Now retired from the New York City Ballet, dancer Jock Soto is one of eight New Mexicans who will receive a 2024 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.Ìý
Now retired from the New York City Ballet, dancer Jock Soto is one of eight New Mexicans who will receive a 2024 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.Ìý
During his career as a New York City Ballet star, Jock Soto partnered with some of the world’s legendary ballerinas. But his very first partner was his mother, Mama Jo (Josephine Towne Soto), who taught him to perform the hoop dance with her at rodeos and gatherings, with hoops made by his grandfather, when he was just 3 years old.
Now retired from the NYCB, Soto teaches and choreographs nationwide but always comes home to New Mexico. He is one of eight New Mexicans who will receive a Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts — something he says he “never imagined†— at the October 10 ceremony at St. Francis Auditorium.
The award is “well-deserved,†says Patricia Dickinson, founder and artistic director of Festival Ballet Albuquerque, who has collaborated with Soto for many years. “He was born here, he lived here, he came back, and now he’s giving back to his Native heritage.â€
By the time he was 12, mother and son had moved to New York City so he could attend the School of American Ballet, the feeder school for the New York City Ballet, on full scholarship. It was a big change from Arizona.
“We flew there — I don’t know how we could afford it,†Soto says. “We walked in holding hands, and my mom was like, ‘This is kind of a huge place, right?’ And there were like 100 boys. And I was silent — I didn’t speak.â€
He loved SAB and New York, and by 14, he was living there on his own. Instead of high school, he was learning to dance under George Balanchine, who built NYCB into the nation’s top ballet company and changed the course of American dance. At night, he went to the ballet, hung out with friends, and ran in the same circles as Andy Warhol’s crowd.
“I was getting a $250 monthly stipend in school to live on,†he says. “So, yeah, it was not easy, but it was fun. You know, you have New York hot dogs, New York pizza, things you can eat cheap.â€
At 16, Soto was one of the last dancers Balanchine invited to join the company’s corps de ballet before his death. Soto became a soloist in 1984 and was named NYCB’s first Indigenous principal dancer in 1985 — a meteoric rise. (Maria Tallchief of the Osage Nation was the company’s first Indigenous ballerina.)
When he retired in 2005 at age 40, more than 35 roles had been made on him — meaning choreographed specifically for and with him — and he had partnered with NYCB’s most illustrious ballerinas. The day after his final performance (and a blowout party with 450 guests and Mexican food flown in from Texas), Soto started classes at the Institute of Culinary Education, in part because he’d fallen in love with chef and sommelier Luis Fuentes and needed to up his cooking game.
Fuentes and Soto married in 2011 and live in a hogan-shaped house they built in Eagle Nest for Mama Jo, who died of cancer in 2008 before it was finished. Soto’s dad, Jose Soto, who died 10 years after his mom, lived there at the end of his life.
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful setting,†Soto says. “We wanted all the windows to face the lake and face the mountains, and we always enter in the east, like you do in a hogan.â€
Soto loves spending time at home with Luis, entertaining and cooking. Each of the 13 chapters in his memoir ends with a family recipe, like his mom’s pork chops and his grandma’s fry bread. He also wrote Our Meals in 1997 with longtime NYCB ballerina and partner Heather Watts, and it offers a collection of recipes with some ballet gossip thrown in.
Eagle Nest is remote, and Soto “hates driving in the snow with a passion,†but it’s close-ish to Taos, where he’s been working with Ballet Taos since 2017. Like many retired NYCB dancers, he keeps Balanchine’s legacy alive through guest teaching.
“I constantly quote him, and I teach a Balanchine and New York City Ballet class,†Soto says. “I have a little pink book he gave each dancer at the Tchaikovsky Festival in 1981, and there are so many things in there that are so beautiful. This is one of his quotes, the one I put before chapter one in my book: ‘The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time.’â€
Ballet Taos founder and artistic director Megan Yackovich met Soto when she was working for Fuentes at one of her three jobs, saving money to open a ballet school. She invited him to teach at the first summer intensive.
“The connection he made with the dancers that summer was instantaneous,†Yackovich says. “He is such an inspiration to young dancers. He stresses that musicality and artistry are just as important as your technical prowess.â€
Soto now serves as guest faculty for Ballet Taos, giving master classes and creating choreography for the professional dancers and apprentices.
“At Ballet Taos, I’ve been working with Daya Frenkel, a ballerina from Israel, for about four years now,†Soto says. “I’ve also been trying to go further into contemporary pieces where I don’t have to use classical music. I did a whole program last year that was all pop music.â€
Soto has to travel a lot farther to work with Festival Ballet Albuquerque. FBA founder and artistic director Dickinson invited him to guest teach for the company in 2017, and soon after, he began creating choreography for them.
October 18-20 he’ll appear onstage with Festival Ballet Albuquerque and Taos Pueblo musician Robert Mirabal in the fifth iteration of FBA’s Sacred Journeys program at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. He choreographed six of the dances and appears in one.
“Patricia wanted me to be in it, and I said, ‘What the hell am I gonna do in it?’†he says. “I’m on the stage in the middle of all the dancers, and she just gave me a few things to do, and I kind of embellished on it. Robert and I, when we’re working together in the moment, we improvise the whole time, so it could be different every night. And that’s really cool to do.â€
Dickinson says the project has been a labor of love and inspiration from the start.
“We have had a lot of fun collaborating on the vast amount of Robert’s music,†she says. “Jock is such a great partner. We’re the Three Musketeers: me, him, and Robert. My dancers just love his choreography.â€
When he works with dancers, Soto also imparts one of the beliefs his mother learned from her ancestors: to walk in beauty and harmony. “I’ve said it many, many times: You walk in beauty, you walk proud, you walk tall. If I’m going to be teaching, I have to walk into the room and show you what I’ve got,†he says. “I’m like a big peacock.†◀
Emiliana Sandoval began her ballet studies at Prince Ballet and Early Street Studios in ·è¿ÍÖ±²¥ Fe and continued at Indiana University under former New York City Ballet dancer Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux. She still sidles up to the barre once a week.