My teaching, performance, and scholarship draws on the theoretical underpinnings, critical issues, and embodied practices that have enabled me to consider the power and efficacy of dance. I am asking: how does one decolonize the body? How do systems of oppression and privilege manifest in one’s physicality, in the experience of the senses, and in the ways in which one moves through the world? How can I better imagine the application of embodied practices to the issues most pressing our society? What shifts in the field can I be responsible for? Particularly salient in my current studio practices is my identity as a cis-gender female. For years, my dance training existed within systems that reinforced dominant cultural values around a woman’s body, its appearance, and function in society. Unknowingly, I viewed myself as an object to be surveyed and perfected. Eventually, I began to question these practices, first finding freedom in improvisational dance forms. Spending hours in the studio alone, I came to see the possibility of dance as a form of research. I began to envision my dance training as a space to explore rather than a place to train a body. Continuing with this decade of research, I have recently drawn on the Alexander Technique principle of undoing. I have created scores that deconstruct learned habits of tightening, narrowing, and collapsing. The scores ask: what does it mean to fill a space, to take up space, to make space? These scores are the foundation of my most recent solo project: The Fact of Flesh, which has been performed in Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas. |