ARTIST STATEMENT
As a Performance Studies scholar-practitioner specializing in Black dance aesthetics, my work investigates the Black–White binary and the persistent attempts to invisibilize Black dancing bodies within American concert dance. Through political arts activism and movement invention, my choreography challenges stereotypical assumptions about Black dance aesthetics while advocating for substantive cultural pluralism. I position my creative practice within three interdisciplinary and generative frameworks—research-to-performance, practice-based, and practice-led inquiry—producing timely, unsettling, and liminal creations that connect past and present through staged representations of history on a loop.
My choreographic practice is rooted in visibilizing the “blood memories,” “aesthetic of the cool,” and “get down” qualities evident in Africanist and Black dance aesthetics. I approach these qualities as embodied cultural knowledge, grounded in distinct movement techniques, vernaculars, genealogies, and histories. Their practice and performance generate new knowledge while challenging the hierarchies that have historically marginalized Black movement traditions within the discipline of dance.
Drawing upon physical theatre, Hip-Hop, postmodern dance, jazz, and contemporary African dance, I create anti-essentialist choreographic encounters that interrogate what “performing Blackness” is and isn't. These intersecting movement practices expose and undo stereotypical assumptions historically imposed upon the Black body politic while overtly subverting the subjugating white gaze. The performativity of my work acts as a dialectical image of dance in America, interrogating the racial and cultural hierarchies through which movement is classified, legitimized, and understood. Rather than reproducing fixed notions of racial identity, my choreography challenges the essentialist frameworks through which Blackness has been represented and interpreted.
This inquiry also informs Caricatureography, my original research-to-performance methodology that approaches choreography as an act of reading, writing, and embodied cultural interpretation. Moving beyond literal storytelling, Caricatureography transforms readers' interpretations of Black literary characters into embodied annotations, opening possibilities for multiple meanings and perspectives to coexist through movement.
Central to my creative process is an investment in bodily autonomy, movement identity, and the dancer's capacity to generate knowledge through embodied experience. Informed by my Entercultural Engaged Pedagogy, I approach dancers as creative collaborators whose cultural histories, artistic intuitions, and individual grooves contribute to the development of choreography. This commitment to creative agency resists the notion that any singular movement tradition constitutes the authoritative foundation of dance.
I describe the resistance of my artistry as **imperceptible mutabilities**—subtle yet consequential transformations that resonate within the liminal presentations of Black dancing bodies. At the heart of my artistry remains a call to action: to provoke audiences to think critically about the cultural and political constructions of dance, challenge what they have been taught to see, and become agents of change.
