Blog

Today while driving home, I heard an episode of the TED radio hour that gave me new ways of articulating why the practice of contact improvisation is so fulfilling to me. Yes, I find CI creatively fulfilling. It is part of my artistic life and I love the challenge of shaping a satisfying sequence while… [Read More]

Sara Ahmed reclaims the word feminism and shares her deeply intersectional view of the daily work of feminism in her 2017 book Living a Feminist Life. Grounded in lived experience (the author’s and those of a variety of literary figures, feminist scholars, friends, colleagues, etc.), this book is (for me anyway) an easier read than… [Read More]

The term queer theory floats around in academic settings a great deal these days, cross-pollinating with daily discourse in more and more dance artist’s practices. What does it really mean? The new-to-me book Queer: A Graphic History (2016) is a great way to find out! This slim volume (174 pages) presents a remarkably comprehensive and… [Read More]

Here are some excerpts from my article Queering Contact Improvisation, published in Contact Quarterly in 2017: There’s an interesting tension around gender in CI. On the one hand, CI seems to have nothing to do with gender—there are no assigned gender roles in this dance form. On the other hand, we bring our humanity with… [Read More]

A reflection after teaching a week-long Gender&CI workshop at the Tanzfabrik Sommer Tanz festival (assisted by Diana Thielen). At the end of the Sommer Tanz festival, I find myself incredibly grateful for the opportunity Tanzfabrik provided to move deeper into my current research.  This was the third time in the two year life of this… [Read More]

Gender is not just an idea we have in our minds– rather it is something we DO.  It lives in our bodies — in our movements, our gestures, our posture. It is a daily performance.  It is part of how we organize our physicality, how we relate to the space around us, how we interact… [Read More]