CHOREOGRAPHY
Artist Statement
Selfhood. Identity. Belonging.
These three words are the foundation of my choreographic and creative practice. As a queer, non-binary artist working within and against traditionally binary dance systems, I create work that centers the body as a site of reclamation, resistance, and radical presence. My choreography emerges from years of navigating movement spaces that denied my full selfhood. That disconnection became the catalyst for my current practice: building trustworthy, co-collaborative environments where artists can move from a place of authenticity, vulnerability, and agency.
My Process.
An interdisciplinary approach to collaborative movement generation.
My creative practices exist within structures of co-creation and exploration. I use writing prompts, guided improvisation, and discussion-based practices to cultivate spaces of dynamic trust. From these exercises, I invite dancers to generate phrase material that feels true to their own bodies. These phrases are then braided with my own vocabulary, transformed through timing, space, and dynamic shifts, so that the final work holds all our voices in tension and harmony. My movement vocabulary is a hybrid language shaped by my early immersion in urban street forms — primarily House, Popping, and Locking —and Western contemporary and modern dance. These “Soph-isms”, a dynamic blend of isolation, reverb, and grounded physicality, emerge from this lineage and continue to evolve through this collaborative lens.
Screendance is another facet of this methodology as an interdisciplinary modality that reimagines how the self is encountered through the body. By engaging with varying landscapes, editing rhythms, and cinematic gazes, screendance allows movement to unfold beyond the proscenium, situating the dancing body within layered visual environments. In my design of processes centered on co-creation, I blur the lines between embodied disciplines such as sound, visual art, writing, film, and movement. Screendance thus expands choreographic inquiry into terrains where the camera becomes a collaborator, the frame a site of intimacy, and the edit a choreographic gesture.
My choreography is not just about movement; it’s rooted in sociopolitical inquiry and the lived complexities of selfhood. I am committed to creating work that honors the multiplicity of bodies and identities in the room, and that challenges the erasures embedded in dominant dance histories. Through my practice, I continue to ask: What does it mean to belong in our bodies and our lineages? How can movement creation and choreography become a site for healing and discovery? And what role does the body have in understanding the self?