Q: Can you talk a little bit about the very beginning of how you got involved with the performing arts?

I am one of many white girls in the US whose parents put them in ballet. I started ballet when I was three, and was mainly only exposed to ballet, even through high school. Also, during high school I started writing about dance and kind of realizing I had sort of an equal passion for dancing as I did for writing about dancing.

My first life as a dance writer was in daily newspapers. I wrote for the Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post and then Austin American Statesman. I've also written for Ink Magazine, Dance Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. I think my favorite thing to do as a dance writer was that kind of daily newspaper. Being able to create a record of the dance that was happening, I was never the main critic in any of those newspapers. I was a freelancer, so I felt like I was able to bounce around the pockets of dance that don't always get covered in the newspaper. This is also how I learned how limited my view of what dance was had been because I was covering a lot of dance forms, which maybe I knew existed but I knew very little about. Then I was trying to figure out how to make a living as a writer but also wanting to dive deeper than I could in the short journalism pieces I was doing. That led me to go back to graduate school. I got my PhD in something called performance as public practice which is a really innovative and unique PhD program at University of Texas, and was still writing for newspapers there but really learning how to do more scholarly writing at that point. And that became the launching pad for my first book which was Dancers as Diplomats, which looked at the US State Department's sponsorship of international dance tours. The more recent book is an edited anthology focused on questions of gender and sexuality as they relate to dance called Queer Dance, which also includes essays by 17 or 19 artists and scholars, working in queer dance in some way. Now in LA, I'm on sabbatical and working on a book about Jill Johnson, who was a well known dance critic who then went on to become a really important lesbian feminist activist in the 1970s. So, that's the current project.

Q: How did you become involved in working with social justice issues? Specifically writing?

I think probably the longer answer is growing up in Alabama, for all of that state's ongoing racial issues. I think even growing up in South Alabama you just really get steeped in the Civil Rights Movement and the history of that movement. I was always really interested in history and just sort of the accident of the Civil Rights Movement being a really prominent historical narrative in the place that I'm from. So I think I was curious about race.  Also, it's funny growing up in the South. On one hand it's extremely racially segregated in terms of where people live, but my small town life was not very racially segregated, not there was racial equality. But, I grew up going to school in really racially integrated settings in a way, I have not found my “move north'', as my grandmother calls it, to be as integrating. Particularly in Alabama how white people and black people get along, I did not grow up thinking about a racial spectrum broader than that, that's been something that my adult life has brought to my attention. I think that's sort of the backdrop. As someone who has always studied dance history as my focus and dance studies in particular has a really robust literature and commitment to black dance studies. To study dance history was kind of to encounter works by people like Brenda Dixon, God's child and Tommy de France. It's a huge backbone of this field I was drawn to scholarly. I think finally in graduate school, Deborah Bread was a huge influence on me as a professor who focused on Latina performance. She taught us that we couldn't think about performance without thinking about race. Then, in my own personal journey of coming out as a queer person and lesbian, I had to figure out what that had to do with dance which remains a deeply heteronormative space, even though it's full of queer people. So those are just some of the things.

Q: What has danced taught you that you have applied to your life and how you engage with the world around you?

I think that there's a lot that goes unspoken. There's a lot of inflammation in our bodies, there's a lot that we learn from paying attention to other people's bodies. With our bodies, we can put into motion something other than what we've been given thus far. We can also do a lot of terrible things and recreate really bad existing scripts with our body. It's not that I think dance is just “you dance and everything gets better.” All the oppression that exists outside the studio existed in the studio too, but just the notion that you can make something else is really exciting to me and how you can do it. Doing something physically and acting in the moment is the possibility that keeps me really interested in dance training.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected you?

