“Lexicon” (short for “A Lexicon for Lesbian Aesthetics”) is the performance dimension of my ongoing research on the relative invisibility of lesbian choreographers in the midst of the AIDS crisis, during which time gay men were stigmatized and hyper-visible. Our understanding of the contemporary dance landscape is incomplete. Queer men are overwhelmingly associated with this time in U.S. concert dance, and this project retroactively centers lesbian dancemakers at the turn of the twenty-first century (Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Paula Josa Jones, Ann Carlson, Polly Motley, Gina Gibney, and others).
My research began during my Research Fellowship in the Archives of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, where I began to locate and follow the traces of queer intimacy that I perceived in my 70+ hours watching the work of queer women from 1984-2000. I developed a list of affects, attributes, and compositional strategies that were strung through these women’s works, queer refrains that appeared over and over. These refrains are the foundation of my choreographic practice: Erotic Contact, Spectrality/Hauntedness, Precision, Disorientation, Multiplicity, Relentless Physicality.
Since 2023, I have been been collaborating with Julia Antinozzi, Chloe London, Ellie Goudie-Averill, Gabby Carmichael, and dramaturg Meredith Bove. This work has catalyzed processes of intergenerational relationship, learning, and articulation of what it means to embody queerness in 2024. As the idea of queerness becomes ever more expansive and accepted in our culture, the specificity of lesbian experience’s impact on the present moment becomes more and more blurry. A Lexicon for Lesbian Aesthetics will visibilize the contributions of lesbian choreographers, thus forging new relationships between queer, trans, and nonbinary artists and their lesbian forebears.
A.P.E. Gallery (Northampton, MA)
Subcircle Residency (Biddeford, ME)
Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA)