I was writing a choreographic narrative for an award that I was nominated for and decided to share this to provide insight into my thinking about my work:

My contemporary dance work both has and hasn’t changed over the last five years. The two main constants are my drive to investigate the ways that people engage and connect with themselves and with others, and my desire to use research and first-hand exploration to expand the ways in which I conceive of and implement choreography.

I am intrigued by human emotions – the tenderness, humor, and absurdity that drive our day-to-day interactions – and view our uniquely human efforts to understand one another as a powerful and moving shared resource. I harness these interests by creating works in which people negotiate their bodies, relationships and circumstances creatively, leading viewers to identify with the movement and the performers in a personal way.

My work examines how we use our bodies to create meaning, interpret situations, learn and play, boldly state who we are and impact one another. My core questions concern human identity and how cognition and emotions are grounded in the body’s actions.

My interest in how people interpret and interact with one another was heightened while I was researching dance forms during extended stays in Bali, Cuba, Brazil and Turkey. During these periods, I engaged with communities by studying their dance forms and participating in performances, as well as by immersing myself in daily life. I learned much about the nuances of translating ideas into actions from studying the range of ways people express themselves, and from negotiating awkward moments of my own attempted communication. This has led me to approach my art-making as an ethnographer as well as a choreographer.

Cultural dance forms, primarily those of the Balinese Topeng, have influenced my approach to choreography. In cultures in which dance is a ritual obligation, performers exude an utter lack of self-consciousness. This full-bodied dedication to transforming into another entity is a practice that I aim for personally and work toward with my dancers.

My cultural experiences have shaped how I establish a dynamic with my dancers and audiences. I create challenges that require my dancers to find creative ways to relate ideas. I draw upon their unique strengths, but require them and myself to work near the edges of our abilities. In this way, we surprise ourselves when something familiar suddenly shifts, leading us to find new ways to see, be, move and relate to ourselves and to one another. This is the origin of my use of the word Misnomer – it refers to mistakenly identifying something as what it is not. When one is earnestly committed to transforming, delightfully unexpected moments arise, which I capture and craft into my work.

As is true in Balinese culture, I do not differentiate between dance and theater. I see both as a continuum of activity through the body. The playfulness with which we engage one another enacts the theatrical aspects of life, in its political, social and intimate moments.

My work, in a sense, creates its own culture; I aim to build dances that entice an audience to lean in and listen with the same mindfulness that is required of someone submerged in a foreign culture. I hope to conjure a visceral experience for audiences as they make associations, tap into memories, and empathize with the risk-taking onstage. To this end, I conceive of the stage as an arena that the audience actively looks into, all the while decoding the performers’ behavior.

With a background in dance, cultural anthropology, public policy, and computer science, I bring multiple perspectives to my work. Recent and upcoming cross-media projects include collaborations with Bjork, film director Joss Whedon, the Danish Dance Theatre, and Apple Computers, as well as with composers, visual and installation artists, puppeteers, roboticists, and interactive technology artists. Each collaboration further expands and refines my conceptions as a dance-maker.

In addition, my use of the web as a stage to expose the otherwise invisible back-story and behind-the-scenes art-building process is a contemporary choreography in itself. By turning the rehearsals into a performance, we offer audiences ongoing artistic and educational insight which informs how they see the work. In return, the dancers and I gain a greater self-realization as artists as we reflect upon our previously unseen interactions in the studio. This is an outgrowth of my artistic interest in looking at how people negotiate with each other as manifested on any stage, in a theater, or in virtual space. I have extended my dance work from the stage to the studio, then online, aiming to bring the three “stages” into counter-point so that they inform one another.

As an example of these efforts, we are working towards developing tools that will let us post web-streaming rehearsal footage in real time so that online audience members can send us text messaged questions which we answer afterwards. This type of work blurs the separation between art, learning and participation, creating a dialogue surrounding and within the artistic project, so that attending the stage premiere is one episode in a continuous artistic presentation.

What makes this online work vital to me is that it creates an ongoing exchange with audiences that informs my work about human understanding. I make art about and in relation to people – and because we receive hundreds of emails every month from people who see our work online, I know that a meaningful connection is being made. This not only helps my art to be expressed and my company to grow, but it widens the circle of those exposed to contemporary dance. I also work as an advocate to share my online methodologies freely with other dance companies so that they can use these tools to express their own work, thus fostering exchange and collaboration in the dance community for our collective audiences.

In the studio, I video all rehearsals to make best use of my dancers’ instincts and our exercises. This enables me to continue choreographing dances on my laptop, scanning through the work in fast forward or reorganizing sections, seeking both global and detailed perspectives on my work. Toward this end, I use real-time coaching in the studio, which blends rehearsal, improvisation, and performance; I have the dancers start a run of existing material as if it were a show, and then coach them to reach unexpected places. Together we fill in the blanks with material informed by our research. In these engaging moments, synergies and associations emerge. I record this process so we can capture and evaluate our work instantly.

When I invent and teach new material I ask my dancers to do more than learn the subtleties of my movements. I bring them into the culture of the dance, with transformation at its core, requiring them to blend technique with the bravery of genuine exploration.

Looking forward, I envision myself continuing to create contexts in which I can work long, hard hours in the studio, seek experiences that place me out of my element, collaborate with a range of people and media in my work, and help the field develop new ways of engaging audiences in more complex and rewarding ways.