Artist Statement 1

Dance is my language.
It is eloquent and honest with the power to move, disturb, provoke, inspire, disrupt, elevate and alter.
My choreography is an offering, an attempt to speak something of the soul through movement.
My dances are lamentation, longing, suffering, desire, exuberance, irreverence, subversion, inquiry, rage, frustration, meditation, reflection, and explosion. As I create them, I look for the lyric and the narrative; I move from heartbreak and outrage; I seek sublimity, nuance, and disturbing beauty.
They are always molded from a sensual movement impulse, shaped through a vision and love of form, and performed with a reverence for the earth and the human body.

My work is strongly woman-identified, and culturally expansive and inclusive. I have a reputation as a dancer’s dancer and a dancer’s choreographer for my sheer love of lush, sensual movement and my insistence on making choreography in which movement is the primary vehicle of communication.
I am drawn toward collective artistic ventures in which my own talents are stretched, where I can be challenged by scale and by strong collaborators, and where we may rally our artistic efforts to maximize their impact.

At this point in my career, I want to use my skill, craft, and vision to make dances that deal with issues of social change. I want to create partnerships with local, national, and international communities in order to bring attention to important issues, to inspire activism, and to inject the possibility of transformation and beauty to even the most difficult subjects. Each project I undertake now involves a multifarious yet like-minded group of artists and activist collaborators, creating community around the work and the issues.

Artist Statement 2

I live between the lines, straddling worlds, dancing complexity and nuance. My gesture seeks the quiet mind where we create revolution. Refraining from the automatic, I interrogate hierarchy as it plays its power out in motion. I believe that dance is the birthright of all beings; that the body is a site of wisdom, knowledge, and imagination.
This is a womanist dance aesthetic that honors the sacred and the profane, the high and the low, the collective and the individual, the formal and the ordinary. I embrace my contradictions as the deliciousness of what is. I believe in the possibility of the real in the face of overwhelming abstraction. I want to fight by yielding always to the necessary. Dance is my necessity.

I am a question, pushing toward the silenced with an ever-evolving language of movement.
I move on the edge, untying knots, turning emotion into sinuous movement thoughts.
I see obstacles, climb walls, grapple with treasures and reach toward the touch.
I am an explorer of breath inside the word.
I am sometimes a silent, soft creature, sometimes a dervish with spindly hands.
My questions expand into the sensuous, unearthing a disturbed quivering.
I am a conflict of textures, a stream flowing, a vine creeping, a violated web.
I dance the loosely evocative, swinging hearts from the intersections and wading through broken brambles.
I endure the anguished, beckoning “ahhh”.

“… I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
… I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
– Mary Oliver