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My journey with dance started in a community space and at family functions; my first dance class was in a community center, so I have always associated dance with community, family and gatherings. As a Black woman, my work speaks from the Black/African-Diasporic lived experience and pushes for equity by telling stories that center Blackness.

Through my artistic practice, I continue to be in conversation with my community. My engagement, my entrance into the community, has to come via invitation. Invitation indicates value alignment, that there’s something the community sees in me, and I enter into this dialogue listening. Aesthetically, I honor cohesiveness and how interconnected we all are - a needing and leaning on/in one another. This sits not only inside my choreography, but also shapes how I collaborate with dancers in my space: the collaboration to achieve a shared goal; the simultaneous respect for each person’s unique genius; the acknowledgement that each one's genius is needed to achieve the goal. My mapping practices reflect these values, as I work to understand the abundance of community assets, even if the outside narrative is one of lack.

My work deals with questions of power, privilege and cultural context through my process, which is very much research to performance. Everyone, including myself, other artists, the composer, the costume designer, and dancers are a part of the research – research that includes empirical reading as well as mining embodied memory. Together, our ideas create something authentic. When other artists see that their voice matters, the power dynamic shifts. My work has a sustained commitment to wielding the healing power of Black/African Diaspora dance to bring to fruition healthy, healed, and well-resourced communities. My commitment is long-term and not transactional; this way of working is a disrupter.

My intents and visions for my work are multiple and complementary. First, equity, authentic voice, and living fully human in this world are guiding principles for my work. I want to see people live freely and fully without fear. I want to live as my full self and know that my experience, specifically my experience as a Black person, is valued and believed as real. As an artist, I need the viewer to see the full life experience that I’m having, whether they believe it or not. Through my work, the artist may have agency over and in their full experience, whether the viewer gets there or not. That is how the world is changed. Secondly, one may pretend and escape in theater, but my work is not escapism, it is a creative way of expressing reality. This starts with the dancers, who are neither “putting it on,” nor pretending.

My community-based artistic practice is driven by the commitment I have to my people, Black/African Diaspora people, to see us live the full expression of our humanity unapologetically. In my artistic and teaching practices, I focus on teaching African Diaspora dance forms, as well as the music and the people that originated this form. All three of these are paramount to fully share these dance practices in community. I want to see a radical shift where power and resources are equitably shared and liberation is available to all who seek it.

In my creative practice, Black/African Diaspora voices and lived experiences are at the center and stand alone. They are not in relationship to whiteness. I intentionally work to create a making-space where our lived experiences are the standard. To me, this is radical and disruptive to the current social order.

Community engagement is a part of the research and development of my artistic work, it is not an afterthought, it is not a post-performance conversation. I want to know how my community is engaging with the topic or line of inquiry of a work while I develop it. My artistic practice engages my community by reflecting art that centers, affirms and amplifies the wholeness of our culture and tells the full truth of who we are as a people. The voices of those in my village and their thoughts matter and it is a gift to be able, with permission of course, to weave those narratives into the work to paint the full picture of how we feel about the topic we are investigating. We are not a monolith, there is diversity in how we view and experience things, and in what we value. This is also disruptive. 

My work facilitates care and healing by celebrating the Black/African Diaspora body. It might not fit the white dominant dance culture practice, but we celebrate all the shapes and hues our bodies come in and the ability to move, using our cultural dance forms as the foundation. My work dismantles systems of oppression by flipping the script and centering the full lived experience of my people as the standard. WE are the measure of excellence, in every way that we choose to exist. I work to create liberated spaces where our bodies are not policed nor surveilled for control and that combat the ignorance and insecurity of white dominant culture. Our bodies are OURS to own and move and do with what we like, as we like to do it, when we want to do it.  My work fights to undo the erasure of Black/African Diaspora contributions to today's collective cultural experiences. In my dance making practice, ongoing dialogue is present and necessary to ensure that the dancers and I have agency to activate their full artistry inside of the making practice.