Artist's Statement

seeking stasis start

moving through my memories

to find me in me

 

That haiku was my first artist statement. It well describes my research and choreography practice: layered, deliberate and personal.

 

Much of my current research focuses on zombies.  Pop culture appeal aside, zombies and the zombie narrative are an incredibly flexible metaphor that can be applied to mindfulness and agency in performance studies, creating a student-centered approach to dance pedagogy, and the value of inclusiveness in arts advocacy.  Zombies are also a safe other; rarely does one want to hear their point of view.  Horror scholar Noel Carroll said that society is most afraid of things ‘out of place’.  As a black woman, I can relate to this otherness, of feeling out of place, but that intersection between the status quo and the other is an exciting space where the mixture gets shaken and something new may be born from it.

 

My interest in quilting has many parallels, not just with my choreographic process but also with my zombie research.  The quilting process includes fragmentation, re-assembly and juxtaposition.  Society parcels me into easy, consumable and quantifiable pieces, a rather dehumanizing process that does not accurately reflect me.  My research and choreographic practice is not just an effort to understand those pieces but to re-member them into the image I wish to present to the world.  This process is slow and messy, but one in which I am an active participant much unlike society’s fragmentation process of me.

 

My research and choreography cycle around various themes: Self-Other, Part-Whole, Mobility-Stability, but I have come to recognize that these seemingly either/or dualities are really just viewing the same thing from a different perspective and that all of my work explores the universal and the personal.  To quote one of my teachers, William (Bill) Evans, “We are all having the same experience and yet we are all having a different experience.”