Art making

i am a

  • performance maker (collaborator, contributor, director, improvisor, choreographer, dramaturge, performer),

  • teacher (enthusiastic nourisher of cultural futures),

  • researcher (avidly seeking, threading, uncovering, expanding, physically theorizing), and

  • partner (in conceiving, thinking, imagining, materializing, enacting. in matters of ephemerality and grit).

The work i am a part of becomes through a commitment to pouring RIGOR, and COMPASSION into every crevice of cultural production.

my efforts traverse art forms, genres, disciplines, institutions, and sectors.

i began devising performance in 2003. Since then, i have been fortunate to partner with esteemed colleagues to generate more than thirty long and short form works.

Highlights:

Selected Recent projects

Process

my deeply physical performance renderings emphasize

  • abstraction (transmuting wisdoms as they come through the body),

  • intimacy (striving to source the marrow of the marrow), and a

  • reverence for lived experience/s.

my approaches to making are outgrowths of the faith, resourcefulness and unflinching courage of my immigrant family. my first choreographic processes were the silent organization of our sustained work to restore, repurpose, conserve and find alternative uses for seemingly everything.

In the studio, i cleave, syncretize and reckon.

my practices bring together fellow makers to synthesize and press into the edges of

  • palpable media (e.g., activating skin, clothing, built environments, performance landscapes, atmospheric elements, artifacts, objects…) AND

  • immaterial objects (e.g., vocalizations, uttered texts, stories, images, rituals, visions, light, concepts, prayers,…).

Whether work is presented as a spontaneous or more firmly defined composition (i.e. improvised or choreographed), it becomes through a sensitivity to visceral responses (including those of collaborators) to ______________ (fill in the blank).

Thought Loom

A devotion to performance as a means to nurture socio-cultural transformation, led me to conceive and launch Thought Loom (2009-2017), an artist-run company dedicated to giving traction to performance ideas. Thought Loom co-founding collaborators included Betsy Mullins, Ilana Reynolds, and Lydia Bittner-Baird. Thought Loom teamed up with visionary Miami-based organizations like Miami Light Project, New World Symphony, O, Miami Poetry Festival, and Bas Fisher International to support provocative makers (including cherished colleagues, sha Harrell and Octavio Campos) in enacting projects for concert halls, gallery spaces, historic street corners and buses (recently mentioned in the New York Times).

Teaching

Background

Love has fueled my 30 + year teaching practice that spans studio, professional, community, public school, conference, and university settings.

Artistic focus areas include

  • choreographic approaches/trusting personal artistic voice

  • improvisation (as generative process and as performance practice),

  • multi-platform-experimental performance (developing fluency across mediums, contexts and their site sensitive applications),

  • movement practices ranging from ballet to hybrid post-post-modern forms, sometimes referred to as “contemporary,”

  • directing and devising/facilitation of textual and movement-based dialogue,

  • intertextuality/interdisciplinary production processes,

  • constructive feedback methods,

  • connecting to the relevance and potency of disciplines that dwell within the humanities,

i also facilitate workshops and consult in the following areas

  • arts-integration practices (i.e. arts as a learning strategy),

  • artist professional development [Topics: workshop development (pre-K through professional); budget forecasting; grant writing (aligning ideas with opportunities); articulating ideas in writing; demystifying contracts, etc.],

  • critical dance studies (delving into, gutting and fervently revising repeatedly narrowed epistemologies),

  • organizational collaborations and partnerships,

  • organizational visioning and strategic planning (i believe the impossible can always become possible), as well as

  • program design

Pedagogy

my pedagogies foreground personhood, artistry, and complexity. When in the role of teacher, i prioritize rigor, CARE, trauma-informed principles, depolarization, belonging, participation, agency, and non-othering praxis. i seek to nurture spaces that support active questioning as a means to consciously acknowledge the knowings of each body in the room. Among many things, i propose an ecosystems approach to course design that formally invites and acknowledges co-authorship, and ongoing feedback loops. I believe learning environments can genuinely celebrate the temporary community that forms during each class, workshop or course. And that each course can be perceived as a collectively devised artistic work.

Current roles

my current teaching practices include the following roles:

  • Lecturer in Improvisation, Advanced contemporary modern technique (311/411), and Orientation to Dance studies for the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music dance program.

  • Adjunct faculty in Dance and Humanities at Miami-Dade College.

  • resident Teaching Artist for Arts for Learning Miami’s South Florida Wolf Trap initiatives. This work with very young people and their awe-inspiring teachers has urged me to re-imagine the word “energy.”

