The Body Remembers—Choreographing Mango Street

There’s a moment in The House on Mango Street when Esperanza realizes she wants to leave, but not disappear. She wants to return for the ones who can’t. That line stayed with me—not as an idea, but as a weight. I know what it means to grow up in a space shaped by poverty, tradition, faith, and silence. I also know what it means to leave and wrestle with what gets left behind.

I didn’t choose this book because it’s popular in classrooms. I chose it because the questions it asks are still active in my own life. What do you owe the place that formed you? How do you love a culture that has both shaped and restricted you? And what happens when the body remembers more than the language can say?

We’re creating this ballet with those tensions in mind. Not to translate the novel literally, but to respond to it—to let the movement emerge from the complexity of Esperanza’s world, and ours. Ballet has a history of flattening culture. We’re working from a different starting point: proximity. We’re not staging a concept. We’re tracing something lived.

When I set choreography, I think in fragments—how a shoulder drops when someone feels out of place, how a foot falters before a closed door. These details matter, especially in The House on Mango Street. Cisneros doesn’t offer a linear plot; she offers memory. Scenes that linger because they’re true, not because they resolve.

“The lovely dancers in the second company are emerging ballerinas, yes, but they’re also young women navigating the same questions Esperanza faces: How do I speak? Who hears me? What happens when I tell the truth?”

That’s how we’re going to build this ballet. Not with grand arcs or technical spectacle, but with gestures rooted in experience. A dancer shielding her ribs. A walk that holds both defiance and self-doubt. These are not invented movements—they’re remembered ones. Some are mine. Some come from the dancers. Some surface in the studio when we stop trying to “perform” and start paying attention to our intuition.

The lovely dancers in the second company are emerging ballerinas, yes, but they’re also young women navigating the same questions Esperanza faces: How do I speak? Who hears me? What happens when I tell the truth?

In ballet, it’s easy to default to shape. But shape without story is decoration. We’re after something more essential. This isn’t about re-staging a story. It’s about what happens when literature settles in the body—and stays there.