Artist Statement

My work acknowledges that the space of performance is active and tactile. Even if it’s subtle, I seek to change and be changed by performing. I am orientated towards site-specific making, collaboration with social and environmental systems, and addressing location and positionality in staged work.

I like staying with things a while. Give me repetition, rhythm, and groove any day. Longer durations help me to surrender to what the body knows, and most real investigations take years. I also like sharp and rough textures, humor and surprise, dancers who talk and make sounds. Most of my performances are artifacts of time spent together with others in rehearsal. Making them facilitates—and results from—the building of friendships and collaborative relationships. I choreograph to acknowledge and grow connections with other movers and places.

Through multiple projects over the past several years, I’ve been looking at the forces that move us and asking how bodies respond to those forces. As the daughter of an ocean climatologist and a mediator trained in conflict resolution, I am trained to believe in a present that is both shaped by a series of disasters and yet pregnant with opportunities for reconciliation. I am always asking—What are the conditions that compel us to move? What agency do we have inside these conditions? How do our environments and our communities imprint on our bodies, and how do we become conscious of the imprint that we leave in turn?

I am interested in movement-as-metaphor for what it teaches me about the alchemy of choreography. In crafting dance metaphors, I reach toward meaning and fall into the multiplicity of movement. Legibility helps expose the research that my dances are grounded in and communicate the ideas that fuel the work. But dance resists didacticism. Dance gathers, scatters; holds disparate ideas, temporalities, and energies as it moves from body to body. Dance crystallizes in brief moments and then liquifies again as it passes through time, helping us to understand the present moment of performance as a collection of different experiences.