I’ve always been curious what is behind the social pressure I received as a youth to avoid activities that I loved - like dance, theatre, and choir. In the culture I grew up in, synchronized movements of men’s bodies took place in sports where beauty and grace were talked about through distanced language of statistics and competition. Graceful movement was feminized and I was bullied in order to perform prescribed movements of ‘maleness.’ As a teenager, I retreated to painting for expression, developing an intuitive non-figurative visual vocabulary. As an adult, I had the opportunity to study under Anna Halprin at Tamalpa Institute where performance and visual art are explored in an arts therapy model. These years catalyzed a practice of cross-medium translation which led to my reclamation of dance as part of my artistic identity, and merge these two languages.
I approach animation as an interpreter and time-based painter with an embodied practice. A decade of cycling through disparate practices of performance, narrative filmmaking, and painting culminated in a hybrid animation style, informed by multimedia appreciation and cross-discipline inquiry. I have found animation as an illimitable playground for developing fluency in a fluid language of audio, visual and kinetic vocabulary.
My proposed thesis film project combines my practices in animation and choreography with my social inquiries related to masculinity, aggression, dance and ego/conflict dissolution. With a touch of humor, I visually address this line of inquiry with a non-figurative style that resembles kinetic abstract painting. Abstracted animation is used in the film to visualize internal kinesthetic experience and to simplify the index of a dancer into a kinetic identity.
