I'm not interested in replicating my own body.
Obviously, that's super not interesting for me.
So I'm not interested in a choreographic approach that wants to
formalize a style in a way,
because for each piece I try to develop another physical logic.
The stories that I would like to tell
in some ways
can only be imagined.
For me, freedom is a tricky term and one that I don't use
for multiple reasons
because I often think someone's freedom is at the expense of someone else's.
So I rather think about entanglement and being entangled in other people's lives
and that might not allow for this feeling of freedom
but I think it allows for something else.
It's the kind of the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, about the past.
And my relationship to it is one that requires a lot of
fiction making.
Let's say...
A lot of imagination, in part because of the ghosting that has happened
through the context of transatlantic slave trade,
and through colonialism.
The stories that I would like to tell in some ways can only be imagined.
I like to think that the body is an incredible trace
of what our pasts are, even if they can't be articulated.
I work with...
quite critically with the materiality of the body
thinking critically about what it means to be a body in the flesh
and the histories that have determined what the flesh means
and what it signifies for some versus others.
A kind of broader exploration of embodiment.
These very questions of the body and what it means to be a body in space and time,
but not just in the isolated situation of a studio or a theater,
but through history and time: what it has come to mean to be a body.
And that can never collapse only into the present.
I’m after something untenable, something you can't capture with language
otherwise I would just write a story, right?
But I'm interested in this whole process of what the materiality of the theater
also invites. The audience, the materiality of the people, the eyes,
how those eyes are kind of shaping,
in some ways, your perception of yourself
and then how you project that back onto that
like this kind of dynamic relation.
And I really think of the space of the theater
as a very relational space.
And that's why as a dancer, as a trained dancer, choreographer, whatever, I never...
I don't work abstractly,
there's this thing of addressal.
I always address the audience in every work.
There's always a reflection that we're here together,
despite the fact that this fiction is unfolding before their eyes.
I start each piece by first
figuring the work, parts of the work, not the entire thing
but I work so much from the body and from my body.
So in order to invite people into a creation
I have to know what I'm doing.
And I want it to be clear.
It has to be clear to a certain degree because, you know, of course, once
I invite performers in, they take that material and they go further with it.
That's without a doubt.
But in the very beginning
I always want to know what's at stake.
Like inside of a piece. And that's my responsibility.
When I’m in the beginning of a creative process, like now, I actually find I’m less eloquent because
I’m doing the weirdest shit in the studio.
I’m doing a lot of improvisations. I feel very loopy sometimes.
I film everything.
I do these different processes,
either I'll do a process with my eyes closed and it's...
this is adopting this style of practice.
It's called
“authentic movement”, which is a bad name, but it's basically moving with your eyes closed.
And it's like these different sensorial practices that I do.
And then I'll do something with my eyes open.
And it's funny, different things that you think “Oh, I nailed it,
this is what it is.” La, la, la.
And then you're so confident with what it feels like.
But actually you watch it and you're like, Oh, actually, here, this is it, this is it.
So without a doubt, I'm filming everything.
I try to be very careful of too much talking about intimacy
or talking about the process of a work or the meaning of a work.
And instead I get very busy with activity.
We're very busy throughout the day.
Anyone that's worked with me knows that it's like a really intense
working process and in a way that allows
for less banter because in the banter,
then you can start to get trapped in your own ego and your own emotions and in your own...
all of the kind of very boring things that we're kind of trapped in
in our everyday. In the process of being together
I think that you need to have a concentrated practice to come together in order to explore something else outside of
someone's psychological space.
You know, there's talking through doing, you know, often and something that doesn't feel immediately like it makes sense.
We don't worry about it.
I don't worry about this thing of sense making, especially in the beginning.
I propose a series of practices and we keep doing we keep doing.
And in time something emerges and we follow that trace.
And then something else emerges. You follow that trace.
And so it's a thing of doing and listening.
You know, I really do start much more abstractly each work.
Sometimes an image is haunting for me
Or a kind of story.
I stumble across a story about my great grandmother, and I'm kind of fascinated.
It requires me to think more critically about certain things that I've taken for granted.
And in that process of getting kind of fascinated
by something, I start to map or kind of plot quite literally
a series of questions for myself that I try to interrogate
both through texts, through theoretical writing, or dance around also in the studio
and try to figure out, to sniff, what it is that is kind of emerging.
I'm not interested in creating essays, obviously, or I really want to create
experientially rich works that are like really this process of worlding.
So these worlds kind of unfold and and I really want to lean
into the poetics of that, into creating these kind of very resonant images,
these kind of haunting images so that the work operates more
on this kind of psychic level than just the kind of logical or rational level.
I direct through my body.
That's why I consider myself a choreographer
but then dancers that have traditional dance training are
like “you work more like a director” because I
I'm interested more in the performative qualities than the kind of
movements themselves.
There is this kind of intimacy that does emerge always throughout a creation
because of the intensity of the work and the concentrated time frame.
And so I guess in collaboration, also to have multiple voices in a room,
that's important and dynamic and interesting.
Collaborations are beautiful because, for each creation
this is your temporary family because I spend more time with the people
that are working in the production than I do with folks in my intimate life, you know what I mean?
Because of just the kind of hours that you're together
and that
is intensely beautiful, because
you lose a sense of centralized
containment, like you...
you can't be... you're constantly in this kind of space of activating sociability,
it's very social all the time.
So it kind of de-centers you in some ways.
And this is also an exciting process.
It's overwhelming, but I...
I love it.
It needs to grow on an ethos of sociability,
which is to say, to find and constantly create forms
that allow for better social relations.
And I know that there's a post humanist turn,
but I would like to invoke the Jamaican scholar
Sylvia Winter, who reminds us that there are genres of humans, right?
And there are some genres of humans that haven't had a chance to even be human.
And those are the people,
those are the folks that know best about the land and about its resources.
And either through forced labor or through their own nativeness, right?
These different genres of humans that are entangled in each other's lives,
regardless of whether or not they want to be.
But we are, right? Through this kind of global reality, this world
that is united through racial capitalism and all of its horrors.
For me, I would like to think that what can emerge
now is an acknowledgement of this, not to move
beyond it, because we can't, right?
There is no transcending history,
the materiality of time, right?
But we can we can dream, of course, about what's possible.
But I think only when we take into consideration all the different genres of humans
and how we can build a more equitable space
amongst these genres of humans.
There's so many things that have to change
in our social realities in order to even
believe that theater, at least theater as we know it, is possible in 30 years.
There’s so much that's shifting.
I hope that there is a process of really listening and observing and,
being fascinated by the stories that are difficult to tell.
And I hope that those stories get to be told
and that it's not only the privileged that get to hear those stories.
I would like to imagine or believe
that I will have continued to be kind of fearless in my explorations.
I would have continued to take risks
at the expense of success or,
whatever the things are that might happen in the process of creating work.
Allow that thing that's burning inside of me,
these like ongoing questions
to provide a kind of ethos of working
that I can be proud of.