Original Work

A Ritual of Protection and Healing

This was a ritual in preparation for a surgery. It incorporates Wicca casting, invocation of a heifer, and participatory meditation.

Performed as part of the MUCK performance series on a rooftop in the East Village on Saturday, October 17, 2020.

走 ("Zou")

走 explores the somatic experience of grief through walking. Pronounced "zǒu" in Mandarin, it is a word that means both “to go” and “to walk.”

Grief is an atelic process. Atelic, from the Greek root ‘telos’ for end — it means something that never ends.

The central practice of baguazhang, an internal Chinese martial art, is walking in circles.

But not just any kind of walking — the footwork is precise. Like the flat of an iron, the foot floats imperceptibly on a parallel plane above the ground but never touching it, an optical illusion; the walker is of both earth and air. She places the foot down, gentle but all at once instead of rolling through, a reentry that brooks no transition but the mindfulness of increasing pressure. The weight shift is powered like bellows from the hips, invisible even while at work. To lift the foot is a struggle, given the ball and heel are to arise together, the resuscitation a united front. The eyes gaze ahead to the horizon. They track the arrow of the inner foot that walks the perimeter of a square, even as the reconnaissance scout of the outer foot draws the circle. The eyes cannot skip ahead. The entire experience is both in time and out of it — every motion is at exactly the same pace, a monotonic beat. Blink, and nothing happens. Blink again, she moves. Blink again, she is in the same place. The piece vibrates with themes of fragility, fear, control, balance, falling, discovery, and return.

This performance was on December 17, 2019 as part of the Open Performance series at Movement Research in New York, NY.

Constellations of the Ego

This work explores the anxieties of identity. It counts as influences Erik Erikson's model of psychosocial development, family constellation therapy, and Iain M. Banks’s science fiction.

Performed at Dixon Place and curated by Sangeeta Yesley on May 30, 2019 in New York, NY.