As a bi-cultural (SF Bay Area/Oaxaca) dance company working across borders, our artwork is embedded in ongoing creative practices of community-responsive listening and exchange in both Mexico and the US.  ​​After 25 years of dedication as DANCE MONKS (Est.1999), developing practices related to the mythologies held in the body and the land, we are now envisioning sanctuaries for creative expression and the healing arts as bridges of care between the two countries.
 
Currently, through APAPACHO, our vision is inspired by Folk and Indigenous practices of community organizing to create international spaces for gathering, creative expression, healing/care/empowerment, and dance/interdisciplinary art making. As part of this project, we offer unhoused, farmworker and migrant families (in the East Bay of California and Oaxaca) art and culturally relevant healing services and movement workshops through our free programs.  We have also created a multilingual mobile library with a focus on books in Spanish and Indigenous languages including Maam, Zapoteco, Mixteco, Nahuatl, and Mayan for farming families.

Looking ahead, we envision establishing small community milpas (traditional Mexican farming plots) and tianguis (markets) to foster economic resilience in underserved communities.  APAPACHO returns to some of the questions that we were asking in past works, Tlaoli: People of the Corn (2016) and Breathe Here: Respira Aqui (2023)  about migration, vulnerability/exploitation, cultural displacement, and amnesia, while working with the arts and traditional healing practices to spark needed change.
 
APAPACHO honors immigrants' vital contributions while providing needed spaces to rest and dream, recover ancestral memory, and ignite the renewal of sacred ways of being and relating to the body and the land. During times of environmental and social crisis, it is essential to listen to the wise voices of those who have not been traditionally heard or have been overlooked and whose cultures hold vital knowledge for these times.  ​
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