DANCE  ARTIST

When I was a toddler, my mother called me “chil’ren.” She tells me that I scurried throughout my childhood home and made enough noise for multiple children. I hid in cabinets, bustled up and down stairs, crashed pots and pans together, and entertained myself with the magnificence of sound and movement.

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A fascination with sound and movement begat a love for music, dance, and telling stories about those two things, thus informing my journey as a dance artist, writer, and scholar. The interplay between music and a moving body has and always will be sacred to me. 

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There are no doubts in my mind that dance artists are superhuman: we explore the capabilities of the human body with curiosity, vigor, and boundless elegance. We completely embody the depth and heights of the human experience emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We are vessels for truth and clarity. 

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I value dance for the strength, emotional freedom, and agency it provides me. I feel limitless as my body bends, stretches, contracts, expands, flies, or crawls throughout space.

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I study and write about dance from the sociohistorical and cultural lenses because I am drawn to the embodied history that is inherently placed within a dancer and their role in storytelling. When a dancer learns a new step or style, this person is tapping into a wealth of physical archives and shared narratives. The body can serve as an artifact, and writing immortalizes the ephemeral nature of each performance. 

 

I am eager to learn all the ways in which my body has been colonized in order to shape a storytelling practice and philosophy that is decolonized, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and pro-freedom.

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