My work accesses the heightened frame and ephemeral container of performance to experiment with alternate ways of being in the world. I manipulate physical looping, emergent text constructions, and stuttering gestures to access alternate possibilities for language, identity, and time. Performance making allows me to dream and actualize future blueprints in the present. I understand choreography as a set of constructed ecosystems, wherein the social order is highly prescribed and everybody plays a role. These roles however can be fucked with and slippages and refusals can occur.
Selected choreography below:
How to Continue (Together)?
Film Installation Premiered in Lisbon, Portugal July 2020
Live Zoom Performance Premiered April 2021
The performance utilizes the liminal in-between zoom space to co-create a new world together. We engage with micro movements, energetic tuning scores, and emergent text construction to collectively develop a shared language which serves as material to propose a new framework for intimacy grounded in emergence, slowness, and economies of attention. We do not know what will come next, or how we will get there, but we can allow it to radically unfold if we practice deep noticing. This work is a rehearsal for new ways of being in relation with ourselves and one another; these are methods for engaging with nonlinear time, iterative language, and emergent fractal thought patterns.
If the zoom space pre-supposes a lack of or irrelevance of the tactile physical body, and intimacy as we know it is grounded in a proximity or physical experience of bodies being together, how then do we find each other in this moment. Across time and space to meet, be together, and find each other. What are the new strategies for and new configurations of “touch”? Where is the body? How do we find each other now? What are the new constellations, networks, and strategies for experiencing, sharing, and creating intimacy?
Watch the full video here.
Hysterical Realness
Hysterical Realness
Hysterical Realness
Hysterical Realness
Hysterical Realness explores the elasticity and slippage between the gendered body, sexed body, and hysteric body. Part performance lecture, part pop concert, part embodied archive, Hysterical Realness uses the body as the site of exploration to address the limitations of Eurocentric feminism, and urgently resist the socially constructed regimes ruling our bodies, experiences, and identities. I hope to propose a hysterical utopia that refuses binary thinking, demands intersectionality, and values our ephemeral desires.
Hysterical Realness
Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles 2019
Halle 2, Kassel, Germany 2018
Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams
Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams
Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams
Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams
Champagne Wishes & Caviar Dreams
Commissioned for the Undergraduate Summer Performance at Sozo Visions-in-Motion, 2018
Performed by: Therese Nübling, Rosalie Knuby, Zaneta Kêsik, Daniel Michalek, Marah Haj
Screaming, shouting, laughing, shaking, quaking, quivering. In anger, rage, pleasure, pain. We will be seen. We will be heard. We will live in the excess. In the ecstasy of our bodies without control. This is a world of heightened expressivity and physical release. Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams explores what happens when the body reaches its peak of what is unbearable, and expresses itself in ways which are often obscene.
Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams is the result of a developed technique for being “in hysteria”. In collaboration with the dancers over the course of four weeks, we codified a repertoire of hysterical physical symptoms by de-contextualizing the history and emotionality of the symptoms. We worked with improvisational techniques to excavate these historical somatic symptoms in order to re-appropriate and re-contextualize them. With the end goal being, stripping these physical symptoms away from their oppressive past, and using them as a vehicle for future liberation.
Watch full video here.
Eggjoy
Durational three channel video with live “symptom score” performed by Emily Barasch
Performed June 2019 at UCLA Gloria Kaufman Hall
Eggjoy 2019
Eggjoy 2019
Eggjoy 2019
Eggjoy 2019
Made as a love letter to Carolee Schneemann in the wake of her death, Eggjoy is grounded in the body as a living, reflexive, and permeable archive. Through imagining Schneemann's MeatJoy in my performing body, my present body, Schneemann's performing body, and the space of transmission between me and hercollide, converge, and slide against one another. As I disloyally re-perform MeatJoy with Eggs instead of raw meat, I work to disrupt the linearity of time and narrative by engaging in an intimate connection with Schneemann across space and time.
How to put your Uterus Back in Place
Premiered Halle 2 Kassel, Germany 2017
Join me as I attempt to put my uterus back in place in an effort to rid myself of depression, anxiety, and other unwanted emotional states. Part ritual, part historical presentation, and part spectacle. ~~*How to put your uterus back in place ()~~ interrogates the history of hysteria, and its lasting affects in modernity. This piece mines historical images and practices in order to simultaneously subvert and affirm the problematic social constructions of the feminine and the limitations of this specific body.