Aggie Almanac; Brazilian Dances and a Formal Entrance

In this out-of-the-way gym on the NMSU campus, a transforming cultural exchange is about to take place. Elusa Santos has traveled to Las Cruces from her home country of Brazil, where she is an expert in local dance styles. My home state is a spirit of Santos, to the north of Rio de Janeiro. And I grew up in Vitoria, was born and grew up in Vitoria, the capital city of a spirit of Santos. It's an island. Very attached to the continent, though, you may not feel like you're on an island, but it's an island. Beautiful beaches, a lot of energy, but also a spirit of Santos has a lot of mountains, so you stretch your right arm, you touch the ocean, you stretch your left arm, you touch the mountains. It's a very narrow state. If you look at the map, Rio de Janeiro and a spirit of Santos, they're both narrow and small.

And yeah, there's a lot of energy out there. People outside, and the sun is shining, a lot of the beach, people are just playing soccer and doing everything else. And like Santos, they also dance a lot. This is not her first time in this area. Still very nice and tall. I came here in September. September, September, 2008, with the company Latina Dance Project. I am a co-founder of that company, and we did a residency here, taught, lectured, performed. And she loved the experience. She loved the students. When I taught here, there was a wonderful, beautiful engagement between me and the students. I just loved the students here. I don't think I would have come back if I didn't like the students. They excite me. They engagement. They're energy. So really, that's why I'm back. There may be a passivity, or yes, you learn. And you know, you're there in a class learning, going through a dance floor, doing the movements. But then there is the, just, it's a learning environment.

He, I feel like there is more than just a learning environment. There is a full involvement. It's the body, it's the soul. It's the, all that interest that's with passion, not just the learning interest, but passion. So that's the difference here. We really are passionate about what they're learning. Excited, and then they show you a smile, and they keep you after class. This time, Santos is here to take part in another NMSU project called the Pan American Dance Institute. We want to expand our knowledge of other cultures. Kirsten Avelar was recently hired as its director. And she says the whole idea of the organization, which was founded last year, is to build dance exchange programs across the Americas. We brought in a Brazilian artist, Alusa Santos, to come and share this week. We're wanting to bring in artists to share with the community here in Las Cruces. I'll pass one. And we're, as well, we're wanting to send out our dance companies here at the university throughout the Americas.

So really to build an exchange among the Americas. The institute was thrilled to bring this somewhat larger than life dancer to town to interact with students and anyone else who wanted to learn about Brazilian beat dance. Santos is as qualified and experienced as you can get, with a degree in physical education from Brazil, a bachelor and master's of fine arts from Arizona State University, and even a PhD in dance from Texas Women's University. Her research focuses on the cultural origins of contemporary Brazilian concert dance styles. Are we ready here? Okay, let's move. Today, she's here to teach this group several very current and popular Brazilian dances, starting with the Samba. I think the idea behind the Samba is have fun, have, you know, blast. But the movement idea behind the Samba, there's a lot of hip movement and fast footwork. We're doing Samba.

Do you know that? Samba is the popular national dance of Brazil. I'm from Brazil. We're doing some Samba. Now, Samba really is a macrocosm, there are lots of different types of Samba, including the Basanova. You have heard of Basanova, right? It's a branch of Samba, Samba mixed with cool jazz, Basanova. You got Samba Raga, you know, in Brazil, yeah, Samba Raga. You have Samba that we do during carnival, the Samba of the avenues. We have ballroom style Samba, Samba dig a fiata, and other styles. But she begins with the most basic Samba dance, popular at parties in Brazil or at Carnival and other celebrations. Like a little crossing, cross, cross, circle that little hill there, hill.

Now, a little bit up here, hip movement. She takes the students through the steps with a kind of passion. It's like you're killing the cockroach, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, okay, five, six, seven, three, go, all one, and two, and three, and four. Getting the idea? Well, it begins to pick up an intensity. It's easy, it's easy, it's a big jump, jump, jump, see, hips, hips, hips, hips, hips, hip movement, guys, okay, all right. As some of the steps are designed more for women, others for men.

The guys do this a lot, oh, oh, oh, oh, this is really a guys Samba step, can we double time it, here we go, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, that's a guys step, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. That's the really fun Samba, but there's a ballroom form of the dance too. Samba is done in a social style, in a ballroom style, in Brazil, in the place of Samba. It's called Samba de Gafieda. Gafieda is the place, the house, or the night club, where you go to dance Samba with a partner. So many people will say, do you know how to dance a Gafieda? Well, nobody can dance a Gafieda because it's a building, can't dance a building, but it's Samba de Gafieda, it's Samba of that type of place. And it's done with a partner and a bit more formally.

The women will step back with the right, in front with the left, back, in front, back, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, there you go. In the toilet, five, six, seven, eight, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop. It's going to get a bit of a fine everywhere. And finally, a Brazilian dance step that's been catching on with the youth of that country. Fahar is very simple. However, I have to say this is part of the cultural environment for the Fahar.

