Why Dance? 

 Dance is a shapeshifting echo of embodiments that travels through time. It is an event which holds shared emotions, feelings, and abstract situations. Dance is opaque, and this opacity allows for many different people to project themselves, their meanings, and their needs into it. Dance is a place where we can feel together, and importantly, imagine together. It is a shifting sand box in front of your eyes, which unlike a movie or a play, does not offer a definitive narrative, but is malleable and expands with each subjective interpretation. Dance gives you a shape for you to feel your own meaning through. Dance is a community practice, in that it comes to significance through the act of feeling each other, projecting, and imagining together. 

Dance is also an activity that I love. In dance I both feel fully myself and fully impersonal, as I melt into what is shared. Dance teaches us that what we feel and experience is all relational. Movements come from somewhere and go someplace else, whether it be a physical movement, emotions moving, or thoughts moving. The bodies we have are portals of experience for movements to happen through. Movement helps us to sense ourselves in physical space and as subjects in the world. If we could not feel we could not move. For example, it's impossible to walk without the feet and legs feeling the ground. There would be no movement without sensing, and inversely, there would be no sensing without movement. Touch and change are the basis of both sensing and movement. To be a body experiencing change, to be in the vulnerability of liveness, for me, might be a sort of ontology of dance. 

In performance it's my responsibility as a dance artist to put that in a context, in a situation, for us to understand and open the world we are in and the relationships we are a part of here.