My relationship to the source material for Lands and Peoples is more complex than with other sources in past work. Specifically I’m using text from interviews of members of the British National Party — Britain’s far right group whose primary interest is to secure the ‘British-ness’/whiteness of Britain. To put it in a facile way, I’ve always been interested in exploring pathologies that make people do awful things to each other, but this material is from a place that is very real — like, in my mother’s home town in England, the BNP is gaining more and more support from voters — and that feels like a departure for me. Although this material is similar to sources from past work in that, although the BNP stuff is completely misguided and full of hatred, it’s also very romantic — these people use the notions of history, tradition and family in their rhetoric. It’s scary how easy it is to empathize with them.

2. what happens in your life AFTER your showing at BAX this spring?

I have a really amazing April planned. It involves visiting my mum and grandparents in England, whom I haven’t seen in over a year, and then going to an island called Bequia, which is a fishing island in the Caribbean. I used my accumulated air-miles to fly my boyfriend and I out there and then we’re basically going to camp out on the beach for a week. I never made it to the beach at all last summer, so we’re making sure to get some ocean time in way ahead of the game this year.

Then back to NY for the summer. Have to find new work- new teaching opportunities, nannying, hopefully unexpected, flexible and semi-lucrative jobs will fall into place. Artistically, this summer is about structuring and beginning the ethnographic/documentary work that is an extension of the performance work I’ve been making this year at BAX; as well as going into intensive rehearsals for a more collaborative, integrated-media production that I’m working on as an artist-in-residence at HERE Arts Center.

One of my best friends is having a baby this fall, and I want to be there for the birth, so I want to make sure to spend time with her this summer while she’s pregnant.

3. if you had to break your process into parts, what would you call those parts, and how would you describe each one (short description is ok!) let me know if that’s confusing/weird question.

I’m learning that my process changes drastically from piece to piece. In past pieces, working by myself with a notebook and pencils and listening to music, was a really treasured part of my process in which I made a lot of discoveries. That was during a different time in my life when I romanticized solitude more — now I live with my boyfriend and am generally more busy, but I think working to figure out the piece alone as a dance-maker is a strategy that changes the work, makes it less collaborative, makes it more about a single person’s vision. I’ve made very few discoveries alone in the making of Lands and Peoples, the work happens mostly in the rehearsal room at BAX together with Sean.

But I would say that my process is partly social, where I collect bits of life that I find beautiful in some way and want to use as material; partly private — listening and researching music, reading, drawing; partly bodily — dance class, yoga; and mainly studio based —  conversing, laughing, creating, restructuring, editing with collaborators.

4. what was/is an artistic inspiration to you & why (another piece of work? another artist’s body of work? something non-arts?)

The work of English film directors Mike Leigh and Ken Loach immediately come to mind. Their fiction is almost documentary — uncomfortably familiar, gritty, both pathetic and heroic.

Visual artist Kara Walker inspires me to find simple aesthetic formats for very complex ideas — definitely haven’t gotten there yet, but in a time-based medium a ‘format’ is maybe more complicated to find. Writers Hanif Kuneishi and Zadie Smith deal with cultural merging and friction in grimy, troubled and hilarious ways.

In terms of performances that I think about all the time-  Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Once, which was a solo to an entire live Joan Baez concert,  Theatre de la Complicite’s Nmenonic, a production of Edna Walsh’s Disco Pigs I saw at the Edinburgh Festival when I was 16 years old, Miguel Gutierrez’s Everyone, Anna Deveare Smith and Carrie Mae Weems are both artists whose work lies between ethnography, biography and experimental aesthetic forms. Julia May Jonas a.k.a. Nellie Tinder is friend and contemporary who inspires me to keep pursuing art-making, as we get to figure it out together. I think about Ann Liv Young —  her work is less of a direct inspiration to me — I don’t really love her choices — but I feel she’s a marker in the culture that I feel I’m a part of. So somehow my work responds to hers.

Annie-B Parson of Big Dance Theater is an important mentor of mine — I’m inspired by her approach to dance making, teaching, and living as an artist.  Donna Faye Burchfield — chair of the MFA program at Hollins University, which is where I went to grad school, propels me to continue a life in dance and education.  She also introduced me to theorist/film-maker Trinh-t Minh-ha, whose work I try to read daily.

My work is really most inspired by my mum, dad and grandparents to the point where it’s difficult for me to be around them and not want to document their behavior, our conversations. I just think they are all so funny and poetic.

5. if you couldn’t make dances or performances, what would your job be?

A documentary filmmaker.  I wish I had taken piano more seriously when I was a child, because songs are the best form I think, but that’s more a dream career as I don’t think I’m musically very talented.

I’m going to include teaching as in the making dances category.

If I couldn’t do what I’m doing now, and I didn’t have the ability somehow to participate in cultural production in any way, I would be working in archaeology in some way — digging up burial chambers.

6. (this one’s more like a YM quiz): what’s one thing you’d like to do in the next 5 years? 20 years? 50 years?

5 years — make a movie. 20 years — found a school or residency program for interdisciplinary art, somewhere outside of the ‘first world’. Within fifty years I would like to have walked from China to Amsterdam, like my great-great grandfather on my Chinese side did in the 1800′s.

7. what makes you the most uneasy or what is your biggest insecurity?

I feel like I’m a bad dancer, or I’m just not embodied enough and it shows. I get worried, sometimes mid-sentence, that what I’m saying is derivative or just transparent and bullshit. The same shit most people are insecure about and that I’m working on getting rid of so that I can be more sensitive to the wonder of the force of life.