artist’s statement

What I do, is make things up. My struggles, questions, history and perspective are at work in the movement, language, images, and encounters that I, with a wide range of collaborators, imagine and bring to life. Fiendish or sweet, austere or awkward, elliptical or candid, these ideas take shape and emerge through affectionate attention to improvisation and play. I relish mischievous ambitions, and seek to sideswipe the conventions of proper comportment and expectation. Inevitably, there is an autobiographical dimension to my explorations, and the implications of the coming ecological crisis, the ongoing ravages of social and racial injustice, the disruption of power hierarchies (white privilege), and geopolitical influences infiltrate my process.

My ideas about performing and performance resound with contradictions. The tension around difference plays out in both serious and hilarious ways. Where is the reliable truth about people and how they behave together? Why aren’t things what they seem? Lately, these questions offer starkly bleak answers. My affection for literature, language, film, animals, food, fashion, mistakes, reckless and embarrassing exploits, a diverse range of music, agitprop, traveling and the natural world inevitably shape my approaches and outcomes.

I am compelled by intimacy, longing, seduction and treacherous motives and maneuvers. I’m drawn to stories, sensations, scenarios that have caused, purposefully or by mistake, a warp or crater. I love to watch the ways that bodies react to unfamiliar situations—things that come up unbidden, in the moment. I love dancing and creating movement that stings, bites and devours, and is also deeply tender. I love the names of things, and getting categories wrong. I want to slake a deep thirst, and along the way address and wrestle with thorny topics with high frequency attention and physicality.

Dance Making and Collaborations

In my dance making, both solo and group works and in collaborations with other artists, I seek inventive and unanticipated intersections between narrative and abstract forms, opening the way for my work to come to life in a vivid, unexpected and compelling way.
Locating the heart of each project can feel like chasing a moving target, a shifting frame of focus that sometimes feels like an unruly alchemy of coincidence, pleasure, desperation and enchantment.