Work
Other Refrains (2022)
Evening-length version currently in-process
Alternating between gesture, text, impersonation, and abstraction, I excavate family stories, dance with lingering absences, and conjure up embodied imprints. In the work, dance becomes a way to care for and trouble these inheritances, and movement carves space for the body to hold more multiplicity. “Refrains” (plural noun) speaks to the repetition of movement and how familiarity plays through the body like a song. I return to the verses that I know. “Refrains” (verb, present tense) also refers to how these returnings can contain and constrain the body into known patterns of femininity, masculinity, whiteness, Jewishness and goyishness, work, and dance. While paying homage to inherited embodiments through this work, I am also asking—What is being upheld? What is being exorcised? How might the collisions of ancestral bodily memories challenge white-hegemony? What is dying, and what is being born?
Skin in the Game: Investigating risk & togetherness (ongoing)
Skin in the Game started with a week-long process-based dance residency for ARC 2023 at APE Gallery. I worked with four performer-collaborators—Catalina Hernández-Cabal, Alta Millar, Madison Pallfy, and Ashley Shey. Together we asked: With the continued threat of a powerful illness in our midst, how do we move together in meaningful ways? What is needed to care for each other? How has the risk of contagion registered in our bodies, shaped our movement, brought us together and pushed us apart? Our daily rehearsals incorporated practices and scores that center bodily negotiation of proximity, connection, touch, and vulnerability. All elements that we “improvised” with in our daily lives during this uncertain time of the lingering-pandemic. The week included two open rehearsals, a public showing, and audience conversation at culmination of the week. In addition to exploring togetherness amongst the performers, we also considered the ways that the public moves and gathers in relationship to the performers. Skin in the Game refuses to forget or ignore the pandemic. Rather, we seek to learn from its reverberations in our bodies and to chart a path forward that honors the risk of shared breath. This research fed into a repertory project As Lungs As Wings, which was performed in Thereafter: Art of Understanding at Totman Performance Lab, November 2023. The next iterations of the project with Hernández-Cabal, Palffy, Millar, and Shey will be shown in the summer of 2024.
