Biography
I am a choreographer who uses modern and postmodern dance as tools to understand the corporeal impact of history. I make projects that excavate the body as an archive for personal and social memory. My choreographic works are interdisciplinary and often created in collaboration with filmmakers, visual artists, poets, and scientists.
My dances have toured nationally and internationally, and I have received residencies from Hambidge, Yaddo, and Djerassi, and funding from entities including The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, CT Office of the Arts, and the Mellon Foundation. Between 2001-2014 I was based in California where my work has been presented at ODC, REDCAT, UCLA, and Highways Performance Space. From 2014-18 I served as an Assistant Professor of Dance at Ball State University and a Guest Artist in the Masters program in Social Practice Art at University of Indianapolis. In Indiana I created community-based dance and social practice projects focusing on public parks and monuments.
In 2018 I returned home to Hartford, CT, to accept a position at Trinity College where I focus on choreography, dance history, and performing arts and community. I am a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance (2021), and the author of multiple book chapters. I continue to create choreographic works, social practice projects, and dance films in New England and California.
Artist Statement
I am a choreographer who uses modern and postmodern dance as tools to understand the corporeal impact of history. I have an abiding interest in the past, and an engagement with our bodies as archives for personal and social memories. In dances this may manifest as historical reenactment, narrative rupture, listmaking, or scripted collage. My choreographic projects are interdisciplinary and I often work in collaboration with filmmakers, visual artists, poets, and scientists.
I am committed to the exacting, physical labor of movement discovery and each piece has a distinct vocabulary drawn from its animating questions. Specificity of gesture is a powerful engine behind the projects that I make and I believe even the smallest energetic shift can change an experience completely. My projects range from highly designed stage compositions to participatory containers that invite indeterminacy and messiness. Recently I have focused on creating public events and encounters that explore community through movement.
Creating choreography is like hiking in the dark – I have faith that we will get there but along the way there might be stumbles, long detours and even forays into beautiful spots that will be evident only in their psychic trace. What excites me about dance is its ability to hold all these diversions in tension. My dances are characterized by their contradictions - I am dedicated to performances that are as messy and surprising and beautiful and complicated as the people who created them and the world in which they live.