To make performance in the American West is to adopt its cultural idiosyncrasies. The vibrant culture of the New American West is currently defined by the influx of computerized devices. Technological innovation is providing us with new tools, new options, and even whole new ways to stimulate the senses. The presence of technology is allowing artists in the West to define new paradigms of expression: genres are...

As an emerging dance artist in Seattle, I feel that to make performance out of the vibrant culture of the evolving 21st century American West means to ask yourself questions you don’t have the answers to. To ask questions that will perhaps remain unanswered, but which will ignite unfamiliar dialogue within both artist and the audience. When I create work, I begin by asking myself questions. I...

I feel that a surge of a new electric energy has come over the Northwest dance scene, creating an aesthetic very unique to our region. As this new energy changes, we take what we have learned from our brilliant and creative forerunners who continue to pave our way, and combine it with what is happening today. We are concerning ourselves with setting heavy personal limitations, yet creating...

Hope for the New West I wish that I could go to sleep and awaken to a West that I’ve imagined: In which we truly embrace one another, in which respect exists for low- to mid-rent tastes as it exists for the high, and where the dance community forgoes the clan mentality in favor of freely “nerding out” along the spectrum of dance. No one is a...

I believe that dance on the West Coast is an amalgamation of highly trained physical movement, theatrics, technology, and cinematic qualities. Artists push boundaries by creating choreography that requires technical skill and beautiful lines while showing broken, awkward, or pedestrian movement concurrently. West Coast dance is a careful juxtaposition of organic movement, theatricality, modern dance, ballet, and pop-culture styles. Performances reflect the desire to be the same...

I rode a bus into the state of California; I did so laying down at my mother’s feet. We had crossed the border during the night; the large wheels of the bus against pavement sang me a song. The dips and bumps of the road crackled and popped like an old vinyl recording that already held the feeling of nostalgia for our old life. It was a...

The one thing we can always look to guide us as dance artists is our history. Dancers have a rich history of pioneers who asked the tough questions and pushed the parameters of our art. When approaching my work I aim to celebrate that history. I find beauty in the ability to mix the classical lines of Humphrey-Weidman with the questions of Yvonne Rainer, alongside the process...

  Living and making work in the Northwest for the past ten years, for me, is to exist inside a push and pull of geographical, cultural, and historical demarcations of which I have chosen voluntarily but also do not have full control. I am interested in all the connotations implied by boundaries and borders; interested in what it means to exist inside defined edges. The parameters that...

Told to funnel my energy into one discipline (dance), time spent in other pursuits was highly criticized. I was reproached time and again for learning arts outside the staid prescription of what a dancer is or is not. In Europe, I got a taste for moving from a more human center point. All aspects of embodiment as radii allow for a full experience of the circumference. Finished...

“If you want to, you can lay me over the table and amuse yourself. And even call in your men. Well… No woman ever died from that. When you’re finished, all I’ll need will be a tub of boiling water, and I’ll be exactly what I was before – with just another filthy memory.” -Jill McBain (played by Claudia Cardinale. Once Upon a Time in the West,...