Through dance, I seek what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin refers to as an “awareness of the deep currents” — a comprehension of the connection between all things, an awareness of the present as well as that which transcends time and space.
My dances manifest in theatrical dance pieces, durational performance installations, public sites in Nature and cities and short experimental films. I examine the body’s connection to place, space and other bodies through embodied memory and I create within a framework of my multi-lingual/cultural context that comes from living in three different continents.
Currently, I am creating dances in public spaces, touring with my solo work The Other Witch and I am creating a new work entitled A Dance For A Time Being.
A Dance For A Time Being is video and augmented reality dance portrait of 6 dancers over 60 years old. The project will celebrate and bring awareness to aging in exploring how our identity is shaped by place and community and how one’s sense of self evolves over a lifetime.
Dancer’s bodies, like trees, accumulate wisdom and knowledge throughout years of training and living—a wealth that is overlooked because dance is popularly seen as an artform of youth. With this project, I intend to make the gains of age visible through the art of movement.
To me, dance has always been a way of connecting with people in order to better understand the world and myself in it. From the beginning of my long career as a movement artist, I have been drawn to the transformational way dance can be employed to create and empower community. For example, since 1985 I have shared dance not just on stage but in public spaces. During my tours, besides dancing in theaters and opera houses, I often dance in prisons, cemeteries, galleries, juvenile detention centers, parks, and city streets. To transform a community, I believe that we need to liberate dance out of the confines of the theater and to bring it into public view in public sites with community. I feel liberating dance liberates us and connects us as a community.
And today, I see that people need spaces to contemplate mortality. I lost my father in 2019 and we have lost so many during the pandemic. I want to be able to support and learn from others who are growing older and facing losses because that is a shared future of growth and legacy.
Learn More: https://www.ny2dance.com/