Artistic Philosophy

My foremost intention as an artist is to create dances that are at once romantic and dark, whimsical and sensual, intimate and striking. Through the work, I hope to bring into the world a marriage of the fantastic to the deeply real, exploring the order and chaos of human experience with a sense of unalloyed energy.

My work is heavily invested in the dance theatre principles of integral design, creation of environment, and strongly character-based composition. I am interested in making humanist work surrounding social justice and feminist issues and in the body as experiential as well as performative.

I am inspired by metaphor and contrast, by The Woman in all of her incarnations, by the juxtaposition of the old and the new, and by the beauty that is veiled, unexpected, peculiar, witty, and bold.


Teaching Philosophy

          Teaching should first be an act of selflessness. My ego has no place in it.
          Teaching is a demonstration of love for our artform and of belief that what we do is important.
          Teaching is an opportunity to demonstrate the values of professionalism, of discipline, and of the cultivation of useful habits.
          Teaching is a challenge daily to be equal to the responsibility that I have accepted both to and for my students.
          Teaching is the avenue by which I may come to better understand sensation, language, somatic experience, cause and effect, community, identity, and journey.

          My first goal is to dispel any sense of fear that the student may bring into the studio. What we do is deeply personal,  visceral, and affecting. The presence of fear only serves to increase destructive inhibitions, breed defensiveness, and hamper growth. If I can create an environment of safety where judgment is delayed and in its place sits freedom to explore, then my students can begin to challenge themselves without the fear of failure to halt the process before it begins.

          Teaching is a knife-edge balance of opposites, as is the study of dance itself. The rigor of physical training is balanced by the discipline of mental attitude. Absolute focus is most useful when offset by an environment that embraces humor, wit, and individuality. Rote technique is dead without the freedom of artistry. The precision and purity of expectations must be weighed against an openness to uniqueness, diversity, and individual history.

          We don’t just train the body, we seek to understand and develop the self. Education has a duty to provide an opportunity and a challenge for students to take ownership of the virtues of personal responsibility, of choice and consequence (both positive and negative!), of honest self-assessment, of rabid curiosity, and of utmost self-respect. This is the way that we build the communities of compassion and trust that the arts desperately need if we are to thrive.

          If I can leave my students with a broad knowledge of principles, a solid technical foundation balanced by the edgy intuition of an artist, and the capacity to carry their knowledge and values into the world, then I will have equipped them to move forward with intelligence, integrity, and success.