Alfonso Cervera and Irvin Manuel Gonzalez’s Primera Generación Dance Collective named to Dance Magazine’s 25 to Watch for 2025

Dance Magazine recently announced their top 25 dancers, choreographers, directors, and companies to look out for in 2025. These artists are acknowledged as innovative figures shaping the direction of the dance field and industry. Professors Alfonso Cervera and Irvin Manuel Gonzalez’s Latinx dance troupe, Primera Generación Dance Collective, joins this year’s 25 to Watch list. The group has been celebrated for its focus on Latine storytelling in dance. Collaborating with artists Patricia “Patty” Huerta and Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier, the collective’s NEA-funded, evening-length work NOStalgia POP recently premiered at REDCAT in Los Angeles, CA, where it was hailed as a “transformational journey” by the LA Dance Chronicle. The group finished out the month of January with multiple performances at CounterPulse in San Francisco.

All four members of Pimera Generación met when they were graduate students at the University of California Riverside. That was nearly ten years ago, but they’ve been co-creating ever since. In her article for Dance Magazine, Phoebe Roberts wrote:

“The artists behind Primera Generación Dance Collective aren’t afraid to get a little messy. Self-professed “desmadre-makers” (in English, the phrase translates roughly to “mess-makers”), first-generation Mexican American dancers Alfonso Cervera, Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier, Irvin Manuel Gonzalez, and Patrica “Patty” Huerta find beauty in chaos. The group’s NOStalgia POP, a hybridization of text, satire, song, and movement that premiered at REDCAT in Los Angeles last June, references everything from Western media depictions of Latin pop culture to the performers’ own memories of growing up first-generation.”