Artistic Statement

I am not only interested in undercovering the juxtaposition of movement qualities, but also how those words and concept affect a person on a human level. As a dancer, artist, and human, I strive to create movement with a juxtaposition that aims to share either a narrative or a concept. In pairing two movement qualities against each other, I find that I can highlight the complexities of the story being created by the piece, whether there is a clear story line for the audience to follow, or an abstract concept that has multiple facets. Working with two contrasting ideas also pushes me as a maker and mover to push myself to discover the innuendos inside each movement quality and how they can pair together. Most recently, I created a piece inspired by the disease of Alzheimer’s that aimed to juxtapose movement with fluidity against abrupt pedestrian movement to show the progression of the disease. This piece was personal to me and my family, so finding movement to express not only what he was going through, but also what his support system was going through was incredibly challenging yet healing process that allowed me to understand the layers of this disease and its impact. The idea that the broken mind that could never be healed must be carried on by the people that person loves was the narrative that I strove to portray to my audience. I had many conversations with my dancers about my own personal experience in this situation for them to understand where I was coming from choreographically as well as emotionally. To help their own embodied experience, I used different pieces of photography, poems, and journaling exercises to help them not only connect to the movement, but connect to each other. By utilizing two different ideas, my hope is to not only push myself, but my dancers in discovering different complexities in themselves. My goal is to portray this concept to the audience in the hopes that audience overall grasps the bigger narrative, but each individual audience member has their own interpretation of the dynamics and complexities portrayed on stage.