Artist Statement
Photo by Jason Chen
I am a multi-racial, multi-lingual, first generation American cradled by an intersectional mosaic of cultural markers, and yet, simply, I am a flamenco dancer. I am not rooted in any single locality. Rather, I am grounded in the intangible and transitive nature of my identity.
My artistic work centers humanity, subjectivity, and experience in autobiographical embodied representations of flamenco. My dance is a constant navigation of my shifting interior terrain, a negotiation in which notions of tradition/modernity and self/Other converge within the flamenco body. As a US-American artist, I honor the traditions of the form while focusing a critical eye on what it means for my body to enact this movement practice in all its cultural specificity. I’m attuned to the ways flamenco responds to time and place, and the ways it sustains and create community. Through my arte, I contemplate my identity and wrestle with questions of appropriation while striving to create works that enact social justice activism and respond to the world around me. Bearing witness to the ways in which flamenco movement is translated and transmitted within and from my body, I welcome the physical and emotional challenges that accompany this steady disentanglement of self.
My MFA project, a dance film entitled Haunted, I investigated stereotypical conceptions of the bailaora (female flamenco dancer) to empower and reaffirm her physical body as site of meaning making and knowledge creation. I called upon the legacy of flamenco as act of protest to reconcile enduring female images and explore the values of flamenco performance in the United States beyond the realm of the aesthetic. Characterized by high-contrast imagery, concepts from film theory, and a distortion of conventional flamenco vocabulary, the project’s somatic potency forced me to confront the dynamic tensions that drive my embodied research and characterize my ever-evolving relationship with flamenco.
What is a “US-American flamenco,” if such a thing exists, and how can flamenco performance and pedagogy become more culturally relevant and responsive in this time and place? The deep cultural layering within my body demands that I grapple with these important questions in future research and creative endeavors. Acutely aware of the almost 200 years of commercialism, Orientalism, and romanticism under which my work operates, I draw from a variety of dance idioms and aspire to cultivate connection, conversation, and community with my work. Flamenco’s relationships with gender, race, and power dynamics are continually transforming, and as such, I use my art to honor my physical body and those of others, defy expectations, and convert movement into progress.