About Me
I value dance as a transformative art form that inspires continual discovery of self, and in turn how the self relates to others and functions within community. I believe my work as both a choreographic artist and dance educator stands upon and reflects these ideals. By engaging with and prompting questions, while exploring multiple perspectives, my choreographic work endeavors to draw a viewer into the work before them. My current, and I suspect, lifelong dance research investigations stem from how performance enters into all aspects of our lives. I question how our countless performative roles contribute enrichments or ruptures within relationships and communities. I am particularly interested in the vulnerability, uncertainty, beauty and ugliness inherent in the exposure of these manufactured ways of being, and hope to reveal genuine human truths through my artistic processes.
My movement design and aesthetic blends flourishes of athleticism with nuanced gesture and intimate partnering material. Often beginning with a narrative idea or research inquiry, I use improvisational prompts, writing, and collaborative contributions to investigate the concept and allow for my dances to portray an abstracted, wider perspective, and exist in a world of their own. I often see my dances as representing multiple moments in time from multiple perspectives at once, or as though they function on a skewed timeline while providing glimpses of various climactic points throughout a story. I fervently value the process of creation, believing that through dance building, a singular community is born between the collaborators. I aim to build works that deeply involve my contributors’ own experiences, insights, and movement signatures, allowing for shared ownership that enhances the performers’ investment in the work.
As a teaching artist, I value the studio as a space of communal growth; a place where the experiences of both the instructor and the students inform one another and heighten the level of development achieved. I am committed to creating a learning atmosphere that is warm and invigorating, while being attentive to each body in the room. Through the use of descriptive imagery, attention to detail and demonstration, I focus my classes on developing reliable foundational alignment and motor pathways to enable movement efficiency, clarity and continuity, but also value the inherent problem-solving skills needed to navigate complex material. I believe the practice of navigating an awareness of space and those that occupy and share it in the studio connects directly to a general, yet vital self-awareness that carries over into all aspects of a dance students’ life.
Just as my own approach in a dance class centers around not simply ‘working,’ but seeking discoveries, surprises and new joys while moving, I promote artistic exploration in my students by prioritizing the concept of choice-making. Even while engaging with fully choreographed phrase material, I believe dancers have the vital agency and responsibility to make an infinite number of artistic choices that allow for growth and an expansion of previously known limitations. I am committed to instilling this sense of ongoing curiosity in my students because I believe it is what establishes the difference between dancer and dance artist. I am eager to see these artistic explorations take place before me, and I constantly seek new information from students’ output that is applicable to the cycle of sharing that should be inherent in every dance classroom. I believe every moment in the dance studio is an opportunity to meet challenges, to discover new ones, to renew, and to engage the whole self with the world; mind and body in harmony on a path of awareness and discovery.