Kevin Zambrano: complexity in the red curtain.

House of Red by Slade Segerson.

Performer, choreographer, and director Kevin Zambrano first discovered his love of movement through high school show choir — which is to say he’s always had a flair for the dramatic. By his senior year of high school, he was choreographing on the school dance team and applying to study dance in college. He ended up at California Institute of the Arts, where he says a lot of his artistic identity came into view.

“I felt like that was the best school for me, because it was a moment for me to feel free, artistically speaking: play with all the colors, while also getting a pretty rigorous technical training,” he said.

Post-graduation, Zambrano freelanced in Los Angeles before he was cast in the much-anticipated Broadway revival of West Side Story, directed by Ivo van Hove. Almost by accident, he settled into a multimedia kismet in New York, in the creation process of a show centered at the intersection of dance and musical theatre.

“Seeing the theatrical side of Ivo van Hove, seeing how he interacts with the actors and the dancers… Things as small as not being too specific, and allowing the actor to make the choice — I really enjoyed learning about the mechanics of how a show can run,” he said. “And I think that translated to making my show during COVID.”

Back home and restless

The COVID-19 pandemic hit just after the show opened, but Zambrano used his momentum back in Los Angeles to create opportunities for other artists in his community, with the help of a small army.

“I didn't like sitting around at home. And I knew that the theaters were empty. So I was like, why not allow at least one person to be in there? And they don't have to make anything. They can just be in there, have fun, explore,” he said.

Zambrano and collaborator Bret Easterling launched the Ghost Light residency shortly after, a non-profit residency that used a lottery system to place local artists in local theaters for safe artistic practice. Dmitri Chamblas, dean of dance at CalArts, and CalArts faculty member Rosanna Gamson consulted on the project, and soon there were almost a hundred applicants. 

This impressive venture was not Zambrano’s only artistic goal during pandemic downtime. He had been playing with a performance concept based on his experience as a club kid, and missing the communal energy of the scene cemented the idea. He brought the outline to Easterling, who encouraged him to run with it. Soon he was texting collaborators left and right, and a pandemic process was born.

“I think it was also just like, divine timing, that everybody missed performing,” he said.

“House of Red was made over 10 weeks…it’s based on the spirituality of dancing in a club with queer people.”

House of Red by Slade Segerson.

Characterization in House of Red

Most of the dramaturgical work for House of Red is based on personal club experiences and perceptions that Zambrano and his cast pooled together. They worked rigorously in history and identity before movement, styling, and more came into play — but this research set up the work to fall into place more easily.

“It’s a lot of their own input, and their own character analysis, creating their own club kid for themselves… Who are they in the club? Are they the new kid? Are they the person that has been here for 20 years, and always stands in the back corner and smokes a cigarette?” he said. “And also those interpersonal connections... it doesn't necessarily have to be explicit in the piece. But I think as an audience member, you can read when there's history. It's just more fun and appetizing. I wanted to provide that to our community somehow.”

The theatrical bent, while an effect of Zambrano’s show choir past and dance theatre style, is also rooted in his desire for the audience to see queer characters as whole human people; they don’t just exist in this moment where we see them performing.

“The narrative doesn't have to be linear or explicit,” he said. “An audience empathizes with people through narrative and storytelling, and I think I felt successful when somebody after the show said to me, ‘I don't know why I cared so much about these people, I just did.’”

Kevin Zambrano by Lee Gumbs.

Recreating the club atmosphere

He accomplishes some of that with exquisite attention to detail, many of which he spent time dreaming up with collaborators. Fallon Brooking served as dramaturge for the piece; Mimi Haddon and Kolby Keene led the costuming charge with customized details for each club kid. Zambrano’s childhood friend and longtime friend Oliver Sandino documented the work as videographer, Slade Segerson as photographer, and Maxwell Transue orchestrated the adventure as DJ and sound designer. 

Christine Ferrier designed club-esque lighting for the performance venue — an 80-foot flatbed truck — and illustrator Liana Krakirian designed titles and trading cards for the House. Production manager Paige O’Mara kept the club running for dancers Emara Neymour-Jackson, Catalia Jackson-Uruena, Jasmine Sugar, Madaline Riley, Mao Chenui, Robert Wells, Zambrano, and Easterling (who also produced).

The cast finds successful characters in their own research and in Zambrano’s fantastically physical choreography – it’s quirky and unique, but referential to his stage training in a way that makes it so endearingly familiar.

“I usually go to a mix of like, very performative, campy, jazz hands – I really like the tongue in cheek. And then I like to deconstruct it in a way. I'm also still learning what my style is, choreographically,” he said. “But I definitely was referencing house music and house dance: the ideas of repetition and bouncing, and that kind of energy that you build by repeating.”

He and the cast worked through the repetition becoming trance, cult-like, even, in those long sessions in the club:

“I was kind of investigating that… almost like a prayer, and relating that to spirituality, and how the club world is like a very spiritual space.”

“The first part was more performative and explicitly about a club, and then the second half got more spiritual, moving to tap into this higher power,” he said.

Red Curtain: The Great Pretender (2018) by Sasha Douglas-Nares.

The Red Curtain

Though Zambrano is still investigating his choreographic style, one omniscient theme weaves through all of his work: the Red Curtain. The curtain, he explains, is a visual trope and shifting metaphor that has followed him since high school.

“I don't know what it means yet, but I feel like every time I make something it teaches me. So that is, like a visual theme that I use. It has morphed from being about ego to extreme love, to passing and translation,” he said.

The last of Zambrano’s pandemic goals was to create a dance film; in keeping with the theme of the Red Curtain, it’s titled The Crimson Cabaret, and focuses on the relationship between two backup dancers, and how it changes as they crave and demand more love from their audience. Through all of his work — in any medium — he’s committed to exposing the wholeness of the queer person.

“Queer people are humans. They are not this… entity, that does no wrong,” he said. 

In House of Red, for example, the characters are queer, and like Zambrano says, the work is innately queer because he is. But that doesn’t leave the narrative without conflict, or without nuance.

“We want to avoid showing queer people in a bad light because it can be detrimental for the community,” he said. “But if we only see queer people in one light, we're stripping them of their humanity, of their ability to have agency and their ability to make a mistake — and then also come back from that mistake.”

In the meantime, Zambrano is in the process of returning to New York, where he plans to develop a musical adaptation of House of Red; keep your eyes peeled for a Red Curtain going up on Broadway with his name on it.

Crimson’s Cabaret by Myko Nguyen.

See more of his work at kevinzambranodance.com, and find him on Instagram @kevin_zam.