Selected Works

TO GET THERE FROM HERE

to get there from here, composed and performed by myself and collaborators Nguyễn Nguyên and Kevin Williamson, is a choreographic investigation of mapping memories in and through our bodies. We have woven together panoramic videos, movement, and objects to animate the tension between memory and the sense of never quite arriving - constantly propelled forward. We chart physical and emotional landscapes through auto-ethnographies negotiating inscribed pasts. I trace the erasure and restoration of my Mexican lineage, Nguyên navigates unfamiliar terrains as a refugee, and Kevin wrestles with discomfort and queer pleasure. This sharing juxtaposes the video installations alongside the performance.  In our performance, we combine our stories, memories, and songs to embody themes of memory, reunion, and resilience

MIGRATION OF GESTURE

Migration of Gesture shares a dialogic of kinetic and visual Images through a collaboration with myself, Nirmal Raja and Portia Cobb.  Our videos are empathetic and cyclical calls and responses to each other's works through our mediums. This diptych shows an artist’s call on the left and another’s response on the right. Milwaukee composer/musician Barry Paul Clark created the music as he  responded to the diptych. Migration inspired the creation of to get there from here, as I reimagined the practice of empathetic response to landscape and texture as the embodied charting of memory. 

These works reveal how I interact with and through the body as my primary medium for creation.  

FINGERPRINTS OF GHOSTS

I’m making this work with dancers at UWM. This piece explores the story and experience of one's ancestry that lives within our embodied memories. It gestures to the archetype of the medial woman, standing in between two worlds, not quite from here, nor from there, but able to convey knowledge from one world to the other. The medial thrive in the in between and convey knowledge between the unseen to the seen. I feel like this dance is my antidote to intergenerational trauma and is more of a soft whisper, the memory of a gentle tune, or a sense of direction along a long journey.  Music is both a texture and a romantic invocation to the dancers' consecration of intuitive and ancestral knowledge, and pairs grief with tenderness.