Artist Statement

I am a North Carolina based performer, educator, and choreographer.  My choreography and research is motivated with the idea that the body is a burial ground for suffering, love, joy, and grief; a permeable landscape that activates movement.  

The global vocabulary of my dancing is generated from the pelvis, or what i refer to as “the undercarriage”.  I prefer movement, objects, and bodies that are stark and direct; unadorned and naked.  in this aesthetic, the concept of the body as artifact becomes brutally honest.  these realities are seen in unbrushed hair, stiff and awkward gestures of the spine, and the  jiggle-jangle of flesh. These descriptions of bodies / creatures/ things in motions are seen in site specific work and dance for camera, where lens and location become equal collaborators.

I approach my interdisciplinary research with absurdity, humor, and improvisation making these themes central to producing choreography that is viscerally disruptive and upon first glance presents as chaotic and messy.  Clarity is delivered through hyper-focused set material in solo and group or through the catharsis of creating sing-a-long/dance-a-long moments where audiences and performers enmesh to disrupt cultural assumptions and optics around performance.

I see dance and choreography as a civic duty, therefore, i make my work accessible to dancers and people who do not consider themselves dancers.  Using quotidian movements to re-introduce people to the functional design of their individual body, my work focuses on the objective of a particular movement, rather than its visual aesthetics.   Philosophically, i recognize choreography as a system that can address problems and abstract qualities of human life.   Research rooted in trauma theory, disability studies, memory studies, pilates, and contemporary american dance are enmeshed in my choreography and are relied on to answer ongoing curiosities within these specific fields.