Artist Statement

Dance is the language through which I can express the full range of human experience – its history, its stories, its interactions, its passions, its joy, and grief. In creation and interpretation, I can honor, celebrate, and mourn. Through its performance, I can find resonance with the universal conscience.

When I dance, I blend into what I am expressing. My body loses its boundaries, and I am no longer inhabiting it. The energy is not mine – it is of all creation. I transcend my everyday life. I join with the art of the choreographer, the musician, the costume and stage designers and dancers. I make visual what is available through thought, other senses – otherwise unseen.

Dance is the way I can best express myself. Georgia O’Keefe said, “To create one’s own world takes courage.”  The language of movement makes visible what I cannot find words for, what I cannot paint, the music I cannot make. It gives me unlimited range of visual vocabulary to create and fully express what is important in my world. History has been a powerful influence for me and a source of endless content. My own dance progression mirrors history – My “Ancient” period when I was young began with freely moving in nature. My “Middle Ages” echoed the scientific discovery of those times in balletic form structure, and classical stories. My “Renaissance and Enlightenment” introduced contemporary expansions and humanism incorporating all what came before. My ‘modern” period combines my history and new forms into what I create in my future.

This history parallel finds voice in my current dance. I have taken pure joy in dancing the classical ballet stories, the grand pas de deux, and brought the concept of story into my current dance expression. I continue to tell stories but now in Contemporary and Martha Graham genres. For me it is critically important that there is meaning, and that I am able to convey such meaning through physical expression, with the ultimate goal that the audience sees me as a character in the story that is created on stage, not merely performing the choreography of the story.

Authenticity is essential. There is no contrivance. My passion is born of a strong belief that my best life be spent in creation and then in communication with those I can touch with what my art has to say. Martha Graham said, “Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body,” and that perfectly expresses the deep passion from which I dance. It is my breath, my blood, and my soul in motion.