I am extraordinarily privileged in this moment, because my job is secure, unlike so many people in the arts. I'm not having to worry about a paycheck, which I'm not sure anybody other than tenured professors can say right now. So, I would say one of the impacts is just being aware of that degree of privilege and what responsibility comes with that. I am here working on a book but I write better when I'm dancing. I was dancing a ton, and then suddenly, because we're in LA in California we started sheltering in place before pretty much everyone else. We've really been in this relatively small apartment for two months now, and it's been really strange. I would say one of the odd outcomes of being out here during it is we're being told how serious this was before other people kind of realize.  Just realizing that the US is really big but also being led so badly; that there's not really any sort of shared communication systems. So I spent a lifetime, sort of feeling crazy because I was trying to tell my family in Alabama or tell people back in Michigan how bad this was and it hadn't really caught up so that I'm thinking a lot about that- where we live matters really deeply. I feel really safe in California because there's been so much governmental leadership and I felt like we've kind of been told what to do in relatively clear ways. How it's affected me as an artist..I had to really be patient with myself.  I'm someone who can often sit down and work really hard for long periods of time and now I can't.  I'm also spending a lot of time worried about family members who are older and at higher risk, and I can't get to them. That has been mean, both that experience of being far away from my elderly parents, and also being really horrified at the narrative of “older people are dying.”  I mean, all of my classes are about to gain a new assignment on interviewing your elders, because this notion that young people could just keep going and maybe some old people will die but they're going to die anyway. I'm being a little hyperbolic in my description but I don't think that much. Thinking about how we acknowledge the debts to older people and how we live in a world that helps sustain life for the most compromised around us. I actually think it's mostly affecting content imaging. The focus on elders is going to be really big and also how to sort of move away from a notion of individual and to sort of collective care. I really want to experiment in the classroom, when we retire and whatever that looks like.

Q: How have you seen other professors supporting their students during this time?

I mean it's been really interesting. I am in touch with University of Michigan, there's a group of women who all teach in dance departments. We have sort of a research working group and we've been meeting every week to talk about our work.  I've actually been really intrigued that a lot of them are talking about students doing really great work at this moment and think feeling like some of it has to do, maybe counter intuitively, with the fact that I have a little bit less access to professors. So, you all are high achievers and you want to do well.  It's a pretty frequent conversation, we wonder, “What's the right way to do it?” and they would give more guidance, which isn't a bad instinct. I would never wish this circumstance on anyone but I'm curious about how it might have just set people off on the path they want to take and fate having to figure things out in a different community than they might have. I'm intrigued about that and I'm even intrigued about thinking about it if we're teaching online in the fall.  We're going to treat it as an opportunity to work differently.

Q: What have you seen specifically in the dance community during this time?

I think people are trying to figure out what to do with absolutely no income. Most of my conversations I think with independent artists have been around trying to fill out unemployment applications and states that have bad setups for that.  Having to deal with people being in power who don't believe the government should function, has meant now the government doesn't function and now we really need the government. People are dealing with intense financial realities. I think being around artists who were at universities were often around people who have a lot of familial safety nets. That is not the reality for a lot of black, brown and queer artists in particular. Just talking to people about what's happening financially, we are talking about money more than we used to. I don't think that'll be a bad thing if we keep talking about money more and that's certainly been a shift in the dance world. Trying to figure out how to do this stuff online, I've been curating a series of theories that we've been calling “Dances for Surviving and Thriving”, so inviting Midwestern dance artists to create these little kinds of dance tutorials. It has been really cool to see what people want to do in their home to kind of move away from taking class online. Again, I think there's a lot of the money conversations leading to dealing with the ethics of the art industry. I don't know if this is new, but talking about how we get involved politically, so that we have people in offices from the school board to the President, that are looking out for folks and creating an infrastructure.

Q: What would you like to see change and shift in the performing arts after the pandemic is over and we get back to a new normal?

As a curator, I have an obsession with mixed bills (mixed programs.) I think that the idea of the mixed bill is with me as a curator, we have to think about sharing resources in moments of shrinking resources. I'm curious how people will try to not just spread the resources but genuinely share them and what that looks like. What that looks like for the more privileged among us to find ways to step back. Just modes of collectivity. My hope is that there's actually some ground laid to try to keep thinking about collectivity and sharing resources. As a former MFA Dance student at UM Fabiola would say, “Who's in the room and who's not in the room, and what does that mean about the room we're in?”