Fahar has all the freedom in the world for the way you position your body. See, this has been done by the young people, and they are really doing what they want to do with it. Okay, so let's say, give me your hand, the girl, and you can have the, it's very close and really you dance cheek to cheek. So, yes, it's well cuddly, even romantic. You got it. Simple, isn't it? Simple and fun, which is why it's so popular with young people. I think it's great having Elusa Santos here. She just opens up your spirit, you know, you're in class,

and you feel like you're in Brazil, you feel like you're in the clubs, and people's house is just dancing, and she really takes away that wall from teacher and student. She just breaks down that wall and she just lets you feel the dance in the movement. It was a lot of fun, I've never done much social dancing, and I really like Lulu's style, and she really made it a lot of fun for me. It's great. Especially the Samba. The Samba that they do over there is a lot different down here, the second Samba we did. It's the one that we're more used to here because it's more of a bar room style. It's a dance with a partner. The one that she tossed first was more of a dance by herself with a group of people, which is really cool, and glad I got to learn that. This class really helped me out to let loose, to figure out the rhythm, to combine it with a partner, and to exclusively do wall room, to help us back in what we do in dance work with our Samba, and just being in tune with our partner, and just having fun. It dances all about having fun as much as learning about technique and form, and this class really was very beneficial.

Besides the instructor, she really made it feel very comfortable to follow her, and just to have fun, and overall enjoy different types of dances from over the world, especially Brazil. Open, open, right. Gosh, dance is life. This is rhythm. Do you live with all rhythm? The heartbeat, movement, effervescence, it's in you, it's your pause. People should dance because they're living. Ah! For the newcomer arriving at New Mexico State University, which way is in?

There is of course the entrance at the East End of University Avenue that leads into the Pan American Center, and all those exciting sports and cultural events. At the western end, one enters campus amid farm animals and agricultural fields. In between, there's a spina leading to the horseshoe and beyond, and Jordan Street, which dead ends at the student center. The fact is, for the first time visitor to campus, there's no obvious doorway, a place that says you have arrived at NMSU. There's lots of ways in, and that's the problem. There's no priority, there's no clarity, nobody knows where to go when they arrive. And it's really a challenge for the first time visitor, and even an occasional user to kind of figure the university out and find a proper way to engage it. Steve Gift is with an architectural firm that helped NMSU draw up its new master plan that regents OK'd two years ago. He and his team are back, and at this cozy public hearing, getting public input on one of the signatures of that plan, a formal entrance to campus. He told this small but focused group that while the campus itself has some incredible assets, the casual pass or buy might never know it.

Much of it is very negative. Greenhouses from the south, what almost looks like public housing on parts of the interstate, just not a really great presentation of an institution of this quality. To make matters worse, he says university avenue itself does not currently lend itself as a welcome mat to the university. On the university side of the street, there are walls, hedges and buildings, even museums like this one with no way in from the street. What we finally decided to call this, it was like two people sharing space, but with their backs turned to one another. The city was looking inward towards itself, the university inward towards itself, and there was no kind of embracing or reaching across the street in a productive handshake. And if the university has no entrance, says gift, it also has no defined center either. Some people think of the horseshoe as a kind of central place, but gifts says students tell him it's not. Decades ago, when Milton Hall was the student union, it helped define a center of sorts, which has since been lost in asphalt and parking lots.

It's these factors that drove university planners to come up with what they think is the best place for a university front door, one that would lead to a newly defined campus heart and also help it turn outward to the city. Jordan Street. So the two things came together around this kind of central lawn and what we call the Jordan Street entrance for the university. And that became a really powerful concept that combined with the notion of creating a town gown scene that was really representative of the university's potential in its future. Here's the vision. It's just a drawing right now, an idea. It's a definition of the university avenue, Jordan Street intersection with a divided entrance to the campus flanked by mixed use buildings with retail services at street level and housing located above. But the notion here is that if this is university avenue, and this is Jordan Street, as we know it today, that by creatively kind of combining housing and commercial space on the street, perhaps long term or the parking deck of visitor center, student services, and they already in place assets of this center, the library and other assets of the university that people from the community are encouraged to visit.

That we could really make the university accessible and understandable. The new entrance would change the whole nature of university avenue, making it more pedestrian friendly. Urban for some people is not entirely good word, but certainly more of a town street with less presence or less dominance of the automobile, a real pedestrian environment with traffic calming measures, landscape planning to kind of isolate the pedestrian. From the car, make the car slow down by virtue of it, a median as a position of refuge for people trying to cross the street. Anchoring the whole project, a Barnes & Noble bookstore. The private company has already taken over the operation of the campus bookstore.

