My work is driven by the body: its movements, its actions, its intelligence, and its relationship to constructed,natural and social environments.
Often site specific and responsive, my interdisciplinary approach in which various mediums - dance /performance, sound, video and photography are interwoven to create a layered dimensionality. Creating across platforms allows for reflection in the making process and multiple channels for engagement. Choreography and ephemeral collages are specifically designed for on-site presentation, the stage, installations, and media. I am particularly drawn to liminal and transitory spaces, where traces of history are palpable within the cracks and margins.
Contemporary Dance - Butoh in particular, QiGong, Somatic Experiencing and Improvisation are foundational practices in my approach. With practices being rooted in embodiment, the intention is to create suspended moments in which the mind allows and facilitates body systems and sensory information to be a felt experience and not dominated by mental chatter and judgement. Working with the porosity of the body, and its capacity for transformation, listening is a part of the shaping process. Even within expanded or mixed media contexts, I prioritize the body, movement, and dance as the conduit and generator of the work's tone and spirit.
A thread of my research is designed to contend with how a performing body reads and responds to the conditions, qualities and histories within specific locations. I value working within local communities and landscapes with the assistance and allyship of existing organizations and habitats through shared exchange, physical participation and dialogue. My process can encompass sitting, walking, dancing, vocalizing, photographing, leading movement workshops, and crafting temporary interventions from collected ephemera. Through collaboration and interdependence sentient, non sentient, materiality and time are interwoven in the fabric of a performance's expression. I focus on subtle and nuanced connections, approaching landscapes with a petition to become held within them, rather than dominate or conquer, even when discomfort arises,
I acknowledge the politics of the body and how origin, experiences, gender, race, and economics translate, interpret and relate uniquely to specific contexts and locations. I am mindful of the often violent colonial histories, present-day issues of gentrification or blight, and the importance of respecting the land when working within chosen sites.
I identify with the wanderer, not because I am lost, but to deepen an understanding of an ever evolving sense of home. Recurring questions in my research are how to cultivate community for sustained investigation, and the role and effects of digital cyberspaces on crafting with the sensorium while navigating the necessity to travel to secure economic support and project development. My choreography, performances, and projects have been supported by residencies and commissions, and presented nationally and internationally by large institutions, independent organizations, and alternative collectives.
Non-Western techniques and teachings were pivotal, becoming foundational to my creative and physical training, ideology, and capacity. Theories and training that establish correlations of natural elements to body parts, organs, temperaments, life stages, sounds, and tastes; putting the body in direct relationship to nature’s directional, elemental, and seasonal cosmologies is central to the development process and creation of the work. Where movement is embodied with the use of imagery and specificity to create a dialogue between eternal and external relationships.
My style is detailed, but raw. It is organic, visceral, rock-n-roll, and witchy. It draws power from the erotic feminine: dark, but with sincerity and humor. I am attentive to disrupting the banal, and parochial.
Functional, ritualistic, and metaphorical relationships, where desire in conversation with external structures, objects, and forms, is probed through task-based prompts and repetition, aiming to move beyond habitual responses. Frame, form, and structure create the container to investigate the contours of a dance, negotiating relationships between the tangible and intangible, history and myth, and natural and constructed environments. I am interested in creating conditions in which latent characters, animals, and natural elements contained within bodies can emerge.
I believe in the power of movement, body based art, and dance to propel embodied intelligence, transformation and affect its surrounding space. I am slightly obsessed with the mystical, with the idea that dance conjures and channels, and the body as a potential agent in the ecosystem of change. I resist a capitalistic hierarchical relationship to the natural world and its effects on our internal landscapes. This process allows me to dive into the nonverbal knowing, spaces of fragility, ferociousness, clarity, and contradiction. I make dances and performances because it challenges me, and because there are truths that I can only access when dancing.
Ultimately, my work explores what constitutes a sense of belonging and how to invite viewers and participants to connect with their interior spaces and the spaces they inhabit.