artist statement

I am a choreographer and artist who plays with the slippage between different mediums. I’ve created movement-based performance and installation projects since 1998.

My creative process circulates around relational intelligence and building it with my audience. By this I mean, I intentionally create interactions with viewers that spark a sense of intimacy, even if it is just for the moment of the encounter. Regardless of whether my performances appear live or mediated, I am invested in this moment of audience encounter, how it shapes and gives ‘charge’ to the event, and how the seemingly self-absorbed act of performance can become empathic and generous. I leave space for the viewer to place themselves into my world, sometimes asking if the roles of performer and viewer could be reversed.

My work has always stemmed from somatic practices – integrating the body and the mind. I realize that this continues to be a radical act. I assert the importance of our contending with the complexity of our full selves, so that we can truly see one another in all our rich specificity. The felt sense of our own bodies often serves as a starting point.

I first created video projections within my live performance projects in 2001. Since then, I’ve blurred the edges between the live and the digital, an interest which followed in parallel to the ways the internet, social media, and digital technology evolved over this same time-period. While we sometimes think of screens as becoming all-consuming, where the viewer loses their sense of their body, I’m more interested in pushing against this – instead asking how technology might become a mirror, a space of imagination and even reconnection.

My projects aim to equalize media by seamlessly moving from one to the next – as different modes of perception and qualities of thought. Even in work that uses no ‘technology’ at all – I shift from perception inside my body to outside, from the pre-lingual to the textual, echoing a similar process to documentation. It is in my work as a videographer producing performance documentation that I’ve come to truly understand viewing and editing. I choreograph the watching of a performance, choosing where to direct the viewer’s eye. This act of editing – its rhythm, timing – often feels intuitive and improvisational, just like my role as a director and performer.

I use mediated forms – video and writing – to articulate what is happening in the ephemeral moments of the improvisations I make. I approach different mediums in a choreographic manner. I intuitively generate images and then use choreographic methods to manipulate and change them. I use these images as scores for subsequent improvisations, translating from one medium to another. Instead of ‘telling a story,’ I willfully eschew linearity for some other kind of logic. Instead, the associative takes precedence. It is through the moving body that the subject becomes the object, and where personal narrative becomes abstract, staying beyond language.