February

This month was about integrating the learnings from the Nairobi residency into my work. Over the art residency, I learned about how to connect more with the process itself of the art than the product. As my advisor says, there are no coincidences and everything can be a part of the art process. Through this, I decided to mend some of my work to curate a workshop of movement that is a bringing together multiple lenses: spirituality, politics, psychology and the personal self. I realized that I actually want to steward a collective embodied process through my work and that bringing people together to engage with my work as it is can be supportive.

I also have distinguished my work away from dance and towards movement. Dance implies a certain level of performance to it that might scare people into interacting with the body. My research is centered on carving pathways for people to connect with their bodies and working with movement helps ease people into a relationship with the body. Movement happens everyday - when we wake up, brush our teeth, get coffee. All of these simple actions are movement and are a way of relating to the body. Of course every movement exposes a certain psychological pattern that the unconscious holds. But the study of that can only emerge if the body is given permission to actually move.

Personally I have also been working with how fear and terror keep me from being in my body and creating work. I have been examining this fear that keeps me in a frozen dissociated space and how I might relate to that. It feels like this has to be a part of the work is a certain engagement with fear, which can be understood in some way as the desire to disconnect.