Lennon Torres
by Ray Delgado
It’s hard enough figuring out who you are and what you want to be when you walk onto campus as a first-year student. It’s even harder when you’re struggling with your own identity and realizing that you may need to be a part of the change you wish to see.
And yet Lennon Torres, now 23, did just that, helping USC’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance become a more inclusive place for transgender and nonbinary people and beginning a career in advocacy that is changing the dance world in the U.S.
Torres, who uses she/her pronouns, found her passion in dance at age 10 and, as she recalls, “was really obsessed with it,” earning a partial scholarship to Kaufman, an emerging program that she chose because of its “forward-thinking” approach.
Growing up in a Latino community in Arizona, Torres was rarely exposed to conversations about gender identity, but she became increasingly aware of her own gender identity struggles when as a dancer she was routinely told to dance in a way that did not feel true to herself because she was told to dance “like a man.” Rather than accept the status quo, Torres pushed back and started asking questions that challenged the way things were done.
“It was something I felt needed to happen. I was coming into myself when I was at USC and I was learning so much. Conversations regarding gender identity and gender and things like that weren’t prominent in my communities before,” she said. “And so when I got to Kaufman, I was really excited to just learn about all the different walks of life that are there and find my place. I mean, that’s what college is for. I was exposed to so much and it really opened my eyes and I always knew something wasn’t quite right within myself.”
Torres said her advocacy at Kaufman was very well received and sparked even more advocacy. The experience led her to write and self-publish a guidebook about gender equity in dance for her senior project and to open a consultancy called Continuum Community that teaches dance companies how to be more inclusive.
“The goal of the company was to consult and to help communities be more inclusive and be more equitable when it comes to gender identity beyond the binary, because I was hitting a lot of walls in my training as a non-binary person at the time,” Torres said. “And then when I came out as trans even more so as I was going through my transition and figuring out how I’m going to train and how I’m going to have a career. And I realized that there’s just so much progress to be made. There has been progress, but there’s so much more we need to do.”
The company has been more successful than Torres ever imagined. She now helps major companies like the New York City Ballet and Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, among others, change the way they operate by wrestling with the big questions.
“How do you teach an art form that is so historically gendered to an ever-expanding youth population that is coming into their own now? How do you keep it respectful of where it comes from and respecting its tradition and its past, but also pushing it forward and thinking of how it can be a reflection of where we’re at today, and the dancers that are dancing today? And so, that’s a lot of the conversations we’re having,” Torres said.
It’s not lost on Torres that had the industry been different, she might have had a different and less frustrating experience as she entered the workforce after graduation. Torres currently works as the Executive Coordinator of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and runs Continuum Community.
“I think that if I hadn’t gone through those hardships and I didn’t have to go through a lot of the trauma I had to go through, I think I would probably still be pursuing a performance career at this time in my life,” Torres said. “I think that the things that I’m advocating for now, if those things had happened earlier, I think that little Lennon would have maybe been in the industry a little bit longer and maybe wouldn’t have needed this break that I’m giving myself.”
Torres accepts the role of trailblazer and is honored to help pave the way for others. “I plan to keep doing it because I can, and people listen, and I have a lot of privilege,” Torres said. “As a trans woman, I have hardship, but I also have privilege and the funds to get an education, the funds to be at a place like USC and the opportunity to socially transition and medically transition, and know that’s an option for me. Because I’m sitting on that seat of privilege, I feel like it’s almost my duty and my job to do good things so that more people can do what I did and do it longer and better.”