PHILOSOPHY
Dance is my praxis. My lens. My axis. I look through it. I center around it.
It is a method of travel, a mode of operation, a great love.
As I see it, we all inhabit a complex theater of movements and behaviors, living within the varied choreographies of relationships, systems, ideas, traditions, elements, forms, bodies, resources. I am concerned with whether or not the choreographies we engage in are good for us and how we learned them—whether they are movements best abandoned or preserved. I want to know about the traditions from which they stem, and play within these traditions, discerning whether to embrace or break them.
I’m devoted to a theology of embodiment--what the body reveals about the divine, what our stories and experiences of the divine and the spirit mean for our bodies, and how all of this affects our relationship to the larger earth body in which we live.
The art of dance is inherently communal. It is a shared form, a collective practice which contains in it the belief that we cannot become well, liberated, whole, and brilliant by ourselves. Many traditional dances are circle dances, honoring our foundational interrelatedness -- the one in the many, the many in the one. Dance, as a way of being, embraces a multi-directional stance -- one that looks back as it moves forward, inward as it moves outward, asking us to find our center within the movement.
As an artist, if I want to interrogate content, I must also interrogate the form which holds it. The way one builds a ceremony is tethered to where it will lead. One can’t use the tools of the oppressors to get free. How you get there is where you arrive.
Dance requires multi-faceted physical, mental, and emotional literacy and flexibility. It demands a deep reverence for varied cultures, methods, and forms in the building of stylistic fluency and diversity. Artists shaped by this methodology emerge with senses and abilities sharpened for the reimagining and rebuilding of culture within and beyond the studio.
Dance is both the studio practice and the movement through the days of one’s life. JOY. IS. CENTRAL. Since joy and sorrow party in the same club, the ongoing dances we need are dances of transformation—doing and redoing the hard, sweaty, gorgeous, heart-wrenching moves of metabolizing loss, bringing forth the courage to keep on regenerating...for justice, for love, for life. This is when our singular attempts in succession start becoming holy labor, high art, big medicine.
It’s an in-and-out, up-and-down, shake-it-out kind of choreography…wake up, stand up, then down to the knees, forehead to earth, get back up, into the streets, onto the stage, move in and out of the light, peer backwards, two step around in the remembering, call out their names, shake off the dust, pull the meaning forward, pack it in the bag, fortify the joints, raise the fist, loosen up the hips, get back in the street, hear a new rhythm, take it to the studio, twirl it out with your friends, twirl it into new form, show what you made to your teachers, listen to what they say, simmer that on the stove a while, now back on your knees, pray, strengthen your ankles, light your candles, taste your cookin’ see if it’s kickin’, listen to your playlist to see if its hittin’, add a pinch of fire, back to the studio, find your groove, and on and on....
This is what we mean in my corner when we say,
I’m a dancer. I love to dance.
It’s a way of saying,
I’m committed to transformation. I’m here for the whole ride.
INTENTIONS & APPROACH
It is my intention to present work that is thoroughly researched, thoughtfully crafted, and articulately executed. I believe that an ability to make pertinent and powerful work is dependent upon being an earnest listener, keen observer, disciplined worker, and daring performer. I do my best to be these things.
I endeavor to make dances that speak clearly and kindly into the lives of real people in real places—work that cultivates sensitivity, physicality, and connectedness in an age that is increasingly mechanized and impersonal. I do this by emphasizing humor, compassion, honesty, and humility in my individual practice, communal process, and public presentation.
I am committed to working with my fellow artists in a respectful and reverent manner. I strive to provide a positive, energized work environment in hopes that my performers and collaborators will be empowered, and feel inspired to bring their whole selves and many gifts to the work.
I consider the audience to be community and family, and my performances to be inclusive offerings made on their behalf. No piece of mine is intended to be an insular occurrence that others are permitted to witness, but a dance “meal” of sorts, offered at a table to which I hope the audience will pull up a chair.
My movement vocabulary is rooted in modern dance methods, Chinese martial arts, Umfundalai African dance, and the music and dance of my heritage—both traditional Greek folk forms and those of the deep South where I was born and raised. I was born on the traditional lands of the Muscogee-Creek peoples, now known as Atlanta, Georgia, on the border of Grant Park and Summerhill.
My family has labored in service to the southern soil and its people for generations before me -- most recently my parents, who have devoted their lives to food security, anti-war and anti-nuclear activism, spiritual community building, advocacy for low-income communities, liberatory education, and art making -- and I honor this lineage by adding the offerings of my own labor and learning.
My work finds its identity at the intersection of traditional and modern, big and small, seen and unseen. I engage in my particular brand of research, risk taking, and collaborative experimentation, and give form to my findings by creating rituals, building hybrid languages, turning things on their side and looking at them that way, and examining the ordinary with an eye for the extraordinary tucked within.
I work to facilitate experiences that are punctuated with small epiphanies that cause the soul to stir.