I am passionate about cultivating the joy, wisdom and power of movement to teach us about ourselves, create community, question hierarchies, speak truth and imagine new visions of the future.
The pleasure of the body moving with rhythm, weight, texture, breath, power, sensitivity is the calling that keeps me rooted in dance and in life. However, for me, committing my life to the pleasure of dance means also looking outward for what dance can do and what we can do with dance.
Throughout my career, I’ve been asking versions of the same question: how can dance make a difference? My answers have changed over the years as has where I look for answers – the stage, the rehearsal studio, the contact improvisation jam, the classroom. I also find myself wondering more and more how I can make a difference in the field of dance.
I hold a vision for dance that is anti-elitist and embracing of all the many, many forms dance takes. Post-modern dance is the center of my training and art practice, but it is not what I take “dance” to mean. It is not the center. There is no center.
My experience of dancing is enriched by asking questions about representation, power, and privilege.
Whose bodies are welcome, valued, included, and invited in this dancing?
What hierarchies and power dynamics are going unquestioned in our dance practices?
Where are we reproducing patterns of bias or oppression?
More and more I am interested in work that creates insight and joy in the moment, within and between people who are moving, more so than in work that goes to an audience. Transformation person-to-person.
I value real touch, human contact — in dancing on and off the stage.
Deep physicality and intellectual engagement, too.
And an awareness of context.
