Q: What have been some challenges in your pre-professional or professional dance career?

Finding your place is hard as a professional dancer and as a student. Finding what it is that you value about dance and building on that and not just being something for someone else. That was a challenge for me when I first started dancing professionally--holding onto who I am and expanding that really showing people that. I was very shy at first ,and tried to be the best tool in the box for the choreographer or teacher in front of the room. But I think that made me less interesting. I feel like I had a hard time capturing how to be a performer and how to share myself openly. There are always the normal challenges of how I will support myself financially but on a bigger level my challenge was tapping into my sense of self and sticking to it.

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Q: Using the idea of “worldmaking” how do you imagine the performing arts world after the pandemic? (Worldmaking: How you can re-imagine the world in your own terms, the way you want it to be. Using this tool one can construct new worlds and write themselves into narratives that have excluded them and systems that have disabled them.)

I would hope that we have a world where it is understood how fragile the arts are and how important they are and how we are all operating on this tiny thread. I think society believes there will always be a show, not fully understanding how tenuous our work is. I hope there will be more of a structure in place to support art always being more present and constant as well as having a more stable base for it. I think we have also opened a door to how we can share training and performing in a much more open way.