As a middle schooler, Mina Estrada found a new passion through her time as a gymnast. Estrada fell in love, not with the balance beams and springboards, but with the choreography of the floor routines. Despite challenging her parents’ ideals of what a college degree was, she now pursues her dream of dance.
“Dancing has been my life,” Estrada said. “It is the thing I love most. Me and dance are best friends — we never stopped.”
Estrada, assistant professor and director of the dance program at Wichita State University, showcased an original dance titled “Inside the Dream Machine” on Nov. 15, inspired by the Ulrich Museum of Art’s fall exhibit “Dream Machine: Fantasy, Surreality and Play.”
“I spent a lot of time in here (the Ulrich),” Estrada said. “I spent a lot of time just looking at the art, learning about the artists, and getting a sense of how I feel about what’s happening, and then creating small phrase work based on these ideas. I do not walk in with some really rigid structure, and especially for something called ‘The Dream Machine,’ like I’m going to keep it loose.”
“The Dream Machine” is full of artworks that play on the dark, surrealist world of art. Estrada said that she connected with the display because of her childhood dreams.
“Almost all of these pieces, they’re riding that really beautiful surrealist edge,” Estrada said. “Like, I am one foot in a place that feels ‘normal,’ and I’m one foot inside a dream. It’s really easy for me to fall into that place of dark and whimsical, but also I’m a vivid dreamer.
“I would tell my mom, ‘I wish I could record in my head because it’s so hard for me to tell you my dreams because they’re disjointed and surreal.’ And so I think for me, finding the essence of this show and put it into movement is what I’ve already been doing as an artist, because I’m always riding the fine line of being real and surreal.”
Estrada said this is the feeling she wanted the audience to walk away with — that blur of reality.
“I wanted everyone in this space to feel like perhaps maybe they had been hypnotized or fallen asleep, but not out of boredom,” Estrada said. “I think I was just hoping that you would get sort of coaxed into a state dream while inside of it.”
The performance was not done in a typical dance scene; it was performed inside the Ulrich in the middle of “The Dream Machine” exhibit. Estrada said this brought its own set of unique challenges.
“We can’t always rehearse in this space,” Estrada said. “Knowing that we would have a giant sculpture in the middle, not knowing where the musicians would be. There’s a lot of technical things that felt like obstacles. Those are all these really deep things you have to take into consideration as you’re formulating an immersive, interactive work.”
Despite the challenges the work presented, Estrada said it was an easy choice to select this artwork as the inspiration for her latest dance.
“We have a gorgeous museum on campus so I wanted to do something that felt interdisciplinary in that we were using art as the influence or impetus for the work,” Estrada said. “The curator contacted me and was like, ‘Would you have any interest?’ And as soon as I heard what the title was and then saw the work, I was like, ‘Yes, a thousand times yes.’ It wasn’t a hard decision to make.”
The exhibition of “Inside the Dream Machine” didn’t stop with this initial performance. Estrada and the School of Digital Arts are collaborating to create a film version of this dance.
“We’re using a space where they built a small pool of water with fog,” Estrada said. “I hate to use the pun, but it’s really dreamy. But because of that, we’re having to piece together, or we’re deconstructing this piece and then reconstructing it as a film.”
The dance film will premiere on April 19, 2025, at Welsbacher Black Box Theatre in the Hughes Metropolitan Complex on 29th and Oliver.
