Artistic Statement

I mine the body…digging, scraping, listening.  Sometimes the silence is deafening, but a resounding holler beckons if I care to open the sinewy pathways that carry the stories that lie within. I ask where love resides....in the heart… long considered to be the mythic center of love?  Or does love’s passion churn in the tissues of the gut, which has the unfathomable responsibility to decide what to keep and what to discard. Etched into the muscles and bones are the scars and tattoos of life…cellular memories chattering with tales that won’t be forgotten despite our best attempts to bury them deep under the ground and the skin…oh the skin…drinks in each touch and makes us squirm, as it records the sensual tastes of life. I want to luxuriate in the skin, but there are more discoveries to unearth. I am curious. If I reverse my breath from the synchronous norm – inhaling while collapsing and exhaling on an upward scream – primal fear quickly grabs ahold of my body, and I sense all at once my own impermanence and the earth’s demise. I know I have hit a rich vein when my body howls with laughter and tears, or curls into the fetal curve of my birth. However, when my body breaks, I wonder who will come to my rescue and fix it, if not me, the excavator of life.  I make dances, I scribble and write, and l choreograph leadership from the body, with the body, and in the body.  One day my body will be...poof…gone…but my soul fervently hopes that the wisps of stories wrested from within will linger in the space just hovering above the earth and below the clouds.