There are sites and spaces where the mundane, everyday world is suspended and a mythic, more-than-material world is evoked. Is it possible to use performance as a site of such trans-dimensional experiencing? What are the political and cultural implications of utilizing dance and performance to envision enlivened worlds that reject colonialist, white supremacist, capitalist, heterosexist stories? How do I navigate my own positionality as a white, western, cisgender, queer woman in the process of such performance? What traditions am I drawing on and how can I collaborate with and learn from the more-than-human world using cultural technologies both inherited and chosen? The objective of such inquiry is to build performances that exist within a continuum of time and space, that activate kinesthetic modes of awareness and storytelling to generate rich worlds. This process acknowledges and leans into the possible ways that performers, makers, and witnesses carry their experience of a performance with them in their bodies and their lives.
In this process of creating worlds, I will hone a methodology of care and attention. I strive to understand how magic functions as an epistemological and spiritual tool within art making. In dance, I often embody contradictory aspects of self as well as creatures and beings whose subjectivities are less knowable to me. In doing so I hope to honor experiences beyond my own and find embodied empathy. I acknowledge the role that imagination plays in these processes. Surrender to not-knowing is an intentioned step away from dominator culture and helps situate me within a space of continual change and growth.
My emerging methodology is rooted in practices of what Diedre Sklar (2008) refers to as kinetic vitality. To be incarnate is a visceral, sensual joy and as an artist, I consistently seek to create from that place. Movement practice is the center of everything I create and the site in which I feel most vividly alive and able to articulate that aliveness to others. However, the kinesthetic sphere is not the only site of this life-affirming creation process. Other methods include a mess of gathering, noticing, pretending, and attending to. I gather to step outside of myself and imagine what it is like to be someone else. I notice to fill in and enliven the world around me and the worlds within me. The word pretend is potent and complicated for me. Much of my self-education around magic occurred in childhood through an almost unceasing state of make-believe. Intuitive creativity and metaphor drive my process as a maker. I often reach a point in the creation process of a dance when the piece declares to me what it wants to be.
Creating the work involves many collaborators and witnesses. I have worked with other dancers, musicians, poets, installation/video artists, and visual artists. The intention is for the performances to function as immersive events that speak to the entanglement and complexities of being. Voice is not separate from movement, place is not arbitrary, music is not an add on, and images are not disconnected from the bodies who created them. My research will extend my collaboration to the more-than-human world and more intentionally invoke forces outside our ordinary reality. I am curious how the art functions as a spiritual technology, capable of generating actionable change within the performers and within the worlds they inhabit with or without an audience. I hope that the work functions to enliven the senses of the human witnesses and bring them closer to their own magic.