I am an interdisciplinary dance artist working in both live performance and screendance. While my work spans genres and subjects, I consider myself to be a pop-artist in that the majority of my work is concerned with how the collective experience of popular culture takes root in our bodies, shaping the way we move and perceive ourselves within current American society.  My choreographic work for the stage and screen interrogates, flips upside-down, and re-arranges iconic images from mainstream American visual culture and subcultures, using source material from popular films, social media, podcasts, pop-literature, docuseries, and memoirs that have captured the American imagination. I aim to unravel these constructs, using my body as a medium to challenge and question constructed identity and celebrate the complexities of individuality within a culture steeped in spectacle and tradition. By isolating, abstracting, and dancing through familiar images, my work draws attention to a shared cultural imaginary and interrogates the power structures that build and proliferate these images. Through the acts of deconstruction and reframing with a highly personal point of view, my dances at once reveal an undercurrent of cultural fears, fetishes, and obsessions, and illuminate alternatives.

Within the wide umbrella of American pop culture, the focus of my most recent artistic research is on the choreography of the female body within the subculture of popular horror media. Through embodied practice, my performance research examines the strategies through which pop-horror presents the monstrous, the fearsome, and the feminine through movement. I find horror to be uniquely choreographic: from drawn-out action sequences where it is movement (rather than dialogue) advancing the plot, to the use of contortion and embodied character work in order to animate the monstrous and the uncanny, the genre has a strong reliance on choreography as a formal tool. Within these ubiquitous choreographies of horror, the female bodies on screen and on the page are especially choreographed. Whether she is running from a monster or becoming one herself, female bodies in the genre are constantly moving or being moved. 

My interest in the relationship between mainstream culture and the individual within the culture relates to how I operate when designing movement. I use a mix of found choreographies and a wide range of movement vocabularies from my movement upbringing. As a young dancer, I received a fairly mainstream American dance training at a suburban studio that taught ballet and studio jazz as well as a variety of other popular styles such as tap, contemporary, and hip hop. This training built within me a movement lexicon that includes shape and line that comes from a ballet lineage, a sharpness and attention to rhythm that stems from a jazz lineage, and a swinging gravitational awareness from contemporary release technique. All of these styles were taught with a heavy commercial influence. I remain deeply influenced by, critical of, and devoted to many of the aesthetic values of my early studio upbringing. Heavily performative and at times grotesquely so, the high-effort and high-tone movement style of American recreational dance studios is uniquely suited to contend with and subvert the domination of the mainstream, and to act as an aesthetic vehicle for the desperation of being an artist operating under the confines of capitalism.

I work in a maximalist aesthetic that values density in choreographic material as well as visual and aural design, and I create dances that themselves make noise and glitter. The design elements that I incorporate into my work have a compositional logic that extends from the movement itself, such as sonic feedback from an amplifier created by a dancer carrying a microphone moving closer and further away from said amplifier, the use of text and song that emanates from the dancing, or costume pieces and a hula-hoop covered in tiny disco mirrors to give the effect of a dancing disco ball. My work Enough, enough (2024) had the structure of one long decrescendo in the density of choreographic information and the effort that the dancers needed to employ in order to perform the choreography. For the last five minutes of the dance, shiny black confetti rained gently on the stage in a durational black snow. The confetti emerged from the process as a visual doubling of the energy of the dancer’s bodies at the end of the work: floating, subtle, peaceful, and descending. It also brought an element of surrealism, its gentleness and color connecting at once to falling ash that might rain on a community after an explosive volcanic event, while its material form connects to the glitz of the usual celebrational context of confetti.

My penchant for maximalism extends to the editing techniques that I employ in my screendance work. In my work with the camera I am not artistically interested in transporting an ‘intact’ dance from the stage to a new digital context. Rather, I am interested in the ways in which the camera and the body, both in motion, can fully entangle as to create a completely new art object that could not exist in any other medium. I often employ the use of collage, reversing and slowing down footage, as well as overlaying multiple takes in order to invoke spectral images and other-worldliness. The camera and editing software are my sketchpad for visual ideas that inform my studio practice, and occasionally make their way back into live performance. Within this portfolio you will find a suite of video-collage experiments that function like sketches or short-form diary entries.

While the content of my work deals with problematizing aspects of a wide-spread American overculture, its creation relies upon an ethics that values the hyper-local. I view the process of relationship building as an artistic and ecological act, and long term collaborations are embedded into the work that comes out of them. Born, raised and working in the suburbs of Boston and western Massachusetts, I thrive on the particularities of this place in both its landscape and its culture. My point of view is situated in an appreciation for the tender quietude of New England winter, the gruff brazenness of Bostonians, and an understanding of the unique way that American mass media and mega-corporations have affected the identity of my hometown. Narrowing in even more, my work is influenced most by the artists that are present in the room when the work is made. In each new work, I continually re-invest into long term collaborations with people and places. This includes the dancers, musicians, and designers that I choose to work with, as well as the institutions and locations where I present my work. The dances I make are a result of the people that populate it. As the director, I choose them carefully, and again and again. 

I am fascinated by the cultural moments that move the masses. When I say “move,” I mean in an emotional, spiritual, and a physical sense. There is immense power and momentum in collective motion. In performance, I confront narratives that permeate our collective consciousness and have potential to drive this collective motion, inviting audiences to reconsider familiar stories, and perhaps take hold of the wheel. I create performances that ask viewers to connect more critically and intimately with their own bodies and constructed identities. Ultimately, my aim is to create a dialogue between these shared cultural moments and the personal, revealing the hidden power in how we move with or against the tide, together.