stringdance+media: May 2009

My last artist’s statement was really long and boring. I’ll try to do better this time.

I used to seek revenge but now I feel peace in my heart and want to use my art for good. Really.

I will never give up philosophy, no matter how close scientists get to determining that my existence, personality and purpose are written in my DNA. Genetic code is the new fate. However, I have to believe in free will. I won’t put down my existentialist tomes, no matter how canny those evolutionary psychologists may seem. Is evolutionary psychology really a serious area of inquiry? Philosophy is rooted in the hard sciences; ancient peoples took it upon themselves to question the very nature of things.

I may not believe in fate or worship Fortuna, but I do believe there is a lot of be learned from the Romans. I so love the Republic that it took me years to finally research the Empire. And my favorite emperor is Julian. I dealt with Constantine by making a ballet about him, inspired by Sartre’s use of Constantine in an example. The premise is that we are all responsible for the end result of our actions, even if we can not predict what that ultimate end might be. I’m not sure I agree with this, but it was a good place to start a dance that addressed the conversion to Christianity and the founding of Byzantium.

I am accustomed to being uncomfortable and I really like it. I am disingenuous; I choose discomfort because it keeps me honest, because doing so seems like a more difficult choice and if I think something is going to be almost really difficult, that is usually what I want to do. Where do all of these stressful choices lead me? I crave structure. Not to mention vodka and potato chips. I really like to impose order wherever possible and embrace any ritual I can find. For example, when I was at my least comfortable (in Korea) I started ballet classes and this made me brave. I didn’t need written or spoken language, I had dance.

Choreography

I continue to dance and choreograph and work toward making performances that are theatrical and sometimes involve technology or collaborations with artists who work in other media. As a choreographer I feel no sense of boundary. Nothing is sacred, so to speak. I started in ballet but I will steal with impunity from almost any form of movement. It’s good to study, it’s good to know which rules you are breaking, but it is important that we keep moving this art form forward by doing as al other art forms do and drawing from all available influences. Globalization is upon us. Abstraction is a great thing as long as it takes us somewhere. Content is crucial. There are stories to be told, systems of thinking to be understood, emotions to be expanded upon. Because these things are of humanity, they can be made physical.

Video

When I decided to pursue kinetic media I had a goal in mind. I would make dance more accessible to people who are accustomed to watching things on a screen. What I had not anticipated was how easily video would bring me to the dark soul of content that I sometimes felt was difficult to convey through either movement or still images. I am influenced by the work of Nam June Paik and Zbigniew Rybczynski, as well as a childhood of watching early music videos. And while I have not succeeded in making dance more accessible to the uninitiated, I have been finding new ways to use movement in my kinetic media pieces to explicate content.

Photography

My forays into photography these days are few and far between, as I have been focusing on kinetic media. What I have consistently returned to as a photographer has been the portrait, and very frequently, the self-portrait. I am interested in compelling subjects (apart from myself) and I’m even more interested in the compelling subject in a dramatic costume placed in an unusual landscape. Having begun my work in the visual arts as a photographer, I often mine my vast body of work for images to use in my videos.