Danielle Diniz. Courtesy photo.
I am a dancer, and I am the granddaughter of two immigrants, my grandmother from Mexico and my grandfather from Portugal.
I have been dancing since I was young, and early in my career, I heard a quote that has never left me: “When you can no longer speak, you sing. When you can no longer sing, you dance.”
That message has never felt more urgent than right now.
Across this country, people not unlike my grandparents are living in fear, afraid that everything they have built, everything they have sacrificed for, could be taken away in an instant, not because of anything they have done, but because of who they are and where they come from. People are hiding in their homes. Parents are being torn from their children. Communities that have spent decades putting down roots are holding their breath.
And yet. In the middle of all of this, something else is happening. People are coming out into the streets to protect their neighbors. Demonstrators are raising awareness and demanding change. Observers are documenting everything, ensuring that what is happening cannot be hidden or denied. There is even a remarkable group of New Yorkers who traveled to Minnesota to help families forced into hiding care for their pets, small acts of grace in an overwhelming moment.
I am responding with dance.
I know that can sound like the least urgent response of all. But I have always believed that dance can say things that words simply cannot reach. Every step is a word. Every series of steps is a sentence. And when a dancer is truly inside a story and not just moving through it, something happens in the room that no headline, no speech, no protest sign can replicate. You feel it before you have decided what to think about it.
History has shown us this, from Alvin Ailey, who showed the world what the Black experience looks and feels like through dance, to Bad Bunny, whose Super Bowl performance was a masterclass in what bodies in motion can say, delivering a message of love that transcended language.
No artist has shaped my understanding of that power more than Jerome Robbins. “West Side Story” is not just a great piece of theater. It is the story of any community trying to make a new place their home, the challenges and the opportunities, the longing and the hope, told through movement in a way the whole world understood. I named my own piece “A Place for Us” as a play on that tradition. But where that song carries longing for a place that may not exist, my title is a declaration. I have seen that place. My grandparents lived in it. When Accent Dance NYC, a nonprofit devoted to bringing exactly these kinds of stories to the stage, commissioned me to make this work, I knew what I wanted to say. I just didn’t know how urgently the world would need to hear it.
My grandmother came to the United States through the Pasajeros Program, crossing seasonally to pick fruit with her family until she earned legal entry. What I know is that she was extraordinary, as were so many people who took these kinds of journeys and worked so hard to build something new. She settled in Lodi, California, where she met my grandfather, a Portuguese orphan who had come through Ellis Island with nothing, alone. They both ended up in the same fruit fields. That is where they found each other.
They didn’t want to stand out. They were unassuming, determined to build a life quietly, without drawing attention. They didn’t even teach my father to speak Spanish, so focused were they on making a home in this new place without being seen, without being targeted, without giving anyone a reason to question whether they belonged. They wanted, more than anything, to simply be. To build a family. To give their children something they never had.
When I think about my grandmother, about how she looked and how she spoke, I know she would not have been safe today. That thought does not leave me.
I started developing A Place for Us about two years ago, as a tribute to my grandparents and the journey that made my life possible. I could not have imagined how much the world would change by the time it reached the stage. But I have always believed that dance can do something the news cycle cannot: it can ask an audience to step inside a story that isn’t theirs, to feel what it costs to leave everything behind, and to understand, in their bones, what it means to finally arrive somewhere and be welcomed.
The piece ends with a city scene. Vibrant. Inclusive. Everyone finding their place. When it is performed on stage this weekend in New York City, I want audiences to see the world my grandparents found. It is the world I want to believe we can return to. And I know that scene looks different now than it did when I first made this piece. I know that the welcome it portrays is not the reality so many families are living with today. But I still end with that scene. Because I believe in hope. Because I see it every day in the way neighbors and communities are showing up for each other, in the streets, in their group chats, on their doorsteps. And because I think we need to be reminded, as often as possible, of the world we are capable of being.
My grandparents came here with almost nothing and built a life. That life made mine possible. I made this piece for them. But I also made it for everyone who deserves the same chance they had, and for everyone who believes they should have it. There are moments when words are not enough. When the body has to speak. This is one of those moments. I choose to answer it the only way I know how. I dance.
Danielle Diniz is a New York-based choreographer whose work has been commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow, Performance Santa Fe, and Ballet Hartford.
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