I work with real-time and deliberately hands-on methods, using analog and participatory processes like walking, making lists, scavenger hunts, eating, sketching, writing–merging high-concept with accessibility as a way to reinforce experience. By creating intuitive and intrinsically fun activity scores I lure audience-participants into mindful observation, moving my audiences past the widespread idea that ‘creativity’ is reserved for the special few.
Drawing on my roots in classical and post-modern dance to create installations, writing and other presentational activities, I work with the power of repetition, visual and auditory rhythms, creating a defined ‘stage’ space by using the notion of the archive to organize my sometimes obsessive documentation of unrelated activities overlapping in one space. Just as I do, I ask participant-audiences to do things that naturally result in appreciation of their personal, intuitive methods of pattern recognition, searching for, collecting, organizing and reporting on their discoveries.
Every moment offers a chance to witness the interactions and intersections of living beings/a place/in time. Everywhere you are, everywhere you look transgressions assert themselves: the daisies growing into the cracks of a sidewalk; the laundry flapping out the luxury high rise window.
In the political sense, I think it’s time for all of us—including and especially lawmakers and policy setters—to recognize and take action on the truth that every place is the accumulation of actions, decisions, loves, desires, needs, natural forces, insects…the movement of a million things and urgencies in one space over many time frames. In other words, every place is more than it seems and necessary. The question is, why, and to whom, and how can we heighten our sensitivity to and appreciation of the world around us.
