About And There She Stood 

My project is a spoken word poem paired with a dance piece I choreographed to complement the text. This work explores the consumption and destruction of identity, specifically female identity, in culture. Audience members may experience the piece as bystanders, intentionally placed at a remove so that you can get perspective on the themes within the piece. I chose this work because it presented an opportunity to unify multiple mediums within which I work to create a world that feels complete.

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Process​

I started by writing my poem, then recording it, then choreographing to it, and then editing all the pieces together. Creatively, I started with free writing around interesting ideas/imagery/words. From there I took certain lines, reflected on why I found them provocative, and wrote a poem that expanded on those ideas. Next, I choreographed movement tied to the audio track, filmed it, and edited the separate parts together. The movement I made was intended to complete the world I cultivated. It was inspired by the feeling the poem was meant to evoke and the imagery within the text.

The time you felt the most powerful

One of the things that makes writers powerful is their ability to write with confidence. For years, I viewed myself as a creator who works with the serious; I was too timid to enter into the realm of humor for fear of failing disastrously. But, one day, my mentor and I free-wrote from a humor prompt: write a warning label, for anything. We both found the task a little daunting, but embarked anyway. I’m glad we did. We both wrote something funny and, in the end, we both grew as writers and felt empowered to take literary risks.