Alfonso or Fonzy
(he/they/él/elle) is a queer Yucatecan Mexican American dance artist, choreographer, educator, and curator whose work is rooted in Poc-Chuc, an evolving choreographic methodology that brings Mexican Ballet Folklórico into conversation with contemporary dance, queer social dance practices, and improvisation. Through Poc-Chuc, Cervera explores how inherited movement traditions can remain living, responsive, and relevant, creating new relationships across histories, bodies, cultures, and places. For Cervera, Folklórico is not simply a tradition to preserve, but a living choreographic language that continues to evolve through collaboration, experimentation, and lived experience.
As a first-generation Mexican American artist with familial roots in Yucatán, Mexico, Cervera's work is deeply informed by ancestral knowledge and family histories. His earliest artistic influences came through Folklórico—not only as a dance form but as a way of understanding community, ritual, and cultural continuity. Equally formative was the work of his grandmother, Vilma Ojeda, a Ballet Folklórico costume seamstress whose craftsmanship shaped his understanding of artistic labor, performance, and the relationship between the body, clothing, and cultural identity. These familial inheritances continue to shape the way he creates, centering the body as both archive and site of transformation while imagining new futures for queer and Latine communities.
Working across performance, choreography, and community engagement, Cervera uses Poc-Chuc to engage movement histories, humanistic states, and local communities. Whether creating in the United States, Mexico, or Japan, he asks how ancestral movement knowledge can build new relationships across borders while remaining grounded in the communities from which it emerges. His work positions Folklórico as a contemporary practice that responds to place, collaboration, and cultural exchange while remaining rooted in its histories.
Cervera's work unfolds through three interconnected modes of creation: solo-authored works, long-term collaborations, and collective choreographic practice. Through his solo work, he explores memory, migration, disability, and queer futurity, often drawing from family narratives, Mexican iconography, and embodied cultural practices. His current solo investigation, RP, responds to his family's experience with Retinitis Pigmentosa, a hereditary visual impairment, while examining his own relationship to disability, care, memory, and embodied access through performance.
Alongside his solo practice, Cervera maintains ongoing creative collaborations with Dr. Irvin Manuel Gonzalez and Paige Calderrera, creating works that explore queer intimacy, relationality, and the social dance floor as spaces of resistance, mourning, play, and celebration. As a co-founding member of Primera Generación Dance Collective, he contributes to collaborative performances that center first-generation experiences, collective authorship, and community-engaged artistic practice.
Cervera creates both within and beyond institutional spaces, cultivating relationships among universities, community organizations, and independent artistic networks. His work throughout the West Coast is informed by his lived experience as a queer Yucatecan Mexican American artist and seeks to build lasting relationships through performance, teaching, and cultural exchange. His choreography has been presented at venues and festivals including REDCAT, CounterPulse, the Tijuana Cultural Center (CECUT), Cleveland Dance Festival, Breaking Ground Dance Festival, and the American College Dance Association. Internationally, he has presented and developed work in Japan and Mexico, where performances, residencies, and research continue to shape his investigations of migration, ritual, queer nightlife, and transnational cultural exchange.
Cervera is an Assistant Professor of Dance at The Ohio State University, where he teaches contemporary movement practices, Folklórico, composition, and partnering while mentoring emerging artists through research, performance, and community-engaged practice. Beyond the university, he serves as President and Co-Director of Show Box LA, fostering experimental performance and interdisciplinary collaboration while continuing to build artistic networks across the West Coast and beyond.
As an educator and facilitator, Cervera leads workshops, master classes, and residencies that invite participants to rethink technique as a culturally responsive and socially engaged practice. Through movement research, improvisation, partnering, and Folklórico, he encourages artists to cultivate technical rigor while embracing curiosity, adaptability, and critical dialogue around identity, belonging, and community.
Cervera's work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council, Artist Trust, and The Ohio State University's Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme, among other national and regional initiatives. He is a recipient of the Community Engaged Scholars Grant and Spark Grant at The Ohio State University, and his work with Primera Generación Dance Collective contributed to the company's recognition as one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch."
