BAILA Society’s Ahtoy Juliana wins Guggenheim Works & Process residency

Ahtoy Juliana, PhD, founder and co-director of BAILA Society, has received a Guggenheim Museum Works & Process residency to develop a new ethnotheater work on the feminine histories of Latin Hustle. The project, created with Jessica Ho, aims to reframe who gets remembered as a leader in a dance form rooted in the South Bronx and Puerto Rican cultural history.

Why it matters: - The residency gives Juliana a major platform to revisit Latin Hustle’s origins and challenge the way the dance’s history has been told. - The work centers women and feminine-identifying dancers as creators, not just followers, which could reshape how audiences understand the form’s lineage. - The project also connects Latin Hustle to broader Puerto Rican dance traditions that helped shape breaking and hip hop.

What happened: - Ahtoy Juliana, PhD, founder and co-director of BAILA Society, received a residency through the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process program. - Juliana will develop a new ethnotheater work with BAILA Society principal dancer Jessica Ho. - The pair will alternate lead and follow roles throughout the performance. - The residency marks Juliana’s return to Works & Process after previously performing at the Guggenheim in Do the Hustle, directed by Abdiel Jacobsen. - Do the Hustle also toured to Jacob’s Pillow.

The details: - The new work grows out of Dance Is Life, Juliana’s archival initiative collecting oral histories from the earliest generation of Latin Hustle dancers. - Latin Hustle was created by Puerto Rican teenagers in the early 1970s South Bronx at the intersection of salsa, disco and Rocking. - The piece asks what changes when women and feminine-identifying dancers are recovered as leaders, innovators and cultural carriers. - Juliana and Ho will switch roles onstage so no single body is fixed as leader or follower. - The project also traces the link between Latin Hustle and Rocking, a related Puerto Rican dance form that helped give rise to breaking and hip hop. - The choreography is designed to unsettle fixed leader-follower roles that hardened after Latin Hustle was commercialized. - The work instead builds on continuous negotiation, with dancers initiating, responding and co-creating in real time. - The residency will support rehearsal development with dancers trained in Latin Hustle and related forms. - The piece will incorporate interview excerpts, period music and movement reconstructed from oral history. - Juliana describes the result as a living, evolving score rather than a fixed reproduction of the past. - Public-facing elements, including open rehearsals, are planned for Works & Process audiences.

Between the lines: - The project is not just archival. It is corrective, using performance to rewrite which bodies and voices are treated as historically central. - Juliana’s framing places Latin Hustle within a wider Black and Puerto Rican cultural continuum instead of treating it as a self-contained social dance. - Her recent works point in the same direction, emphasizing shared authorship, spoken word and overlapping cultural inheritances. - Where’s My Money? was created with a classical Indian dance community and reworked Latin Hustle’s turns and rotations around joint authorship. - Native New Yorker links lyrical jazz and Latin Hustle as twin inheritances of Black and Puerto Rican survival. - Juliana has also built credibility as a scholar and competitor, which strengthens the residency’s historical and choreographic claims.

What's next: - Juliana and Ho will continue developing the piece during the residency. - Rehearsals, interviews and reconstructed movement will feed the evolving score. - Open rehearsals and other public elements are expected to bring Works & Process audiences into the research process. - The finished work will likely deepen the conversation about Latin Hustle’s origins, ownership and cultural memory.

The bottom line: - Juliana’s Guggenheim residency turns Latin Hustle history into a live argument about who gets remembered as a creator, not just a participant.