Artist Statement
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My mission as a dance artist is to question and analyze our socio-political ideologies and environmental ecologies and how they relate to our embodied movement archives.
My choreographic methods include improvisation, score devising, walking (sound walks, foraging), drawing and writing. I've adopted strategies from poetry, the visual arts and, by collaborating closely with sound artists and scientists, the act of listening and observation. To guide this practice I adopt a Latin American, ecofeminist lens and center my work at the intersection of environment, migration and multicultural experience. By improvising outdoors as "field research,” I investigate how gestures and our cultural imaginary are embedded in the body as evidence of its relationship to and as an ecosystem. This practice is concretized through kinesthetic empathy and by listening with and through the body, by which we can make kinship with the non-human. This multi-species connection is the basis for the project Danzas Migratorias: Choreography for the Monarch Butterfly, a site-adaptive investigation of the Monarch Butterfly's migration route, and a poetic description of the corporeality of migrant beings. Meanwhile, in La Maleza, I relate to plants labeled as “weeds” to research what it means to be uprooted and/or find roots in unfamiliar, or often inhospitable, spaces. I believe we can learn much from animals that migrate, plants that have the wisdom to find nourishment in troubled ecosystems, and other non-human kin. |
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As a multinational, immigrant artist, my dance-making often touches on personal themes from my experience ni de aquí, ni de allá that provide recurring conceptual, thematic and emotional threads to my work.
I believe in the power of poetry and metaphor --a sunflower sprouts out of the mouth, women turn into butterflies, gravity is a conspiracy theory, a grapefruit meets an electrical plug, a braid holds the memory of a lover, a weed spirit searches for a place to find roots. The body is an agent of change, by which we can exert concrete transformations in our world through the poetic sensibility of dance, transforming the ordinary into images inspired by the magical realism latent in our more-than-human-world.
I believe in the power of poetry and metaphor --a sunflower sprouts out of the mouth, women turn into butterflies, gravity is a conspiracy theory, a grapefruit meets an electrical plug, a braid holds the memory of a lover, a weed spirit searches for a place to find roots. The body is an agent of change, by which we can exert concrete transformations in our world through the poetic sensibility of dance, transforming the ordinary into images inspired by the magical realism latent in our more-than-human-world.