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Hello! Welcome to my blog for the 2023 Creative Pinellas Professional Artist Grant. I hope to be sharing some things about dance and my process and my projects over the next few months, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to connect with you. I’d like to start by thanking Creative Pinellas for supporting artists through the Professional and Emerging Artist Grants. This support is vital to nourish a strong and growing arts community in Pinellas County, and I am honored to be included in this year’s cohort of artists.

Ok, so let’s get to it!

These blogs are so hard for me because well… what am I supposed to say? It’s a bit like being dropped off in the middle of an ocean in a small canoe – hopefully not off the coast of Spain and Portugal – those orcas! – with a million choices of where to go, but no landmarks (or seamarks) by which to navigate or even make a choice about where to start to find my way home. But what a privilege it is to have this problem — thank you for your support, and I hope to give something meaningful back in return.

Dance shapes how I see the world; it provides me with continuous opportunities to come up against things that I don’t understand, while simultaneously providing me with a dynamic framework for understanding and creating new knowledge.

My research is grounded in an unending curiosity about the power and potential of the body moving. This manifests through physical investigations of imagination, creative fluency, perception, and proprioception. Modes of inquiry include formal techniques and structures of dance training, performance, and choreography as well as less formal, but no less rigorous, improvisational approaches. The output of my research takes multiple forms: choreography, performance, video, and writing. Current areas of inquiry include the following: Improvisation, Choreography, and Dance as Public Art/Dance Infrastructure (Directing, Programming, Curating).

Improvisation in dance means many things to many people. For me, it is a physical practice of awareness and readiness, perception, and decision-making – a methodology for utilizing and deepening my knowledge of the body moving in space, time, relationship, and design. I work with task-based, sensorial, and/or conceptual structures, i.e., folding/unfolding, sliding, and every action is a beginning, as a means for identifying and disrupting habitual movement patterns and discovering new opportunities for movement. It is a self-reflective and relational practice of tracking physical action and possibilities.

I create choreography for and in traditional and non-traditional venues. I am focused on creating work locally that extends nationally and internationally, that values physicality, harmony, and connection, that travels over both space and time in order to build and reinforce a metaphoric interstitial web of creativity, and at its heart, moves people, both inside and outside of the work. I challenge traditional ideas of what it means to make a dance, where performance happens, and how audiences participate as observers.

Toward my goal of positioning dance as public art, I create large-scale site-specific performance events that invite the audience, both intentional and incidental, to engage with dance in non-traditional ways. My intention is to provide greater access to watching the art form by facilitating opportunities for people to encounter dance in their daily lives. As a working artist, I also seek to create meaningful infrastructure for dance through performances and provide paid opportunities for dance artists.

Thank you so much for joining me on this journey!