Dance, as both historical artifact and contemporary practice, is the subject that leads my work. Whether located as an artistic discipline, a set of physical techniques, or as an intersection of rituals and community, I am deeply curious about dance’s liberatory potential--as a model for emergence or a force of resistance to structures of domestication. My work intersects a highly visual and visceral space between site and the body, where performance offers an event within which to explore relationships between architecture, geography, domesticity, gender, soma-politics, materiality & affect, participatory practice, and private/public space. I’m inspired by performance that deconstructs assumptions of the discipline, “dancing across the aisles” and investing in post-studio and paratextual modes of production.

My research is driven by the ways that bodies inflect sites, spaces, and material contexts. Whether performance, text, or workshop, I start with its where—choreography becomes the map and dance the articulation of its landing. As an artist whose work engages architecture, geography, land- and urban-scape through choreography, performance, film, and writing, I encounter site in terms of its contingency, context, and indeterminacy as much as its contemporary use and historical stratifications. Choreography offers a means by which to peer into and map silences of history, and dance becomes corporeal divining rod that detects ephemeral memory and its sensorial multivocalities. Performance excavates the charged nature of site, which, not unlike the body, enacts social projects of remembering and forgetting, of cultivation and wildness, of access and resistance. My current project investigates dance and arts activism as it intersects forest protection and conservation, through the lens of what I theorize as epiphytic choreographies. If a dance happens in the middle of the forest and there is no one there to see it, did it really happen? Yes, and yes. Through arboreal relation and listening, how can the dancer mobilize a post-anthropocentric theatre? How can we cultivate a more-than-human stage?

Consideration of where we place our bodies helps me understand the politics of how dance lands, how history becomes geography, and choreography as a practice that rehearses these inscriptions across bodies and sites.