Artist Statement
I learned to dance merengue in my kitchen with my Dominican grandmother. At this point in her advanced dementia, she could not remember my name or how to use utensils, but merengue lived in her bones. I listened to her hips—absorbing the rhythm and choreographic pattern without any need for verbal communication. These dances taught me about the intimacy of bodies, culture, and politics. Growing up in the diaspora as a Dominican-Cuban-Jewish queer woman, memories like this became core to my artistic identity. For me, dancing merengue is a conjuring. It becomes a site of belonging for diasporic people while also recalling a complex history of resistance, dictatorship, migration, and power. I begin with merengue because it grounds me in the ways performance appears in our daily lives. It reminds me that art and life are in constant, never-ending conversation.
At the core of my artistic practice, I am a storyteller interested in how performance functions as a cultural and societal tool. While the container changes, be it a play, dance, or devised production, I am intent on creating performances that allow us to more deeply connect to community, challenge people to think from different perspectives, and spark conversations about politics, society, and culture. I am particularly passionate about projects that address issues of gender, diaspora, ancestral memory, queerness, and/or Latinidad. Guided by women of color feminism I look to alternative archives—our kitchens, our ancestors, our communities, and our flesh—as places of creation. I believe performance provides a critical space for experimentation where we can rehearse our present realities and collectively dream alternative, more liberatory worlds.