Concept, Music, & Performance 

Artist Statement

Two years ago, right before COVID gripped the world, I decided I needed to grow my hair out and create a solo. I wasn’t sure why…

The time and space afforded to me during my homebound period of the pandemic triggered the processing of deep body trauma experienced during my nearly two decade “professional” dance career. During those first months of the pandemic I was writing, making music, discovering a new drawing practice, and swimming through How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I was using Paulo Virno’s Virtuosity and Revolution to help me formulate the idea of the death of virtuosity. This had obvious implications to me in regards to the commodification of my body and labor as a professional concert dancer for nearly two decades. They say that dancers have two deaths; one at the end of their careers and one at the end of their life. I was feeling this “first death” in major ways that echoed out through my body and compelled me to make. This gave way to more research around labor, work, and action, as defined by French theorist Hannah Arendt, and how these modes affect bodies in spaces.I was equating this idea of the death of virtuosity to the zeitgeist of late stage capitalism, to the cracking of colonialism and whiteness, and locating this cracking in me as well.I was revitalized at imagining new futures for my body, and moving with it as a site of possibility. I desired to make new forms, both in my body and in spaces. I experimented with equating my body to rooms, as a way to broaden my consciousness and challenge my perception. I played with recorded text from the aforementioned Body Without Organs, manipulated it in varying ways, and danced with it. I drew bodies with morphing shapes and lines, and used them as improvisational scores to generate movement. I pondered my future body, the one that comes after the death of virtuosity, the body on the horizon of the not-yet-here queerness from Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia. I moved with thought models outlined in A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari, particularly the Rhizome as “an image of thought” and “mode of knowledge.” I operationalized a queer reach in my body, after reading about bodily orientation in Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomonology.

These experiences and practices have now synthesized into a crescendo of expression that has returned, once again, to my body. It is simultaneously a death and a rebirth, a compression and a contraction, and a swim in the vast ocean of in betweenness.