Artist Statement
I am a movement artist.
My approach to performance explores choreography as a visualization of tacit directives. I look to the ways personal history, site, social or economic pressures, and the weight of tradition constantly inscribe bodies to perform. At the same time, I believe in dance’s capacity to surprise, to refuse or triumph over expected ways of moving and being.
I have the fantastic desire to occupy impossible positions when I dance, and that desire coming into contact with the limits of reality is where my choreography emerges.
My solo and ensemble works incorporate custom-made objects. For example, in a recent solo, Up to the Elbows, my body contends with six soft sculptures, the total of which equals my weight. I consider such sculptures as co-choreographers in that they expand, or restrict, a dancer’s range of movement. For me, watching a body confronting objects in performance speaks to independent strivings tempered by factors outside one’s control.
I rehearse and perform a testing of limits, attempting to reach beyond the confines of my body, of expectation, a given space, timeframe, or situation.
Examining limits inevitably involves failure, and the performing body is where we often see dreams collide with physical reality. My practice embraces this fallibility and acknowledges that fantastic attempts result in varying combinations of prescience, pitifulness, beauty, absurdity, and triumph.