Hello world!  Welcome to my blog.  If you know me at all, you know that I have a proclivity for entering into long-form feminist rants and tangents about the things I love, most likely dance and sometimes science (and maybe coffee…I really love coffee).  So, I’ve created this as a place to store all the ramblings/rants since they’re not well-contained in the 140 character limit of Twitter.

As an introduction to me and my work, I thought I’d write about a piece I choreographed this fall called Dum Spiro Spero – While I Breathe, I Hope.  So, without further ado:

This piece is about (my reaction to) the Pulse shooting. I initially began creating it to portray a type of sadness so intense that you feel it physically in your body, which was my first reaction to the Pulse shooting.  As the process progressed, I decided I wanted the focus of the piece to shift from this feeling to being more directly representative of the Pulse shooting and, specifically, the activism that needed to come out of it. On the night of the election, it became about existing in a world that condemns your existence, because huge groups of people’s existences were condemned then. This is not to say that the world was not already condemning their existences (as in, systems of oppression and bigotry clearly did not pop up out of nowhere on the night of the election), but this is to say that the election sent a clear message that this condemnation is certainly alive and well in the United States (this could be, like, five blog posts all to itself so I suppose I’ll write more about that another time).  The piece can, essentially, be boiled down to three themes: queerness, anger at injustice and the activism this spurs, and the emotional exhaustion resulting from tragedy and from living in a world that condemns your existence.

These are just a few of my thematic musings on this piece, and I could go into a lot more detail (there exists a literal sticky note mapping of the concepts in this piece) but I won’t.  Part of what I love about dance is the ability of its consumers to get something more or something different out of it than the choreographer does, so take my loose musings and do with them what you will.  Maybe you see what I see in it, maybe you get something completely different from it.

Here’s the video of the piece (it’s taken on a phone, so apologies for the low quality): https://vimeo.com/204650768

But anyways, welcome to my ramblings!  Stay tuned for further musings on dance, activism, and who knows what else.