Amy Schofield

Scholar/Artist Statement

In every facet of my scholarly work, my embodied experience of flamenco practice and research is attuned to the ways the art form sustains and creates community while constantly shifting in response to time and place. In my artistic creations and my scholarly and embodied research, my work is rooted in practices of community care and identity formation. As a multi-racial, multi-lingual, first-generation American cradled by an intersectional mosaic of cultural markers, my work centers interconnectedness, subjectivity, and agency and is grounded by the liminal and layered nature of my own identity. As a US-American flamenco artist/scholar, I constantly ask how can flamenco performance and pedagogy become more culturally relevant and responsive in this time and place? My research, whether practice-based, archival, or ethnographic, is inherently interdisciplinary and embodied.

While flamenco is intimately connected to Spanish culture, my doctoral dissertation expands understandings of the art form by reframing it as a movement-based performance of latinidad in the bodies of Latinx practitioners in the United States. The project engages theories from dance and performance studies, diaspora studies, Latinx studies, and urban theory to analyze the ways Latinx flamenco artists in three specific communities—Albuquerque, NM; New York City, NY; and Miami, FL—use their practice and performance as an assertion of subjectivity that often includes components of community support, social justice, and activism. Through performance analysis, ethnographic interviews, and participant-observation the dissertation explores themes of home, migration, coloniality, transnationalism, and displacement to define what I term Latinx flamenco.  

In my embodied work, I am interested in phenomenological and autobiographical approaches to flamenco, rooted in a strong rhythmic foundation. My MFA project investigated stereotypical conceptions of the bailaora (female flamenco dancer) to empower and reaffirm her physical body as site of meaning making and knowledge creation. With a cast of five women and in collaboration with filmmaker Jenny Serrano, I created a dance film entitled Haunted that employed themes and aesthetics from film noir to explore connections between images of the bailaora and characterizations of Carmen as femme fatale. Disrupting notions of flamenco dance and fracturing limiting representations of femininity, this work carried on the legacy of flamenco as act of protest and contributed to my personal search for expression within the form. Characterized by high-contrast imagery, concepts from film theory, and a distortion of conventional flamenco vocabulary, the project’s somatic potency forced me to confront the dynamic tensions that drive my embodied research and characterize my ever-evolving relationship with flamenco.

Finally, in my archival research and practice, I am committed to highlighting the ways flamenco evolves as it circulates and is enriched by the cultures, embodied knowledge, and specific local histories of those who practice it. In 2024, I began the process of creating the archive and library at the National Institute of Flamenco in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As a Dance/USA Archiving and Preservation Fellow, I was solely responsible for cataloging, digitizing, and rehousing over one thousand items. I created a finding aid for staff and visiting researchers to easily access both the digital and physical items. I created an archivist’s manual that outlined the systems I created, and I trained staff to ensure continued best practices regarding the preservation of ephemera from NIF’s dance company, conservatory, and outreach programming. Issues of dance preservation permeate my research in the ways it intersects with issues of power, gender, inclusivity, and diasporic and communal practices of knowledge transmission.  

The deep cultural layering of both flamenco as an art form and my own identity permeates within the various methods and outputs of my research, which intersects the fields of dance studies, diaspora studies, and Latinx studies. As a choreographer and artist, I am inspired by autobiographical and culturally relevant hybrid flamenco practices, always aware of the ways flamenco reflects the human experience both in Spain and in the diaspora. In my ethnographic and historical research, I utilize performance theory to expand understandings of flamenco’s significations and boundaries of identity, and in my archival work, I utilize decolonial strategies to foreground counterstory and interrogate the ways information is transmitted through both the archive and the repertoire. My research is inherently interdisciplinary and draws from scholars who emphasize community relationships and decolonial feminist approaches to critically examine how dance simultaneously impacts and reflects understandings of ourselves, our communities, and global happenings. My research and creative endeavors grapple with important questions of diaspora, nationality, gender, and power, and I seek to use it to honor my physical body and those of others, defy expectations, and convert movement into progress.