current projects

to get there from here, composed and performed by myself and collaborators Nguyên and Williamson, is a choreographic investigation of mapping memories in and through our bodies. We have woven together panoramic videos, movement, and objects to animate the tension between memory and the sense of never quite arriving - constantly propelled forward. We chart physical and emotional landscapes through auto-ethnographies negotiating inscribed pasts. I trace the erasure and restoration of my Mexican lineage, Nguyên navigates unfamiliar terrains as a refugee, and Kevin wrestles with discomfort and queer pleasure. This sharing juxtaposes the video installations alongside the performance.  In our performance, we combine our stories, memories, and songs to embody themes of memory, reunion, and resilience.

Migration of Gesture shares a dialogic of kinetic and visual Images through a collaboration with myself, Raja and Cobb.  Our videos are empathetic and cyclical calls and responses to each other's works through our mediums. This diptych shows an artist’s call on the left and another’s response on the right. Milwaukee composer/musician Barry Paul Clark created the music as he  responded to the diptych. Migration inspired the creation of to get there from here, as I reimagined the practice of empathetic response to landscape and texture as the embodied charting of memory. 

These works reveal how I interact with and through the body as my primary medium for creation.  

Hyperlocal MKE I co-founded Hyperlocal MKE in 2014 with my colleague, composer and percussionist, Tim Russell. It is a collective of performers who are dedicated to radical play. We are improvising and collaborating composers and choreographers who revel in the growth of ideas and the exchange of artistic practices dedicated to the unknown, the unruly, and the unexpected. Our collective forms a mobile space in which artists gather to explore improvisation methods and practices. It is also a space to reveal to audiences the knowledge, work, play, curiosity, commitment, and letting go of commitments, which are in conversation with every moment of the spontaneous compositions. We make a kind of home of improvised performance practice. When we create with colleagues that may or may not share our opinions, we recruit a kind of suppleness with knowing, where knowing evolves into not knowing, so that the unknown becomes what we pay attention. Side by side, we explore together how these sounds, spaces, movements, relationships, sensations, and permutations evolve right under our fingertips. You can read more about collaborators and performances here www.hyperlocalmke.com

FINGERPRINTS OF GHOSTS
(2023) –

or “Wild Tongue”

I’m making this work with dancers at UWM. This piece explores the story and experience of one's ancestry that lives within our embodied memories. It gestures to the archetype of the medial woman, standing in between two worlds, not quite from from here, nor from there, but able to convey knowledge from one world to the other. The medial thrive in the in between and convey knowledge between the unseen to the seen. I feel like this dance is my antidote to intergenerational trauma and is more of a soft whisper, the memory of a gentle tune, or a sense of direction along a long journey.  Music is both a texture and a romantic invocation to the dancers' consecration of intuitive and ancestral knowledge, and pairs grief with tenderness.

LOS DE QUE ME ACUERDO (2023)
–

a solo performance that is an offshoot from the evening length performance installation, to get there from here. I consecrate a healing space with the words and music of my grandmother, Chole. Feeling through her songs, to keep her alive in my body’s repertoire. This dance is also an act of healing as a form of future-making.

LAS RAÍCES QUE LLEGAN A LAS ESTRELLAS (2021)
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I made this dance with my students incorporating body percussion into our dancing. The dance explores revealing a world where border walls are passes through. Though these walls are attempts to erase indigenous histories, our shared practices of dance and music are resistant maps to the practice of blocking us from home, migration, or safe arrival. Even when powers cage humans in prisons, what the body remembers is reconstructed through rhythmic impulses mapped in our bodies. This dance honors moving beyond borders, and maps bloodlines, ancestors, memories, and cultures through music. Las raíces que llegan a las estrellas… no podrán se silenciadas por barrotes” in English means, “the roots that reach the stars cannot be silenced by bars.”

BLOOM (2015-16)
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Choreographed and performed by Gillespie and Nguyen Nguyen with collaboration on new media with Fabio Altenbach.