My choreographic praxis and performative language integrates Qi Energetics, systems of improvisation, subtle Butoh principles, eco-drag, club dancing, and voice. I am often giving my body what I need when I perform and am moved through space-time via embodied resonance, intuition, and desire. Currently, I am researching and honing a practice called EDGING, which is connected to the idea of allowing the body to become a channel. EDGING involves slowing down, working incrementally and with micro-movements, and surrendering to the power of the unseen. This practice reveals the hidden potency of the tongue and heart unified, where it is safe to speak one’s truth and feasible to give oneself permission to __________.
This practice involves bodies moving, congregating, galvanizing, sweating, charging, grieving, loving, and embodying cellular change. EDGING activates itself through the power of our desires and reveals what is possible when we stop apologizing for our existence. EDGING invites you to notice the things in your life that you may be overlooking and to welcome them back home with compassion. EDGING invites you to acknowledge and name what you are most afraid of so that you can finally outgrow old narratives and move towards a specific direction. EDGING oscillates between opacity, transparency, and invisibility. It is the act of making one choice after another with as much clarity of intention as possible. This practice becomes circumscribed by other practices: WANDERING, ACCUMULATION, INHABITING PARADOX, PRESENCE-ING, BURROWING, SIMMERING that allow the choreographic scores that I orchestrate to become layered, like an archaeological excavation site except it is my body, our bodies, that become the mediums for transmutation. This is how I engender constellations of care.
Because the future is now.
I am here to get to know the one who sees through me, my Spirit, an amalgamation of all that has come before and has yet to materialize. This is my primary collaborator.
My journey with performance began in a Pentecostal church where I wrestled with integrating my queer and spiritual identities; a paradox that I wrestle with to this day. This passion for embodied expression became further substantiated in high school when I had to choose between a sport or an artistic elective each term. Having to make this choice landed me within dance studios that allowed me to access movement as a mechanism for grounding during moments of emotional turbulence. These moments included a deportation I experienced within my family along with other moments of trespass that came to light. It was not until I attended Williams College that I became aware of the field of somatics as a discrete constellation of forms that would expand my perceptual intelligence and radically alter my choreographic praxis. At Williams, I was able to author my own curriculum in Dance & Performance Studies, which included studying abroad in Berlin for an entire year. This exchange opened my consciousness to an international contextualization of experimental performance that situated my own work within endurance art and healing-based frameworks. I view my choreography as ritualistic topographies, often in the frame of imaginary club spaces where the dancefloor becomes the site of and for embodied unraveling.
Artistic mentors I have worked with include: Michael Kliën, Margit Galanter, Carolyn North, Dana Michel, Daria Faïn, and many others. At a workshop I took with Michael in New York City in 2015, I became aware of my body as having the capacity to channel quantum field energy. It was the first time I felt in dialogue with multiple dimensions of time, where I became bigger than my physical self. This experience led me to Michael’s PhD dissertation, Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change, that helped me understand that I was choreographing performative excavation sites. This workshop widened the scope of what choreography and performance could be and what it could do further instigating a desire to collaborate with quantum physicists, designers, architects, farmers, visual artists, and tech developers in initiatives I will launch via The Universe of Rhizomatic Tenderness. In Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar, he offers the following question that becomes a directive for my own curatorial and choreographic work, “Can design be extricated from its embeddedness in modernist defuturing practices and redirected towards other ontological commitments and performances?” To me, choreography is a viable method for designing templates of queer futurity that can be rehearsed and birthed through the body.
I turn to the bees as additional mentors and energetic architects who point towards the power of collective embodied acts. In the The Song of Increase by Jacqueline Freeman she writes, “The vibration of multiple bee presences reverberates throughout the hive by way of the comb. Simultaneously, each of us is individually present, contributing our place within the hive’s Unity, and each of us is also the whole of the hive. All of us together communicate to the Unity the hive’s full combined presence.” With the world becoming more polarized, somatic performances in dialogue with transition design is how I envision manifesting equitable futures. We must attend to these issues at the level of the root, through our own bodies first. I view my role as an artist, mentor, guide, and facilitator as one who is supporting our collective shift consciousness and behavior through writing and performance.