ABOUT

ARTIST STATEMENT

 

​Belonging, Care, Devotion, Memory, Experimentation, Relationship, Ceremony, Listening, Awe, Ecosystems

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​I am a choreographer, herbalist, writer, ritualist, and educator creating transformative interdisciplinary ritual experiences through the prism of dance, creative practice, and performance installation.

My work is the child of many disciplines: dance, mythopoetics, alchemy, neuroscience, oral storytelling traditions, quantum physics, folk herbalism, and psychology are but a handful of the north stars that guide the work.  These interdisciplinary interests, situated in the performance environment, invite ecological storytelling: a tentacular practice of performance, community engagement, collaboration, character development, and spatial relationship that blurs the boundary between audience and performer, inviting a unique experience of embodiment that provokes emotional and spiritual reflection. This body of work also activates various modes of temporality: evening-length performance, hour-long workshops, years-long social practice projects and long-term interdisciplinary research collaborations honors the influence of time on our ability to reach understanding. Placing dance, herbalism, and scholarship in dialogue, my practice involves the creation of interdisciplinary performance; workshops available to professional, pre-professional, and untrained, otherwise curious embodied beings; ritual facilitation; and long-form research projects that foster cross-disciplinary discovery. All performances are designed as experiments: places for asking questions, researching together, and having somatic experiences that may help us to touch the fabric of what it truly feels like to be alive, together.

My mission as an artist is to not only provide transformative experiences through the performance setting, but to also facilitate material change, through emotional and somatic healing, in the lives of those who come into contact with my practice.

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MOVEMENT

When I talk about movement I talk about the presence of the body in the world. Through my practice I use the body as a site to facilitate altered states of consciousness: a consciousness that is rooted in somatic and relational cognition, that creates sanctuary spaces of healing for performers, audiences, and participants. My work is greatly influenced by deep study of the natural and organic world, and revolves around what I have begun to call performance ecosystems: these are methodologies of creative practice that invite all beings, regardless of their prior relationship to movement, into curiosity about the stories that live in the body, and the stories created when we bring movement dialogue between bodies in shared space. These are spaces designed as sanctuaries for emotional, mental, and physical cohesion, and are created to instill in participants a sense of inherent belonging: in their bodies, in community, and in relationship to the environments that they inhabit.

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Through movement I attempt to use the body to touch an animating physical and emotional life force that pulses through all beings. I call this the space between, and utilize performance and workshop environments to ask embodied questions about interstitial spaces: between bodies, between body and landscape, between two ecosystems, between the archive of our body and the imagination of memory, between audience and performer, between our reality and our dreaming, between our emotions and our embodiment, between intellectual, spatial, and embodied cognition, between what we remember and what we forget, between the stories we are told and the ones that we tell ourselves.

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CROSS-DISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION

I use my work as an artist as an opportunity to create long-term research endeavors and archives. Sometimes this involves my own academic pursuits, but it very often involves engaging conversation and web-building with scholars, philosophers, scientists, and artists in other fields whose perspectives enrich and enhance what I am facilitating through the body.  My work is a way to cross boundary lines, and it is an inherent part of my practice to learn and exchange with others in the service of building community. Past and current projects include collaborations with neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, quantum physicists, architects, sculptors, immigrant communities in Queens, NY, musicians, filmmakers, and marine biologists. This embodied discourse finds its origin story in using the body to understand our humanity and the place of that humanity in the world that we inhabit.

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RITUAL​

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I have been fortunate to train extensively in the Earth-based, matrilineal ritual, spiritual, and herbal traditions of my ancestors from Eastern Europe and the Balkan region. Though I have devoted much of the last ten years to these practices, I will forever be a student. It is impossible to underscore enough how influenced I am by these practices, and how much I hope that the body of work I contribute over my lifetime will be in service to carrying forward the lineage, adapting them for contemporary concerns, and welcoming more people into the deep belonging available in shared ritual experiences. Themes of devotion, altered states of consciousness, communal embodiment, connection to mystery, time perception, and healing methodologies are the elements of these practices that most dialogue with the performance and workshop ecosystems that I create. My work aims to bridge the ancient and modern, the mythic and physical, in order to create sanctuary spaces of healing for all.

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HEALING: PERFORMANCE AS A MEDICINAL PRACTICE

Through my work I aim to open up conversations around the complexities of healing, and the reality that this is a non-linear process without destination. Whenever I create a performance, I aim to take my collaborators through a medicinal experience: What is the medicine that you are most in need of right now, and how can this process facilitate that for you? is the first question that I ask any collaborator at the genesis of a new project. This is the primary way that I ensure the work I make is built in service to the community that creates it together, and is the way that I source connections, ideas, and inspirations for the new mythology of a performance work. This process endures whether I am working with other dancers, composers, actors, scientists, archaeologists, etc. In building work this way, from the inside out, I find a deeper listening arrive to be able to hear the precise ecosystem that must be established to welcome an eventual audience into an experience that can be medicinal for them, too. 

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COMMUNITY

Deeply inspired by principles of the Social Sculpture movement and Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, my work is meant for community building. As such, I aim to not only make work about the experiences of community, but to make work that can have material impact within the community whose stories are being shared. This pillar of my work demonstrates my belief that movement is a practice that belongs to all. This also creates a space where performance and embodied experiences might be a place to ask critical questions and to think through them in community, and through the body.

Most notably, I  am currently at work on a massive interdisciplinary social practice and performance, Crucible Body, for which I have been collaborating with psychologists, neurologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists over the last eight years. This work merges my skills as a choreographer, herbalist, and archivist to tell the stories of women who have experienced sexual violence and share the tools of herbalism and movement in service of their healing. 

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