ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a multidisciplinary performance artist, writer, ethnographic researcher, oral historian and acupuncture clinician. Over the past ten years I have orchestrated spaces for people to share recorded audios of poignant histories and stories oriented around critical narratives to be presented in an Oral History Performance Initiative: The Community Storytelling Composition Project
My work is primarily interdisciplinary, existing at the intersection of oral history, movement research, soundscape installation, and immersive theater. Within the creative process I draw inspirations from the fields of applied theater, contemporary performance, experimental and avant garde aesthetics, alongside an ever deepening relationship with nature and periods of reflective solitude. Influencers have been far reaching, some of which have included political theater works of Edwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, David Diamond’s theoretical model for Theater for Living/ Headline theater, in addition to a myriad of butoh, movement research and contemporary dance professionals that I have both performed and learned from within my career.
Over the past eight years I have been exploring the ways in which stories—via performance, listening parties, walking tours, soundscape installations, and digital exhibitions—can be used as tools to creatively, and safely, provoke an audience to engage in dialogue around prescient topics within a community of people with divergent perspectives. Straddling the professional spheres of performance researcher, oral historian, movement artist and acupuncturist, I have been excavating where the intersection of these various fields live, both to challenge and complement one another. As someone who believes the recounting of a personal narrative is only of use if the narratives are heard by a diverse community in relationship with one another, I have come to find performance installations and artist exhibitions as critical tools.
As a performance researcher I am interested in exploring embodied messaging that has the potential to yield relationship building. I believe that the dynamic nature of the collaborative process lends itself to new beliefs, theories and methods in the carrying out of a final production. What I am even more curious about is not only how the trajectory of such work has the potential to shape-shift with new involvement, but how the “experience”, both felt and cognitive, changes as more artists and people contribute to the dialogue.
My documentation process is carried out through writing, audio, image, text, and live—as well as digital—offerings, carving space for critical reflection among the collective, as well as the individual. I am most intrigued by what the sharing of stories, through multi-modal experiences, can do for relationship building and the collaborative process of community stewardship.