Educator Spotlight: Jacque Pritz’s Catching Mangoes Dance celebrates her Filipino roots

Growing up in Orlando, dancer and choreographer Jacque Pritz found it challenging to stay connected to her Filipino roots. With a mixed Filipina-American upbringing, her connection to the culture was limited to her mother’s side of the family who attended small Filipino churches in the greater Orlando area.

“This exposed me more to the culture socially and outside of my nuclear family, but I didn’t really find or connect with any Filipino friends my age,” said Pritz, who grew up visiting family in the Philippines every few years. “I spent several summer breaks living in the provinces of Pangasinan, experiencing a lifestyle much different from my suburban Florida home. I was able to see my lolo [‘grandfather’ in Tagalog] turn 100 years old in 2013.”

Though challenging, maintaining the link to her heritage over the years inspired Pritz to start Catching Mangoes Dance (CMD) in 2023. This small dance nonprofit crafts multicultural representation and creative works through dance for the Filipino and Asian diasporic communities in Atlanta. “That’s very me,” said Pritz with a smile. “It might be niche, but it felt like [there was] a gap here in the city, and I saw it as an opportunity worth going for. And that goal is much bigger than me as one person.”

Creating the multicultural, transpacific dance troupe was also spurred by a 2022 trip Pritz took to the Philippines after nearly a decade away. “It was an awesome experience visiting the motherland as an adult and reconnecting with family,” she recalled. “We drove the tractor trailer to another plot of family land that had a large mango tree. My cousin climbed the tree and used a long bamboo stick [while] my cousins and I were underneath the tree with empty rice bags. And I caught three mangoes!”

While that memory of falling fruit definitely contributed to the name of the troupe, the credit really goes to Emory resident dance lighting designer Gregory Catellier. During a creative workshop, he recommended “Catching Mangoes Dance” as the potential title of an original solo Pritz choreographed and performed for Filipino Independence Day in 2023, as part of Kalayaan Atlanta’s celebration of Filipino-American culture. Although that work wound up with a different title (Nandito Na Ako), Catellier’s suggestion stuck, and, in December of that same year, Pritz launched Catching Mangoes Dance with Work in Process Showing and Ancestral Celebration at Rise City Dance.

In just three short years, this small dance company has put on some big moves. It premiered I’m sorry for your loss, a movement memoir at Beacon Dance’s 2024 spring rep concert and performed at the 2025 opening exhibition of Flux Projects’ Our mothers, our water, our peace at the GOAT Farm. The company previously danced at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and, back in January, traveled to Rochester, New York, for MAD (Movement and Dance) Weekend at Nazareth University.      

Pritz gives a lot of the credit for these successes to her two main dance collaborators: Madison Lee and Hiroko Kelly. Four years ago, Pritz first saw Lee perform at several Emory dance performances and found she couldn’t take her eyes off of her dancing. She reached out to Lee to collaborate on a 2022 work, and the two have been creatively inseparable since.

“I’ve danced my entire life, so I’ve never known myself without it,” said Lee, the first official CMD company member. Similar to Pritz, Lee grew up feeling somewhat disconnected from her Korean-American heritage in a “not culturally diverse area” of the sprawling Dallas suburbs. 

“I didn’t grow up knowing that dance is a vehicle of self-research or cultural research,” Lee said. “So coming to Emory and meeting someone like Jacque, who uses dance as a form of researching your own culture and identity, was a really new idea for me. It opened my eyes to a lot of new things.”

Kelly connected with Pritz — whom she’d known through the Atlanta dance scene – via social media. At the time, Kelly was several thousand miles away across the Pacific, staying short-term with her obaasan (grandmother) and watching Catching Mangoes Dance’s reels on Instagram. “So when Jacque and I came face-to-face, I was like, ‘I was literally just in Japan helping my grandmother pick persimmons and catching them with her and her childhood friend,’” said Kelly, who’s now a board member and secretary for the dance nonprofit.

“It’s such a niche experience, but it’s also wildly universal to name a dance company Catching Mangoes. That could just be seen as something catchy, but it has such a deeper meaning.” Humorously, Kelly notes that her grandmother was quite critical of her persimmon-catching technique.

Watching a CMD performance, it’s easy to see why it has such appeal. Pritz blends her Filipino roots with contemporary American style, mixing the rigor of her classical training with more modern, organically inspired movements.The end result is a choreography infused with such skill, intentionality and even playfulness as to elevate it into storytelling and cultural exchange.

“Even beyond being Asian-American art, we’re talking about multiculturalism — we’re talking about the immigrant experience,” said Kelly. “And that relates to so many people. And so it creates even more vastness in the work.”

This summer from July 7 through July 11, CMD will be stepping into that vastness even more with the Unfold Dance Festival, a five-day summer dance experience for beginners and emerging professionals. Created by Pritz and Emory dance faculty Julio Medina, founder of Medina Movement Collective, the new festival will be an intensive workshop of classes on the creative process. Expect movement classes, creative rehearsals, daily technique training and a free public performance of an original work by Catching Mangoes Dance and Medina Movement Collective.

“Catching Mangoes Dance is growing in a very organized way, but I appreciate that and love letting the company move as slowly as possible so it can be sustainable,” said Pritz, who, like many dancers, has experienced burnout dancing from season to season. “I was inspired by others before who had the courage to make their own companies. At a certain point, I had to tell myself: If they could do it, then I could do it, too.”

Applications are open now through May 15 for Unfold Dance Festival, coming to Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts from July 7 through July 11.

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Jeff Dingler is an Atlanta-based author and entertainer. A graduate of Skidmore College with an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University, he’s written for New York Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tiny Love, Newsweek, WIRED, Salmagundi and Flash Fiction Magazine. More information at jeffdingler.org.