Dance is a shared experience between audience and performer. My choreography draws upon and celebrates what each brings to the work. It invites the audience to participate in a journey, not toward concrete answers, but toward ongoing questioning and reflection. Emotional and narrative content are often suggested, but the layering of ideas and meanings, and my own transparent questioning of the content, invite the audience to interpret their experience of the work and come to their own understanding of it. Suspended between humor and drama, the work challenges the audience by asking what is funny, what is poignant, and why.

 

The dancers are an integral part of the life of a work, not only as performers but as collaborators in the creative process. Their contributions and who they are as people help the work attain a greater scope. Their intimate involvement allows their unique personalities to emerge. Once the work is on stage, interactions between dancers become a means to examine and express through movement both their life experiences and my own. We work to create movement metaphors, based in gesture, that resonate with the viewer while constantly shifting and expanding with the work.

 

But though the audience and the performers are necessary participants in the work, for me the work is also a means by which I can ask questions that are important to me, of understanding myself and the world around me. I am always seeking to challenge myself, to discover new questions and approaches not only within each work but from one piece to another.