In the new development, the bookstore would be front and center, designed to bring in pedestrian traffic, and ultimately other shops and restaurants that would make university avenue a destination of choice for students, and everyone else in the community. The idea here is to embrace the street, not to retreat from it, not to put the car in front of it, not to offer up the university as a collection of parking lots and service docs. But to really put the better stuff of the university, the best face, if you will, out on the street and to meet the town and the visitors, and the student life of the university in a very productive way, out on the street in a way that's engaging. And since under this plan, the university will be reaching out to the city, the city in turn finds itself obligated to do likewise and hug the university back, which is easier said than done. Because in 1992, when the university was still looking inward and not outward, the city resowned its side of university avenue, in a way that makes it difficult for developers to establish pedestrian friendly businesses along the street today.

To point out some of the existing problems and get input on how to resolve them, city and university planners held a walking tour along university avenue for residents. The participants were asked, as they made observations, to make notes on colored post-its, dealing with issues like safety, mobility, enjoyment, and comfort, things that really matter to pedestrians. As the group set out on this inner city hike, people immediately identified problems, like all the traffic and the noise, poorly maintained sidewalks, and barriers to buildings on the north side of the street. These are kind of the moat as it's been referred to. Students complained there's not much on the north side of the street to attract them, and crossing the street is a hazard. Students are known for darting across university avenue mid-block outside of crosswalks, making this stretch of roadway one of the deadliest for pedestrians and bikers in the city. Much of the northern side of the street is devoted to residential housing, a neighborhood that is not doing particularly well, apartment buildings with worn facades, unkept structures, a couple of churches.

The reason for all this? The old city zoning rules we mentioned earlier. We have our six areas, and within each of these areas, there are a list of allowed land uses, which vary quite a bit from one area to the next. For example, in area one, it's all different commercial uses, whereas in area two, it's primarily residential and limited office uses. One of the things that we're looking at as part of this plan revision is what land uses should be allowed where, in order to create the kind of corridor that we want. In terms of being pedestrian friendly with destinations and things like that, balancing that against not wanting to generate a tremendous amount of automobile traffic only. Even this newer development of retail shops, anchored by kinkos, is geared more for cars than pedestrians.

The door to Kiva Juice ought to be right here. I ought to be able to walk right in. One reason for that huge divide is a city zoning rule requiring all structures here be set back 20 feet from the right away. See, this is what we don't like about the existing requirements for setback, give you front door parking instead of, yeah. Whereas I would love that bank as pretty as it is to be right here. The city is thinking about changing the setback requirement because businesses want them to. This new development, centered around a Starbucks, was only possible because it was granted a variance from the zoning setback law. This is, I think, the only place that specifically tried to orient toward the street. Now, we have, because this property was in the floodplain, it had to be elevated a bit.

And so we have a wall that kind of runs down, but it does have several access points across the top. This development had to get a variance actually because it's not 20 feet back from the right away. So they had to go through the committee and to the Planning and Zoning Commission to get specific approval for moving it closer. Across the street from here, the university plans to build a new 37 and a half million dollar arts complex with a 500 seat theater. And just west of that, a hotel and civic center will be built on the university side of the street, transforming this stretch of the roadway, where right now, land use is quite restricted. That's going to be something that's probably going to change regardless of what we do. People are going to be coming in when the convention center gets built. They're going to be coming in for zone change requests all the time because the property values are going to be increasing. There's going to be a lot more pressure for commercial and things like that.

And that's one of the main reasons why we wanted to revisit the corridor as a whole. Because if we don't plan for everything holistically, we're going to end up planning for a piecemeal by default. But the focal point of the project, Jordan Street. The idea is in the concept behind it is that it is something that is quite noticeable and would also begin to be one of the not the first, but a major project where the university begins to look north to the city and to be a participant in the process of being a university in city. So we see this as a very important, we call it town and gown, but a very important scene where a city and a university come together and they turn and face each other as opposed to what you see now are predominantly parking lots, loading docks, locked doors. As the planners, both from the city and the university continue to work with residents on their vision for a new university front door in public meetings like this one, they offer views, images of what might one day be.

These are some early diagrammatic images, technology makes it possible to kind of mock up potential realities. This image is more corner based with the future Barnes and Noble facing university avenue, but another conception is more biased toward Jordan Street with the bookstore facing that street. There's also a courtyard option with a thinner building and a low rise option with the housing on one side and retail shops on the other. Whatever design is finally selected, the mixed use gateway project would likely become phase one, followed by projects that would fill out the district. It's a process that seems to be capturing the imagination of lots of people. Suggestions from that walking tour show a desire for a whole new experience along university avenue. At the public hearings, participants put their thoughts into pictures on a one to 30 scale map of the street.

What we love to see here though is that of the utilities put under the ground for sure. Trust that, it would trust that. So for now, it's still only ideas, but ones that in the months and years ahead will begin to take shape and eventually reshape a main city artery from a border into a destination. We want to build a new legacy that this generation's contribution to what is already a fine place.