As a dancemaker, I am interested in playful and unexpected interminglings of dance forms. These days, I have been immersing myself in the comedy, contact improvisation, and swing dance communities in Los Angeles. I feel there is much to be discovered in the relationship between improvisational comedy and improvisational dance, and I enjoy calling attention to where dance ends and something else begins. My work is grounded in joy and reverence for life.
Foolish Things
Teetering at the edges of dance, clown, and musical theater, Foolish Things is an experiment in cross-disciplinary collaboration. Devised by a cast of performance artists, actors, comedians, and choreographers, the work introduces a jazzy, raunchy world in which angsty performers pine over former lovers through storytelling, dance, and song. Recounting memories of romantic spaghetti dinners, performers evoke their lovers’ ghosts. Unfortunately, they evoke so hard that material, metaphorical, and spirit realms collide, and the performance receives some unwanted ghostly guests. Can the performers purge the theater from a cataclysmic horny haunting? With the radical power of art, perhaps anything is possible.
Me First After You
Me First After You is a playful exploration of the co-existence of bodies in close proximity. Negotiating, leveraging, yielding, resisting, harmonizing— Me First After You depicts a stream of intimate potentials beyond romantic entanglement or antagonism. Drawing inspiration from social dance forms such as lindy hop and contact improvisation, Me First After You explores high stakes closeness.
Odalisque
Odalisque is a solo dance piece exploring the female as muse and visual subject. Taking inspiration from classical and modernist paintings of women in repose, the solo is an effort to reclaim renderings of the female form and animate her with agency. The solo integrates choreographed material and improvisation, posing the question of what it means for the muse to be the subject of her own making. This work was made possible in part by the Pennington Dance Group Space Grant at ARC Pasadena and the Z. Clark Branson Foundation.
Becoming Xavia
This work was commissioned by El Camino College for the Guest Faculty Concert. I was interested in incorporating the absurdity and complexity of bodily movement into choreography— unconscious itches, groovy head bobbing, and formal technique converge. We explored the subtle, everyday gestures, bringing awareness to bodily impulse and heightening the perception of inner and outer experiences, both as individuals and as a group. The dancers wrote directives for themselves, creating a locus of personal intention within the group dynamic. From quotidian to virtuosic movements, the boundaries blur and the quality of attention comes to the fore.
Made in a marble palace
Inspired by oracular divination, seven dancers travel through dreamy realms negotiating the limits and possibilities of their perceptual awarenesses.
Clown’s girlfriend
In an intensely nostalgic 1950s apocalyptic prom nightmare, Clown’s Girlfriend depicts the decay of the party. Set to mid-twentieth century sound-effects records and a two-man jazz ensemble, six high-heeled women in extravagant formalwear scamper and scurry, contort and flop, and softshoe and wiggle across the stage as they create and destroy their world. Referencing retro tropes, music, and costumes reminiscent of Old Hollywood, the dance both undermines and pays tribute to traditional conventions of live entertainment.
Animal Rites
Through faithful baby animal video derivation, dancers translate movement from a variety of animal species onto the dancers’ extremely human bodies. The performers cuddle as kittens, sway on their backs as baby bulldogs, careen into one another as baby goats, and ultimately hunt as a pride of lions. The piece becomes a surreal and non-linear evolution from the nurturing and cute to the savage and menacing. The piece calls attention to the similarities and differences between humans and animals, the bonds between us and the continual evolution of this relationship.