At the heart of my artistic practice is the pursuit of queer belonging, an effort to entangle with others and the world through an honest reckoning with ourselves. To question systems of normativity and violence and instead imagine and experience other possibilities for how to inhabit this world together. My practice is a communion with the other, tearing down the boundaries that separate “us” from “them,” and in its place building a bonfire for us all, for the monstrous and the useless, faggots and sissies, chthulus and fairies, trash heaps and ghosts.
My art is anchored in performance but includes writing, facilitation, and visual art. For many years I have been creating participatory performances which investigate the connections between personal truths, communal identities, and systems of violence. Sometimes they are queered childhood games, in which the familiar is turned upside down to allow us to grapple with the effects of what made us, both the personally and cultural, our histories and socializations. I also create rituals that flow from my childhood spent in Islamic ceremonies, gay and hippy neo-Pegan gatherings, and youth art camps. These performances invite audiences to inhabit the hard feelings, histories, and realities of our current era together. Within these spaces, audiences can reexamine the personal and systemic realities of the world we inhabit, its messy politics and their consequences.
Honoring those that came before is very important to my practice. Research and theory take a prominent place in my work and I draw upon queer, black, feminist, and anti-colonial teachings and history. I work with invitations of non-corporeal entities such as ancestors, ghosts, and divinities, utilizing intuition to generate new practices for opening to the possibilities and indeterminacies of the present-absences in our lives. This art often manifests as grieving rituals in which I invite people to step into sacred space, outside of the rush or need to accomplish of modern life, to sit together with our loss.
As a choreographer, I see all my work as bodily and understand the work of destabilizing normativity as one of embodying the lush realms of possibility. Humans are bodies, ones that expand far beyond the edge of our skin and I am interested in working with the spaces and experiences where one body touches another. This is tactile work, requiring openness to our sensorial experiences as well as play, joy, and care which is vital to the work of liberation.
Working with clay and wood, I investigate how materials can invite spectators to sit with what is no longer here as well invoking the possibility of ongoing relationality to the dead and the gone. Furthermore, I seek to build sculptures that activate in spectator’s emotional resonances that invite people to question normative assumptions about gender, grief, and kinship. Can form and material be a mechanism for inspiring explorations of desire and connection outside of the normative restraints of “proper behavior?”