Leadership

my trust in the capacity of visual, literary, and performing arts methods to serve as a pathway to creating conditions that are equitable, diverse, inclusive, plentiful, as well as individualized so as to honor full personhood me to leads me to participate in efforts of organizations whose work i deeply respect. Organizations like: Arts for Learning, the Miami Affiliate of Young Audiences (current role: Teaching Artist; selected past roles: Director of Programs & Operations, Director of Artist Services, Facilitator/National literacy curriculum co-developer, and consultant); the National YoungArts Foundation (past roles: Guest Artist, interdisciplinary, National Reviewer, dance, Alumni micro-grant panelist, multi-disciplinary, and most notably as Director of Artistic Programming, 2012-2016 designing and curating programs in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Washington, DC); and UCLA’s Disability Ecology and Performance Exchange, initiated by choreographer/field shaper, Victoria Marks, and brought into being by a wowing community of artists and scholars (past role: Action Partner/Assistant Director).

Performance

In my early career (~1991-2004), i worked as a collaborative dance artist with several independent, dance theater projects, performing frequently throughout South Florida and abroad. i was also a Spanish dance artist.

i stepped away from being on stage to focus on ensemble performance making/choreographic roles.

At 44, i returned to performance, primarily enacting long-form/experimental improvisational dance theater works. If a marathon covers an unfathomable distance (albeit a measured one), a long-form work sustains composition for an un-imaginable length of time (albeit clocked). When i perform now (at 50), i relish the sustained channeling of this format.

Support

Colleagues

i am endlessly thankful for every collaborator who has leapt into the darkness with me. Special thanks to Daniel Bernard Roumain, Gema Corredera, and Ilana Reynolds, who offered their artistry to several early projects. And to sha Harrell and Lydia Bittner Baird, with whom i had the chance collaborate with in many capacities.

A prioritization of caregiving for family and community led me to develop work in Miami. Cultural producer, Beth Boone, recently noted, in Miami, international IS local. Throughout my time in Miami, i have been blessed to share energy/space with DISRUPTERS, DREAMERS, RISK TAKERS and MAKERS. Some of these creatives refer to Miami as “home,” some come through Miami briefly, and still others come to the city under-the-radar. i am struck by the way these artists generously share their practices in Miami’s politically complex, and geographically porous terrain.

In November 2024, i had the pleasure of joining colleagues, Jackie Davis, Ali Kheradyar, and Miya Shaffer at the American Studies Association n Baltimore, Maryland to consider research around the notion of Unsolid Ground. Their texts are still ricocheting through me.

While producing as a Miami-based artist, i have been lucky to be with performance practice at many elsewhere-s, including Belgium, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Scotland, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, the Netherlands, Viet Nam, and throughout the U.S.

Awards

my efforts have received formal acknowledgement through four consecutive (the maximum allowable) Miami-Dade independent Choreographer Fellowships (award designated by a curated panel of national luminaries in the field); as well as a National Endowment for the Arts dance writing fellowship, and a beloved Knight Arts Challenge Award.

my work as a maker has been generously supported through grants, commissions, and residency opportunities, including being selected as an inaugural artist for Tigertail Production’s exchange with Movement Research (2006). i am especially thankful to the Adrienne Arsht Center and Miami Light Project for its ongoing support.

Research and Training

After 30+ years participating in the field, i came into arts practice-in-academia. My academic work began with a Smith College Teaching Fellowship (fall 2016) and continued with a UCLA Graduate Opportunity Fellowship (2017-2018), as well as UCLA Merle and Gerald Measer Scholarship (2018-2019).

i hold an MFA from UCLA/World Arts and Cultures/Dance (2020), and a Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing from Barry University (1995), attending on a full academic scholarship.

Other simultaneously lived lives

As a young artist, i eagerly sought to tangibly flex all sides of my brain. to make South Florida more elastic. i often did so through unusual approaches to working.

For example, while choreographing, touring and performing, i served as a hospice nurse (sometimes attending to a death and performing at the Opera house within the same evening). i also stepped into posts as program director at the Offices of Epidemiology and Disease Control (developing protocols and forging partnerships with some of the most incredible thinker-travelers i have ever met), and middle school integrated science teacher/ballet technique consultant (the stories here are many). i even accepted an invitation to teach high school chemistry and night school health courses.

Each of these journeys was remarkable. Each left an indelible mark on my artistic practices.

Current project synopses; CV; work samples, as well as artist, teaching, and research statements

available upon request


contact: lettybassart (at) gmail (dot) com

On Instagram: @lbassart