Artist Statement

I am invested in creating fiercely rigorous dance work which creates compositions that abandon protocol and embrace a highly saturated and dramatic mode of construction. I defer to the bold catharsis of repetition where deep subterranean worlds and improvisational scores are met with my choreography. Trust is somehow upheld in this meeting and a dramatic visual tapestry creates a jagged terrain. I create work that is both heart-on-sleeve and cerebral.

Since 2017 I have been investing in the immediate nature of past experiences, embedded memories and mythology which take root in the flesh of our bodies and play out in the present time. These corporeal memories and associations are often excessive and act as source materials for content, choreography, and influences. Here they are both celebrated and crashed into, with our present-day perspectives. For my performers and for myself, these forms often act as an antagonist, a bully they consistently run up against. Through this battle, I stay watchful for a point of transformation, a place where the body can shed these tyrannical forms and be distilled to something more essential. We work with rigorous practices and an honest porousness that allows vulnerability, life force, and failure to seep out of the cracks.

I am invested in making dances that have a force and a power to frighten me. It's not always easy to see one's personal history broken down, yet our lived experience deserves to be embodied in all its moments of conformity, confusion, and catharsis.

Early in my process, I layer the body with complications. I direct the dancers to work with impossible feats of polyrhythms within strict structures while transparently performing. I work to expose the multiple layers of tension inherent in durational practices, the confines of architecture, and the plight of staying inside material that you want to escape.

I use my own fears, ancestry, and shadow-self as the primary tool for conception in my work. I look to my own nervous system to establish the rhythmic score of my dances and push it to establish a primal drive. I ask my dancers to participate in the breakdown of my formal scores by unleashing their deepest instincts, efforts, and desires in my dances. Each work I make acts as a part of a greater whole: existing together in a spherical orb of impressions and recollections that breed within my subconscious. Much of the material gets edited, but what has been left leaves behind ash that remains embedded in the dance. There is a robust sense of friction, dissimilarity, and coexistence, which creates a space that is meditative, righteous, and casual. This juxtaposition is as alarming as it is soothing and identifies authorship and a unique “aboutness” in all of my works.