I wrote this while I was teaching a beginning Modern dance course a few weeks ago. We were watching PINA. I was overly caffeinated and feeling inspired. . .

Douglas Becker asked me to think about what ballet does in the 21st century. How does my body reflect years of standing at the barre? How do I inherently know something and simultaneously find an honest way to explore the question?

My voice resides in my flesh

in my bones

My movements are my thoughts.

the inhabitations of my experiences.

I can not help but be honest in my body.

I am interested in the interim.The moment just before an occurrence. How we often talk about what we were doing just before the unexpected occurred. How we were doing some simple task, something mundane. Something ordinary, perhaps peaceful.  The contrast between two moments holds such a great capacity for the range of experience. Our subconscious lies in the interim. It is the there, suspended between washing the dishes and the impact of the event, in the millisecond hung between drying off from the shower and the phone ringing with the news, the flutter of the eyelash between the song in the car and the driver in the wrong lane.

That subconscious moment lives in the body, and my movement is the only way I know how to communicate this idea.  Words can explain but my body can express. That my body somehow can move me through the memory, however altered by my imagination, and create something new as I desperately search for the profound, for a way to access a shared experience — a mutual inherent knowledge.

So to answer his question, my choreography is a contemporary expression of classical form. The structures and content speak to the current moment and how the dancing body can inhabit  intergenerational practices and traditions and move forward from the present tense. Seek out that more profound future.