Artist Statement

I am interested in creating dance works of explosive physical vitality and immediacy. My performance projects find productive tension between abstraction and sensory states, the constraints of formal composition and improvisation, and the pursuit of individual agency while creating community. I aim to build dances that are simultaneously individual and communal, chaotic and simple, and propose dancing as a mode of choreographing, and choreographing as a mode of being. 

With each new project I relish challenging my creative process in search of new avenues of experimentation and discovery. Inspired by the thinking and problem solving that is possible through collaboration, I am continually driven to reach outside my discipline—towards experimental music, engineering, architecture, visual art, and anatomy—to ask how the questions and methodologies that drive innovation in other fields can spark movement inquiry and open up new frontiers of choreographic knowledge. 

Two events in my teens sparked my decades long creative investigations into survival, and how we negotiate real-time layers of collaboration in life and art: my fracturing of three vertebrae while I was a Juilliard student, and a workshop with Sally Banes in Post-Modern performance. One event was a profound disruption, the other offered a subversive way forward—each required resourcefulness and invention. 

My life-long fascination with science has been especially integral to my artistic process. Linking dance and science together has led me to creative breakthroughs in movement vocabulary and choreographic design, and informed the scientific research and publications of my collaborators. 

Over three decades, my work has increasingly emphasized a coming together of disciplinary forms—equally influencing each other—and the choreography of continuously adapting, dynamically responsive, emergent systems on stage and in the studio.