I believe the body tells a more honest, intimate and intuitive story than words ever can.  I’ve always been fascinated by the challenge of using the physical form to tell a story more deeply than scripted language.  I began dancing the traditional forms of ballet, modern dance, even Hatian dance at a young age.  By the time I reached the latter half of my college years at Macalester I was encouraged to created my own Major in Dance Theatre, culminating in a devised piece that used only movement to tell the story.  Then as my acting career started to expand, so did my interest in alternative movement forms.  I found myself exploring the art of Bhuto, Suzuki, Grotowski even aerial arts.  In tandem, my lifelong practice in Yoga lead me to earning my Teacher Certification from Moksha Yoga in 2007 with a thesis on creating a practice catered to the needs of an actor and their character.  

Now, under the influence of the masters such as Pina Bausch and Tadashi Endo, I combine my arsenal of  techniques to help fuel an expansive vocabulary for actors in any given show.  I often begin with extracting, simplifying and then reformulating text or repeated concepts into simple actions or ideas.  Then it is the job of each actor to develop a personalized sequence of gestures linked to those cues, which, in turn, I assimilate into one or several  movement phrases for the entire cast.  It allows us all in fast succession to develop an intimate understanding of the movement story in a way that doesn’t demand everyone be a “dancer,” but rather a performer telling their story with their body.  It kinesthetically affects their psyche in a way that otherwise might be just an imposition of movement from an outside choreographer and what I might suppose the story to be, and hope the actors can replicate.  The sense of freedom, shared experience, and personal connection to the gestures or sequences deepens the production value for the audience and thus adds to impact of the text itself.