| Birthdays are a good time for looking back and looking ahead. This is especially true for me today as I’ve navigated a rapid unfolding of new and remembered milestones over the last few months. I have wanted to share these moments more publicly and immediately, but it has felt necessary to prioritize deep processing without the pressure to articulate it externally right away. However, as I celebrate my birthday today—big ups to Aquarians everywhere—I feel called to mark this moment with you. In the transition to 2022, I have been thinking a lot about the impact of homecoming on my life and career thus far. As I write this, I am feeling nostalgic for a year ago this past weekend when 10+ years of creative process culminated in my favorite iteration of my solo project Privy. Despite the isolating effects of pandemic, I was able to share this work with an intimate audience who joined me virtually in my home in Holyoke, Massachusetts (see image from the Zoom performance above). The possibilities of gathering with folks in my home was restored through technology, my formidable team of collaborators (Kelly Silliman, Ritz Ubides, and André M. Zachery), institutional partners (the Center for Afrofuturist Studies and Public Space One), and the precious gift of time to reimagine. I’m grateful, too, for all who participated as witnesses in that Zoom space a year ago, and to our digital passersby in the YouTube space André created.That experience revived my vision for making, and for the kinds of relationships I want to cultivate in performance. Going further back, everything changed when I came home around this time 20 years ago. Several months before that, I had completed my graduate studies in Los Angeles and was grappling with the question of where and how I would establish my choreographic practice thereafter. The robust contemporary dance scene we now recognize in LA was still emerging at the time, and it was clear that the choice to root myself there long-term would require that I invest and participate in building something from the ground up. However, I had grown up in a place that also deserved that level of investment—a place that had nurtured the young artist in me so generously when I was a teenager and young adult. So in mid-December, I decided to return to Connecticut within 30 days, and in January of 2002 I landed in Hartford.Within days of my arrival, I was standing in one of the beloved old Seabury Dance Studios at Trinity College after teaching a class when someone gently tapped me on the shoulder from behind. I could not have predicted that I would turn to find Hanna Kivioja, a gorgeous dancer I’d met while she was an exchange student at CalArts in my first semester as a graduate student there. While at CalArts, we were told on more than one occasion that we had a special chemistry in our dancing together. At the end of that semester, we choreographed and performed a duet inspired by the creative chemistry we shared, and Hanna returned to London to graduate. By the time I returned to Connecticut 2 years later, I was sure Hanna was somewhere in Europe. Instead, we were standing face-to-face in a studio in Hartford. Our encounter was one of several events through which a lifetime of networks would converge in those first few weeks. In those moments, I knew that I had made the right decision to come home. In October of 2002 a group of seven of us shared our first work-in-progress in those same Trinity dance studios, and beginning with that moment, I’ve employed Scapegoat Garden as the primary vehicle for my creative development since. The twenty years in between have been marked by an array of euphoric interpersonal and artistic experiences, lifelong bonds, profound growth individually and collectively, arrivals and departures, near debilitating obstacles, expansion and contraction, ebb and flow. Somehow, though, the work has unfolded with incredible persistence throughout, and Hartford has always been the place from which I’ve launched, and to which I regularly return. Even as my geographic rooting expanded to include Western Massachusetts when I moved to join the faculty at Hampshire College in 2014, I continue to understand my work and my perspective in relation to the Connecticut River Valley, with Hartford as an epicenter. Looking back at my founding of Scapegoat Garden 20 years ago, and looking ahead, I am profoundly grateful for each person who has journeyed with me for some portion of this adventure, those who have pressed me gently forward with their hand at my back, and those who continue to do so. Just last month, Lauren Horn, Abena Koomson-Davis, Arien Wilkerson and I were immersed in a 10-day Pillow Lab Residency at Jacob’s Pillow where we revived our work on Liturgy|Order|Bridge—the project I had been developing when the world stopped in 2020. Toward the end of the residency, Jamila Jackson, Kelly Silliman and Lailye Weidman joined us to help us begin imagining ways we might engage various communities of movers in the project. As if the start of our residency wasn’t excitement enough, our first day on the Jacob’s Pillow campus was punctuated by the public announcement that I was granted a Creative Capital Award for this very project. I’m still trying to process the enormity of this award as both material and psychic support. The Creative Capital award will provide essential resources to see this project through, will support me in building the infrastructures of support I’ve needed, and forge new relationships. This is an exciting time of growth and reprioritizing my artistic life, and I’m grateful for the opportunities that are making themselves available at this moment. As I move through the halfway mark of my sabbatical and leave from Hampshire College this academic year, I am feeling affirmed in my efforts to secure the vitality of my own artistic practice alongside so many concerns vying for our attention at this time—all the time. I hope you will join me in celebrating this milestone year as we begin conceiving the culminating iteration of Liturgy|Order|Bridge, raise additional funds needed to support its full manifestation, and build the relationships and infrastructure necessary to support many more years of artistic process. In the meantime, I look forward to remaining in communication with you throughout this 20th year to share news, creative process updates, and to invite your collaboration in a variety of ways. Oh, and I hope you’ll indulge the sloganeering that will ensue … #20in22 |
