Victor Quijada

Victor Quijada was born on April 15, 1976, in Los Angeles, California, in a Mexican American family. He first danced in the city's b-boy circles and hip-hop clubs, where improvisation, cypher exchange, and floor-based power became embodied knowledge rather than stylistic decoration. He later attended Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, where exposure to concert-dance training widened the technical and compositional questions available to him.

From 1994 to 1996, Quijada performed with postmodern choreographer Rudy Perez. He then moved to New York to join Twyla Tharp's THARP!, spending roughly three years in that demanding hybrid environment before dancing with Eliot Feld's Ballet Tech. Rather than abandoning breaking, he accumulated systems: breaking, ballet, modern and postmodern composition became distinct bodies of knowledge he could test against one another.

In 2000, Quijada moved to Montreal to join Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. Two years later he founded RUBBERBAND, creating a company structure in which his cross-genre investigations could become a sustained repertory and training method. He has created close to thirty short and full-length works for the company, while RUBBERBAND has toured across North America and Europe.

The RUBBERBAND Method grew from the practical problem of moving safely and expressively among upright dancing, rapid weight exchange, inversions, and floorwork. Quijada describes it as a way of thinking about the body and environment—a movement approach with specific floor, inversion, partnering, and environmental principles. Its teaching system has become as consequential as the stage works: dancers from different technical backgrounds learn how to redirect momentum, share weight, and retain individual attack inside ensemble composition.

Quijada's recognition spans choreography, education, and film. He received the Bonnie Bird North American Award and Peter Darrell Choreography Award in 2003, a Princess Grace Foundation Choreographic Fellowship in 2010, Montreal's Cultural Diversity in Dance prize in 2017, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 2024. He has created work for companies including Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Scottish Dance Theatre, and has served as an artist in residence at USC Kaufman since the school's early years.