Your Mother Dances

Your
Mother
Dances

If you think being a dancer is hard, it holds nothing to being a mother.

I am a harried mother of three-former aspiring ballerina-dance architect constantly rubbing up against my own classification and marginalization. My dances are rooted in autobiography exploring and abstracting themes of divorce, motherhood, body-image issues, housewivery, and adolescent crushes--the moments of comedy, grace, and desolation that are the sum of my experience.
 My choreographic work is realized in a rigorously physical and unique movement vocabulary--the result of my intense and eclectic training in ballet and a myriad of contemporary forms. Rhythmic, punctuated phrasing and rapid shifts in dynamic, weight, and flow are the foundations of a non-lyrical musicality that I employ to reveal both internal and external struggle. Exquisite classical line is established and broken and the ordered body deconstructs into poetic disarray. With dancers ricocheting between the ephemeral and the earthbound, refined beauty and distortion, comedy and tragedy, I engage juxtaposition to confound narrative expectations and to emphasize the irony and humor of life as I see it. Thus, themes of painful adolescence, domestic strife, and personal elation or devastation are salted with wry comic relief, keeping the audience compelled yet off balance.
 I am a shameless expressionist, a post-modern animal, a dominatrix of gut-busting physicality and spatial order, and a satirizer of my frustrations and loves. I am on a mission to discover who I am in the present, remember things past, envision the future and then make dances that reflect this chain of moments--these episodic internal film clips. In doing so, I hope the personal can be universally provocative and my work will spark others’ self-investigation as well as promote mutual conversation.

Bio

Philo