I tend to go inward and use my body as a teller of shareable, relatable truths. To be in-quiet, to wander, or meander, to yell, to rave, to settle in an action and repeat, these are the avenues that currently feed my practice. There is no one road in my practice and though change can be fruitful, it can also feel like swallowing vitamins that are too big, a little choke-y. The practice that seems most rewarding is listening in and not “trying” to make, playing my hunches, following a feeling, and waiting to reflect and critique afterwards. How can I gain a deeper understanding of myself, my histories and biases? In the end, I create to connect with myself and with others and in turn, to have others connect with me and each other. I embrace the inherent and inevitable unpredictability of performance and that shows up in my practice. 

 

I am finding my voice within my work. I am “trained” in classical dance forms of Balanchine, Horton and Limon, all of which are complicated by the institutional bio-political structures of their time; yet they have offered me structure and strength. Now I tend to complicate or corrupt them, yet they are legible in my body. My voice moves toward improvisational scores that build upon themselves, I also tend to develop dense movement phrases that are specific to a theme of a work. In this way the works my collaborators and I create tend to push the physical and cognitive limits of the performers. I am caught between the human body as specimen and my own conditional body defined by personal history, societal implications and my physical manifestation. I acknowledge that the body is not separate from the emotional, spiritual and self-awareness of the person I am. Is there honesty in any moving gesture? Our work materializes through colliding roles as makers, performers, and audience; making me invariably dependent on the people (the bodies, emotions, and awareness) of those who are in a shared performance space.  My investigations have, in the last seven years, found roots in identity, particularly multiplicity— a plurality of self that has come into kaleidoscopic focus. 

When moved to begin a new project, I usually get a feeling for a piece, before I understand the concepts or the context. The beautiful thing about feelings, is that they can be complicated and multilayered, —even specific—before becoming clear. When developing  a work, moving toward that feeling is the driver and, that is where collaboration is necessary to my practice. Because of the complicated, multilayered, and specific-while-unclear nature of feelings: having conversation, artistic exchange, and shared attempts to work all help uncover specificity and clarity about ‘the feeling,’ and it becomes a shared feeling that we move toward presenting. I often work with my husband, a musician and composer, to develop music for a new work, but all  the people who come into a process with me tend to explore a feeling and develop concepts with me; reading, writing, drawing and ‘dancing’ through an idea are not unusual acts, even if these are not their mediums. 

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I feel a need to add that absurdity and humor are elemental to my practice. I cannot be multiplicitous without the willingness to laugh and be laughed at throughout a process.