BACK HOME IN THE BRONX.

ARTHUR AVILES MAKES HIS NEIGHBORHOOD SAFE FOR DANCE

How do you persuade an award-winning American modern dancer living in Lyons, France, to move to one of New York City's most economically depressed neighborhoods to teach at a fledgling, no-name dance studio without a decent floor--all for next to no pay? If you're talking about Arthur Aviles, you just pick up the phone and call him.

"I still can't believe he came," says Mildred Ruiz, laughing at the memory. "I told him, `We're trying to open this dance studio in the Bronx. We don't have any money, but if you want to come ...'"

At Bard College, where Ruiz and Aviles had both taken Aileen Passloff's dance class, Aviles's Bessie Award for performing with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was the talk of the dance alumni in 1989. Aviles had joined Jones's company in mid-1987, just before his twenty-fourth birthday, staying with it until the start of 1995. Ruiz called him in late 1995 on a lark. She had heard through a mutual friend that he was thinking of moving back to New York (Aviles was born in Queens and had spent his teenage years in the Bronx), and she hoped to persuade him to perform or teach a few classes at ThePoint/Community Development Corporation. At an abandoned bagel factory in Hunts Point in the South Bronx, Ruiz and three partners--Paul Lipson, Maria Torres, and Stephen Sapp--had just founded a new community center for artists and entrepreneurs. The Point was running on a bare-bones budget. To renovate the factory, they relied heavily on donated labor and equipment and scavenged Home Depot dumpsters on weekends. Ruiz, the new dance director, was desperate. She had no money to offer, only space. She began calling everyone she knew.

Her call to France could not have been better timed. Arthur had followed his boyfriend to Lyons in early 1995, creating a few pieces for the Maison des Arts en Creteil, but by the time Ruiz rang him later that year, he was already prepared to move back to New York. "My boyfriend and I just didn't work out," Aviles says. "Also, I didn't really know the language, and I didn't connect with the dance community there." So, to Ruiz's surprise, Aviles said yes. He arrived to teach The Point/CDC's first modern dance classes in the summer of 1996. By the following year, he officially relaunched his pickup dance company as Arthur Aviles Typical Theater, incorporating dancers and non-dancers alike, as well as local artists and children, into free-spirited and socially conscious productions.

It wasn't easy at first, says Ruiz: "Arthur himself went out to recruit on the streets [saying], `Come on, you're not doing anything right now.'" He appealed to parents and children by organizing a few fairy-tale productions with a Latin twist, like Arturella (Cinderella), Maeva de Oz (The Wizard of Oz) and El Pato Feo (The Ugly Duckling). "He would translate these stories to fit his own life," says Ruiz, now a member of the hip-hop performance group Universes. "For instance, pato in Spanish means `duck,' but it also means `homosexual.' Our community has a lot of difficulties with that. Parents would say, 'Oh, my God, I don't know if I want my kids to be in this.' And Arthur knew he had to really win them over."

Since then, the 38-year-old dancer and choreographer has become a terpischorean fixture in the South Bronx, reinvigorating the neighborhood with his upbeat spirit, appearing at local arts events and drumming up small armies of talent for cultural celebrations and activist events. On Earth Day one year, he and two fellow performers danced fifteen miles along the Bronx River to the opening of a new park in Hunts Point. Currently, he's planning a political arts event--"a garbage band, kids with garbage costumes, hip-hop poetry, and some dance performances"--to protest the two dozen waste-transfer stations located in Hunts Point, which bring some 12,000 garbage trucks into the neighborhood every day.

On another occasion, he invited a homeless couple to be in one of his performances. "Mike was an alcoholic. He died about two years ago, may he rest in peace," recalls Ruiz. "Arthur cleaned and dressed him up, and it was amazing how the community embraced him. He was so happy. And his wife, Diane, apparently had been a dancer a long time ago. Arthur really gave them some special moments. The thing about Arthur is that he wants to include everyone. Anybody and everybody who wants to dance can, without any prejudices."

