About my work

My dance making process tends to start with creative research, often combining  different modes of generating material (writing, vocal, movement, drawing) exercises.

The practice tends to become scored  improvisation or choreography. I am attracted to working with sensory explorations, release imagery, elements of contact improvisation, work with qigong inspired energetics.

I am also drawn to layered cumulative facilitation of movement to produce effect of sensory opening in solo or group awareness. The abandon of known happens, and the unknown emerges, often in synchronicity and unexpected, which to me feels ‘right’ or satisfying.

Dancing to practice pleasure, satisfaction, the connection to one’s erotic, is one of the primary reasons for doing dance. 

I prioritize approaching dance research as a series of questions answered by uncovering the embodied unknown.  how to craft research process as structure to invite other into is what I find worth exploring in making work. 

I love practices that disengage the critical solution oriented, goal oriented mind, and release the state of flow, underneath all the effort, boredom, frustration, habits, and exhaustion. I crave spontaneity and deep trust when I see satisfying dance, or when I am dancing.  It was the ease of shifting into trance of unmind that seduced me towards seeing creativity as valuable. It has fed my soul in a sudden realization, I don’t have to be an observer, I can be a participant, in power to shed identities and be reborn, shape shifting, transformed.

My work explores devised score work, working with energetics (channels, internal energy externalized in movement, elemental approach to body), studying physicality and dynamic movement through space, choreographing space and content guided by scores as ideas that allow the dancing people to constantly engage with the present moment, their own consciousness curiosity in dialogue with themselves and their environment, perceived or imagined. 

I critically engage with challenging themes- emigration, resistence to patriarchy, queer identity, internalized violence, search for connection. 

How do I share to heal broken stories of survival? How do I become visible, witnessed, heard, responded to? 

And what are the implications of an individual being acknowledged, for society? How would it begin to change if everyone became visible and heard, received? How does creative practice bridges isolation and facilitates unity? How do I take part in collective liberation in this country, and the one I left? 

I try to be guided by the desire to be a narrator, while aware of dance having its own syntax of expression. I am curious about arriving at the unexpected moments, inspired by desire to express something through language, yet collapsing into another dimension of choices made outside of picture making expectations.

Experience of participating in physical theater trainings inspired a different emphasis on imagination, poetics, and connecting stories to audience then I tend to cultivate through dance. Work that embraces communal ritual, collaborations with activists or educators, embracing the sense of the place, is very interesting to me, and I am still developing my relationship to that way of making bridges towards the narrative modes of presenting performance. I really appreciate the work that engages in social justice dialogue while being rooted and returning to the body.  

I believe in the power of performance to present a political narrative. Private/public identities of people’s bodies carry specific patterns of constraint, often for reasons beyond their control. Because in this globally changing world political bodies are viewed very differently than actual selves, As an emigrant I am often drawn to healing from invisibility, and the experience of marginalized people. How do people claim their sense of control back, not only intellectually, but also physically and creatively, is my inquiry. 

For these reasons I am often drawn to cross disciplinary experiments, cross cultural collaborations, considering them potent fertile and supportive not just threw creating a product but also nurturing human connections of understanding. 

St Maurice #3

Directed by Ann Glaviano, performed in 2019 & 2018, experimental performance dance shows series, Known Mass, St Maurice. Structured improvisation. This is 2019 promo video.