Q: What have been some challenges in your pre professional and professional career?

This is always a tough one. I have been super privileged and lucky. I got to tour the world with people I love and do repertoire I never dreamed of doing such as Cunningham and Forsyth. A hardship was realizing that there are different ways of being allies as dancers. Seeing what people are sometimes willing to endure and realizing that maybe I am not has brought me to dance advocacy. Dancers need to know they do have voices outside of their bodies that are powerful.

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Q: How can dance be a platform for social justice issues?

...Something that really stuck with me when I visited Chile was seeing this group of women protesting. They had this protest in front of parliament. Within the protest itself there was a very simple movement task that they all did. Seeing a sea of people doing gestures together with passion and power in numbers and movement was the most radical, clear, poignant and succinct way of getting their message across, I think. It's something you can't unfeel and if you can get that visceral response and if you can get people to feel that gut response that music and movement do so well, then you can't deny the discrepancy in privilege and rights being violated. You can't unfeel those things, and I think that is one of the strongest platforms we have for social justice movements.