However, as a dancer particularly concerned with the political and cultural challenges of being gay and Puerto Rican, and as a choreographer who has incorporated nudity into his work, Aviles has not always had an easy time of it. "This is my culture," he says. "It's Latino. It's very macho. This is my discussion with it and my challenge to it."

"Arthur, being the Arthur that he is, doesn't censor himself," says Ruiz. "He's going to dance nude. He danced from our building up the street all the way to the number 6 train" [the local subway station, a ten-minute walk away] "in a red velvet dress, barefoot. He's got guts.... He was determined to make a statement."

"What Arthur has given back to the community is just amazing," says Monica Figueroa, a 22-year-old Bronx native who met Aviles while taking his dance classes at The Point, and who recently joined his company. "He's always full of energy, full of spirit, and incredibly open-minded. He's helped to bring something beautiful here that was never here before."

Hunts Point remains one of the city's more desolate areas, pockmarked with ramshackle storefronts and bisected by a major expressway. It's about an hourlong subway ride from downtown Manhattan. Residents say the neighborhood has improved markedly in recent years. "Fort Apache did tremendous harm to this community's self-image," says Cassandra, a sculptor-in-residence at The Point, referring to the 1981 film, Fort Apache, the Bronx, which depicted the area as a war zone of criminals and drag addicts. "And that's what makes Arthur and The Point so vital."

"It's been difficult to shake the whole '70s stigma of the Bronx being a bombed-out place," adds Charles Rice-Gonzalez, Aviles's life partner and Typical Theater's associate director. "We want to ring a bell for the Bronx artists who have been emigrating to Manhattan. We've proven that there's an audience here for them."

With the help of an economic resurgence in the Bronx, Ruiz, Lipson, and Sapp expanded The Point/CDC's art and youth programs (earning a Bessie Award for themselves in 1999). It now offers twelve to fourteen classes a week to about seventy-five students in ballet, modern dance, hip-hop, and flamenco. The center outgrew its 10,000 square feet, and Aviles relocated his company to another building a few blocks away, christening it Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, or BAAD! Thanks to Dance Theater Workshop's new Outer/Space grants program, the company now enjoys the luxury of a permanent rehearsal and performance space. Last April, it performed on a sprung floor for the first time. The audience was sparse, but Aviles, who is short and muscular, moved with the fluidity and grace that have garnered him raves. He danced with a go-for-broke exuberance, leaping joyously and tracing hearts in the air. Among those giving him a standing ovation on opening night were his former mentor, Bill T. Jones, and colleague Sean Curran.

On August 14, Aviles's company will perform a new piece at the annual Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival. The title is, fittingly, Hunt's Point in the House, and the work is a series of vignettes that lead the audience from one location in the square to the next.

Jenneth Webster, director of Lincoln Center Out of Doors, was one of the first to commission choreography from Aviles back in 1993. "He's a true artist," says Webster, who danced in the Bronx at the now-defunct Fashion Moda Gallery, which launched the careers of visual artists Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer. "He's helping to unleash the creative spirits of the people in his community. It used to be that you could perform in storefronts, and now you can hardly afford to do that. The chances to be seen and venues to rehearse in [in] New York City are becoming increasingly slender, which makes Arthur's effort that much more remarkable."

BAAD! sits around a bend of a narrow street called Barretto, once a notorious street in Hunts Point that was populated by streetwalkers and heroin addicts. These citizens loitered on the stoops to shoot up, leaving their needles behind where children could find and play with them. "My mother was always afraid of Hunts Point," recalls Aviles. "It was very seedy, and we weren't allowed to go out." Today, Barretto Street has been cleaned up, and it's where not only Aviles's company but Arthur Aviles himself resides. As he puts it simply, "I'm back home."

Albert Lee is an editor at Nerve magazine and a regular contributor to Dance Magazine. He has written about the arts for the Village Voice, Salon, and Time Out.