino art instead of modern dance?'" Marroquin concludes that the question becomes, "How can you be an artist and a woman of a certain origin and honor that origin without bowing to stereotypes?"

Bravo's response has always been that she is expressing herself-period. Which leads to another characteristic of Bravo's: she does express herself. She not only creates what she's feeling, but also says what she thinks. In 1999 and 2000, that trait brought a shift in how she produces her work and for whom, when Bravo became frustrated with the City of Austin Arts Commission and its funding process. Bravo was not the only one to complain about the criteria for funding.

"With the Arts Commission, different things that she criticized about the panel and how it works created some problems for her," says Ballet East's Rodolfo Mendez. She felt, as Mendez does, that "the panel doesn't seem to judge you on your artistic merit or how stable the organization is. It's who you know. It's favoritism, and it happens all over the country, not just in Austin."

The upshot for Bravo was that she chose not to apply for city funding anymore. Which seems to suit her Kinesis Dance Theatre System and its offshoot, Diverse Space, whose core members include Bravo, dancers Bao Khang Luu, Tony Cusimano and MariJayd O'Connor (and in the spring performance will include Marroquin, Naimpally and Kermit Allen).

"Diverse Space is very concerned with the issues of diversity, ethnicity and the idea of going to any space and being able to share it and show it and just do it," Bravo says. "The biggest problem about being an artist is how to share your art with your audience. If you're going to go for the formal thing of, it's a concert and it's a venue and it's a microphone and it's a seating arrangement, (then) it's expensive to produce that sort of situation. And then, if you want money, you are measured by city contracts as to how your product was and how much publicity you have and how many people are in your audience. The parameters become everything but the art! And we are tired of that."

In essence, that's what Bravo said when she criticized the Arts Commission panel. With or without the funding, she's still working crazy hours each week. And in a poetic but unfortunate way, taking the non-city-subsidized, less-politicized path dovetails with Bravo's sensibilities. She doesn't function inside a particular system or a community.

"When she found it unfair, she called it unfair," says Phyllis Slattery. "She called it unfair to the panel and to the (City) Council-and she didn't do it in a sloppy way; she did it in a professional manner. After she did that, she didn't go and bitch and bitch so they'd give her more money. She bitched about it, but she didn't want the money anymore. She doesn't apply for city funding now. It's kind of like, 'Excuse me, screw you. I'll do it without you.' And she has. There's a terrific stubbornness about Toni, but she's also very sophisticated...Over the years, she has unflinchingly kept on her path. I really am in awe of her."

That path has evolved over the years. And the road has taken her to places far and near. In addition to leading her across the ocean, it has taken her across many borders on this continent: Bravo has been invited to teach or perform at the Instituto de Bellas Artes in Matamoros, Mexico; the Festival Internacional de Arte de Mujeres in Costa Rica; the University of Colorado in Boulder; the Instituto Cultural Mexicano in San Antonio; and the Festival de la Frontera in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. She has worked with, or still works with, the Austin Housing Authority, the Political Asylum Project of Austin and the Austin Police Department's DARE (drug abuse resistance education) Program.

Synonymous with kinesis, her path involves art, spirituality, knowledge, humanity, opportunity, respect of things organic and unknown, of things "other." Any lengthy conversation with Bravo will invariably include those ideas. As she has said of her marriage of movement and education: "It's not about the money," exhibiting a wry sense of humor and self-deprecation. "This is not my profession. It's not my job. It's not my career. It's the way I'm made. It's not what I do, it's who I am."

And yet, there is a vague yearning in her that comes out in rare self-revealing moments. She seems to yearn for something that doesn't exist, or that is intangible and which used to exist many, many years ago, and may again one day.

"I think there was a time in which spirituality and knowledge were all one thing," Bravo says. "There are some people, cultures, for whom life is religion and religion is life. And it's not so integrated-it's just you. Sometimes I feel like maybe it's a good idea to go back to that state."

Bravo.

Dancing around issues as far-flung as Jungian philosophy and arts in the public schools, Bravo profiler Shermakaye Bass aspired to keep time with the consummate cerebral dancer, activist and instructor-and learned some new "steps" in the process.