selected Archives and Artifacts
Some Ways to Continue? Iteration 1, Los Angeles
Photo by Charles Han
This 12-hour solo performance aimed to produce a dance that:
+offered time rather than demanded it
+operated in radically humble mode
+breathed as an anthem to the limits of empathy culture, AND also aspired toward mutual recognition
+attended to a painstakingly precise compositional score, and dropped it to say, “i love you; welcome; thank you for coming; you are more important than the work, that is the work.”
+could be infinitely renewable
For this project, I transcribed aphorisms/proverbs onto my body. The score placed vernacular wisdoms on an embodied collision course. Occasionally, one or two aligned or emerged triumphantly.
Lighting design by Arsenio Apillanes
An excerpt from process writings
Say Less (or from the inside of a Serra)
The earth is hard. My lungs are hard. It's quiet. I am quiet.
I am surprised by the debris, but mostly by the quickness with which the surface changes.
I have been here two other times. The first time. I was lost. There was an eclipse.
Cloudlessness.
Vitreous humor.
The wetness of seeing.
Glitter. Pinecone. Shard.
Half-buried. You arrive.
I swat desire with drama. You are writing. We look. You ask.
My capacity for consistency is eroding. I wrap myself in the hand-foot puzzle. It takes me somewhere.
I collapse.
The sky is unbearable.
Shell-less. Gelatinous. Oozy.
I go kitsch.
Still. I continue.
There was a swirling; a helicopter; an anxiety.
the sensation of my nose following an unbroken surface to emptiness and back again.
Still. I continue.
Untitled Performance Essay (April 2025) was a response to the work of Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman at the Lowe Art Museum.
I had the pleasure of conceiving, choreographing, designing and directing this installation by Taylor Shirk and Mary Reed (emergent artist-scholars and performers).
The evening was organized by Tola Porter, Assistant Director Learning, Engagement and Technology and moderated by Dr. Kenneth Broad, Director of the Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy.
A general summary
For this installation, Mary Reed and Taylor Shirk (both UM class of ‘26), performed their movement and academic research in response to climate change, and our ever-shifting ecological interdependence.
It featured a multi-media installation of Taylor Shirk’s complex boat traffic coding project, and Mary Reed’s marine conservation research.
Un-Nameable One, Two, Three was commissioned by Miami Light Project. It was created with sha harrell, Gema Corredera, Daniel Bernard Roumain, and Sevim Abaza.
Photo by Glassworks Media
A pulpy Interior
This work began with my deleting hundreds of essays that I wrote during my first two years as a parent.
Un-nameable became an open letter exploring the edges of personhood. Where does my life end, and yours begin? Where does my voice settle? Does its sound penetrate your skin?
What fragments are inscribed on our epigenetic body-mind? What can we know? It asked these questions politically, psycho-spiritually, and personally. It called out and then leaned into the melding of choice and miracle.
Un-nameable opened with a ritualized figure eight floor pattern and closed with pouring sand. The production waded through original texts. Braided throughout was the repetition of this excerpt from James Baldwin’s My Dungeon Shook:
“…I don’t know if you have known anybody from that far back, if you have loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man. You gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort….”
In addition to sha harrell’s performance/text/movement, and my scoring/text/movement/visual design, Un-Nameable featured an original soundscape by DBR and live vocals by songstress, Gema Corredera. The performance enveloped perceivers (with segments transpiring on stage and from behind seating). Lighting inspiration was pulled directly from the notion of a grotto. The staggeringly beautiful ambers were created by Sevim Abaza.