I am most interested in making work that is emotionally urgent. Through movement, I try to externalize internal states and to expose some truth about the complicated nature of our relationships to each other and ourselves.

 

The emotional presence of the performer is very important to me. I build my choreography around the experience of the person inside the movement, their unfolding thought process, and their relationship to what is happening to/within them. I’m interested in the performer being energetically permeable, so that the audience can perceive both their internal and external states. This brings a humanness to the performance that I find compelling.

 

My dances often use familiar objects like staplers and suitcases that serve as reference points to the reality I’m exploring in the dance. They can also be visual or perceptual metaphors that I manipulate to change the way they or the dance is seen. In the same way, I often use text spoken by the performers and/or as voice-over.

 

Collaboration with my performers is essential to my process. I work with each performer to identify what is the most vivid or unique about their movement and stage presence. I place those qualities at the center of their material, magnifying and shaping them into a movement vocabulary. The resulting movement tends to be gestural, intimate, emotional, and/or theatrical, rather than abstract or focused on formal elements.

 

There is often conflict in my work - between characters, between the characters and their environment, or within the characters. As the conflicts unfold, place, time and other theatrical/narrative elements are established and then warped and changed in a dreamlike manner. When conflicts are played out within the context of dream logic, I can rearrange their parts in such a way as to reveal something about us, our choices, and our experiences.