Artist Statement The performances I make center on Gender and sexual body politics by layering bombastic and seemingly disparate movement forms with erotic imagery, text, and sound. Most of my work has an element of humor because I believe laughter generates trust between performers and the audience, laying the groundwork for both provocation and pleasure. Humor allows me to build bridges between public and personal, casual and erotic, banal and profoundly psychological.
My hyper-physical approach to generating movement is regularly juxtaposed with original text, ranging from hyperbolic prose to choral chants and casual conversation. The use of dialogue in my performances is meant to heighten the performers’ presence and create a meta-acknowledgment of the performance itself. The performers onstage are often addressed by their real names and maintain their authentic voices, movements, and speaking methods. My collaborators and I develop our performance range and invite a performative identity that ranges from casual, almost pedestrian, to unabashedly dramatic. In the creative process, we devise these traits together and work to constantly draw from the performers’ personal experiences. The form, theatricality, eroticism, and opacity embedded in my creative practice point to a critical intersection of queer kinship and performance, through which I critique politics of exclusion, rigidity, and social power dynamics. Through my work and the worlds and communities I build within it, I seek to imagine more idealistic, less coercive futures. ITB_2024_04_24_@leerayment-2632.jpg8.12 MB
