As an artist and a queer person, I am interested in the mess of being human, in the spaces in between, and the collection of delicate and resilient parts, responses, and relationships that make us who we are (me who I am.) I want to know where rupture happens. I want to know how things fit together in order to see how they come apart towards something new, named and recognizable or wholly unique. I make work in large part to grapple with my own feelings of mortality and to celebrate the embodied feeling of human connection. Through my work, I am actively trying to multiply – to many myself, to reincarnate in the present, and to engage in as many ways of being with others as possible. I want to slip forward from what I see or presume to what is potential, both externally and internally.
I make dances that are highly physical and based in improvisation and intricate scoring. They are collaborative and responsive to their circumstances, up to and including the moment of performance as further research.
For the past seven and a half years I have been developing an improvisational practice called action is primary. The central tenant is to “hold what you are doing at the center of what you are doing, even as it moves/you let it move towards new centers.” action is primary is a mode of making in the moment that examines how attention, imagination, embodied presence, and the ghosts of our choices tumble through form (our form, the dance’s form) in a constant play of regeneration and falling inwards and spilling out. How do we engage with what’s already present, bring our insides to the outside and the background to the foreground? Can we simultaneously engage in self-determined research and build something together with our fullest, perhaps contradictory, and most multiple selves (as many as we want)?
Simultaneously I committed myself to the 3:15 Project, where I did a dance everyday,
wherever I was at 3:15pm. I did this project several times from 2010-2017, the longest of which was 2.5 years. Almost every dance failed, and subsequently revealed of course my standards of definition. The value of the project moved beyond any individual dance and instead became the articulation of said standards, the related potential to dismantle them, and the accumulation of my daily, ongoing, somatic relationship to the world. My body in relationship as a point of research was not isolated to the studio or to a particular way of moving and making. Even if a “failure,” the opportunity and intricacies of any given moment/movement offered rich insight, and the assumptions of my choreographic process were challenged in a way that continues to reshape my creative practice.
These two experiences illuminated my interest in embodied forms already present, in social interactions or the feeling of hearing a word, for example. What is the somatic resonance of any given moment, and what is the choreographic form and potential of that presence? Emotions are material, and attention has a shape – and vice versa. Time is felt but is also variable and in direct dialog with curated attention and energy.
As a performer and an artist working with embodied form as choreographic material, and now a teacher sharing this practice with others, I am actively working to mine these experiences to make, to find both definition and dissolution. The tools of my work are precise and exact, and the attention is rigorous and tender, but the work itself takes the shape of building relationships in real time; it may get messy.
I am currently using the raw material and tasks of action is primary to improvise a speech that is also a dance about my relationship to death and the loss of my father and the relationship between language and somatics – i.e. the material experience of speaking, the response to the sound and the meaning of words and imagery, the abstract expression of emotion. I am doing this through incremental performance and shared studio research and scoring with collaborators. My practice is always agitated and expanded through the involvement of others. It generates new perspectives and demands that I only speak for myself.
-July 2017
I make dances that are highly physical and based in improvisation and intricate scoring. They are collaborative and responsive to their circumstances, up to and including the moment of performance as further research.
For the past seven and a half years I have been developing an improvisational practice called action is primary. The central tenant is to “hold what you are doing at the center of what you are doing, even as it moves/you let it move towards new centers.” action is primary is a mode of making in the moment that examines how attention, imagination, embodied presence, and the ghosts of our choices tumble through form (our form, the dance’s form) in a constant play of regeneration and falling inwards and spilling out. How do we engage with what’s already present, bring our insides to the outside and the background to the foreground? Can we simultaneously engage in self-determined research and build something together with our fullest, perhaps contradictory, and most multiple selves (as many as we want)?
Simultaneously I committed myself to the 3:15 Project, where I did a dance everyday,
wherever I was at 3:15pm. I did this project several times from 2010-2017, the longest of which was 2.5 years. Almost every dance failed, and subsequently revealed of course my standards of definition. The value of the project moved beyond any individual dance and instead became the articulation of said standards, the related potential to dismantle them, and the accumulation of my daily, ongoing, somatic relationship to the world. My body in relationship as a point of research was not isolated to the studio or to a particular way of moving and making. Even if a “failure,” the opportunity and intricacies of any given moment/movement offered rich insight, and the assumptions of my choreographic process were challenged in a way that continues to reshape my creative practice.
These two experiences illuminated my interest in embodied forms already present, in social interactions or the feeling of hearing a word, for example. What is the somatic resonance of any given moment, and what is the choreographic form and potential of that presence? Emotions are material, and attention has a shape – and vice versa. Time is felt but is also variable and in direct dialog with curated attention and energy.
As a performer and an artist working with embodied form as choreographic material, and now a teacher sharing this practice with others, I am actively working to mine these experiences to make, to find both definition and dissolution. The tools of my work are precise and exact, and the attention is rigorous and tender, but the work itself takes the shape of building relationships in real time; it may get messy.
I am currently using the raw material and tasks of action is primary to improvise a speech that is also a dance about my relationship to death and the loss of my father and the relationship between language and somatics – i.e. the material experience of speaking, the response to the sound and the meaning of words and imagery, the abstract expression of emotion. I am doing this through incremental performance and shared studio research and scoring with collaborators. My practice is always agitated and expanded through the involvement of others. It generates new perspectives and demands that I only speak for myself.
-July 2017