A Puerto Rican Faggot from America.

Arthur Avilés performs the solo A Puerto Rican Faggot from America (1996) at Danspace Project. Avilés forgoes the use of text, music, and costume, leaving the audience to interpret the movement through the dance's title. Throughout the performance, Avilés continuously moves in time and space while asserting his racial, sexual, and national identity. He dances nude as a political gesture to critique contemporary dance aesthetics and to expose his gay, Puerto Rican body amid the AIDS crisis. Avilés also expresses tension surrounding his self-proclaimed identity as a "New York-Rican" - a Puerto Rican born in New York that is estranged from island language and culture. Ultimately, Avilés conjures a body politic that challenges stereotypes and phobias about gay men during the AIDS pandemic, especially in the Latino community.

Arthur Avilés is a queer Puerto Rican dancer/choreographer based in the Bronx, New York. Avilés was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company from 1987 to 1995. He later formed Arthur Avilés Typical Theatre, a dance company based in the Bronx that seeks to create work that plays on the margins of gay and Latino cultures. The company is housed at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!), which was founded in 1998 by Avilés and Charles Rice-González, a creative writer and community activist. Avilés' work utilizes aspects of theater and dance, often taking the structure of stories from existing classics and reconfiguring them in order to express the felt, actual, and fantastical lives of queer Latinos living in the ghetto. He received a Bachelors of Arts in Theater/Dance from Bard College under the direction of Jean Churchill, Lenore Latimer, Albert Reid, Susan Osberg, and Aileen Passloff. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater in 2015.