STATEMENT

I am in search of new gestures. As a dance and performing artist, I engage the incipiency. I lean into the spacetime before gesture crystallizes. I disrupt bodily movement habits and patterns in the process of their forming. I construct embodied situations through scores (using language in very specific ways to craft written and verbal sets of movement tasks, a type of choreography) in which I then activate and sustain perceptual disorientation, asking what it might reveal about being, doing and relating, within the multidimensional dynamics of difference/s. I am preoccupied by questions of ethical relationality, which I investigate through artistic practice and academic inquiry. I take a practice-based-research approach to my work, engaging with the experiential dynamics of relationality – with self, objects, others and environment – and querying the aesthetics of ethics. My work is performative and participatory. The lived body-subject and the poetics of human movement are my materials.

My expertise lies in movement, perception and the lived, experiencing body. My practice is artistic in that it germinates in the aesthetic-poetic field, drawing from and working through aesthetic movement and performance methods. Feminist, phenomenological and performance theories inflect my thinking and weave throughout. My work cleaves to the principle that artistic research offers a valuable mode through which new knowledge manifests (Nelson, Spatz, Barton). New knowledge, in my work, percolates through the body, arising first from aesthetic movement practice and somatic attention. But it is not only of an artistic nature; it also holds relevance across the fields of humanities. In order to be shared with others and disseminated as knowledge, my work requires active participation and experiential engagement, and modal translations into linguistic and audio-visual forms. I have and continue to develop specific methods for engagement with and translation of my work, including performance-installation, somatic writing, participatory-performative facilitation, text-based analysis and audio/video renderings.

We are in the world in motion. We come to know our world and each other through movement – the movement of perception, of our senses and of our bodies in action. As movement practice and performance, dance offers a unique situation for focussed study of this fundamental body-world relationality and the germination of meaningfulness in the context of change.

My work as scholar, educator, facilitator and writer/editor reveals my commitment to the exploration of our body-world situation and to the translation of perceptual and movement experiences in order to articulate them and share them across disciplines and fields of practice. I extend this commitment in my work through performances, facilitated conversations, print and online media content, practice-based research and writing, and in a variety of educational contexts. I explore somatic ways of ‘thinking” that yield distinct knowledge about self, world and relationality. Like others, I believe that this somatic knowledge can contribute to positive change in our being-in-the-world – together.

Context

The fabric of our socio-political existence is contextual and relational. At its core, it is embodied, and performative (Butler). We manifest, reinforce and sustain the social fabric through our bodily actions and expressions – through the repetition of gestures (Ahmed), that arise in the incipiency (Manning) through our lived engagement within the world (Merleau-Ponty). Our movement habits and patterns ground our lived experience and connectivity, and they generate the very processes and structures that dominate our lives – our ways of being, doing, relating. These habits and patterns become an un-questioned and repeating background or baseline that constrains and limits our perceptions, expressions and relations.

Now, more than ever, we face a reckoning. It is clear our structures and ways of being and doing no longer serve; in fact, as many would argue, they never have. Our predominant, embodied habits and patterns of relationality – with self, objects, others and our environment (built and natural) – constrain us to fixed, biased, oppressive, racist and unethical structures and dynamics. We are all implicated, differently, in the crises of these times. 

In this context, embodied performance practice and creation is at the cutting edge of provocation and inquiry.