Artist Statement
I find dancing endlessly captivating, and I approach every piece I make as a challenge to isolate an element of movement that fascinates me. Every successful piece is one that I could watch repeatedly and still discover something new by the 100th viewing. Sometimes, I’ll focus on minute details while leaving other elements up to random chance.
Most of my work is guided by religion, politics, how the world works, our relationships, and our emotions and health. Some of my work focuses on war, capitalism, and social strife. I choreographed (Un)Conflicted as a visceral response to society's conditioning to the normality of the American military-industrial complex and the very real human toll. A Rebuttal addressed the losses experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic – and challenged the idea that everything has returned to a true “normal,” that the actual mental toll of such a catastrophe was being swept under the rug and ignored.
I’ve always felt a strange connection to the audience. This connection sometimes awes and sometimes frightens me. A performance requires an audience in some way. Without one, you’re just in a rehearsal. In Emergence, I worked with the dancers to consider the connection with the audience, to visualize each other as an audience, and to spend time embodying the performance space.
There is no such thing as “wrong” dancing. The best performances I’ve seen and had the honor to choreograph stemmed from the dancers’ movement. Structured improvisation is a substance that can be shaped and molded. I use improvisation to develop the work in every piece I create, where the resulting movement or movement score is often solidified into a set form. Improvisational techniques are fundamental to my performance and choreographic process; Mary Starks Whitehouse’s Authentic Movement and Steve Paxton’s The Small Dance are among the tools I use to discover a dancer's movement. Introducing familiar and welcoming movements helps dancers feel more comfortable and confident. Every dance will challenge the dancers, but starting from a place of comfort supports them in overcoming those challenges. The dance isn’t mine to possess; it’s the dancers’ to perform.
I view music less as dictatorial in the choreographic process and more as an element that guides movement in a conversational manner. My brain never stops choreographing when I hear music, to the point of danger – I’ve sometimes fallen into a road-hypnosis-style trance while choreographing during the drive between Northfield and Minneapolis. Before I start choreographing with music, I research its background and study the emotions it evokes, sitting with the music and waiting for movement and a response to arise rather than actively choreographing it. In Emergence, I explored alternate music cuts and spent months listening to them, selecting and editing them before working with other dancers. I become obsessed with music before I use it, listening to it hundreds of times before incorporating it into my work.