Dancing-with
Diving into water without knowing its depth, temperature, or current requires a relinquishing of control; the body must trust what it cannot yet measure. Surrendering requires trust in elements outside oneself; this kind of vulnerability is generative, fruitful, and community-driven. This vulnerability extends to my work unfolding live and unchoreographed. This is how I enter my work, and how I enter educational spaces such as conferences: with an understanding that over-determination can close down the very encounter I hope to create.
To let go is not to abandon responsibility, but to make room. It allows agency to disperse across the room, repositioning the audience not as passive recipients but as active constituents of the unfolding event. Meaning is not delivered intact from one body to another; it is negotiated live through presence, attention, discomfort, and response.
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In this sense, through practices of with-ness, live art offers educational spaces an alternative to fixed, positivist, capitalist, and closure-driven models of knowledge transfer or “dissemination.” A constellation of seeing-with, smelling-with, listening-with, and tasting-with moves throughout my practice, extending beyond the visual field through sound and scent while interrogating art history through its aliveness. Because the work is unrehearsed and I employ unpredictable materials, the experience unfolds collectively in real time. Rather than presenting knowledge as something already formed, the work invites its co-production, disrupting hierarchical distinctions between artist and audience. I use the phrase “my model” loosely, however, because this diminishing of hierarchy is not unique to my practice. It has emerged throughout history whenever we become receptive to difference rather than attempting to eliminate it or subsume it into sameness; whenever the ego is relinquished, or at least temporarily set aside.
To produce knowledge together, rather than to disseminate it as though there is a fixed “knower” and “receiver,” “expert” and “amateur,” “creator” and “consumer,” is to unsettle these capitalist and Cartesian binaries. Dancing-with proposes an alternative to hierarchical structures of learning. I attempt to create a ‘with-ness’ no matter what matterials are used, a shared, non-hierarchical space in which understanding emerges relationally, through encounter, listening, movement, respect, and mutual responsiveness. My practice develops decolonial, multimodal approaches that nurture difference rather than erase, appropriate, or flatten it into sameness. Rather than moving efficiently toward conclusion, it creates the conditions for a shared wilderness: a space of uncertainty, real-time relation, and mutual becoming, where each participant arrives at their own point of opening. In doing so, it challenges the idea of objective truth, proposing instead that truth is plural, relational, and always in motion — a process of dancing-with rather than arriving. I don’t share work that’s ‘arrived’; I don’t give talks that discuss my approach. I do the approach. I don’t want separation; that is the whole purpose of my work. Even at conferences, they aren’t receiving papers ‘about’ the work. I think that would be counterintuitive.
