I make work in collaboration with the community.
I invite the audience into my practice.
I address a need.
I explore the human condition.
I move through different communities, practices and forms.
I am not fixed.
I value the emergence.
I value people.
I value the unseen.
I value the complex.
I bring people into the art.
I bring artists into the people.
I get out of the theatre.
I create access.
I work with others.
Others work with me.
We both are changed by the interaction.
We make art.
We are co-authors.
Together.
I repel against any sense of artist elitism.
I advocate for the public to value artists.
I sit in that space where the curtain rises and falls - between the public and artists.
Then ask that we, the audience and the artists, go witness how the curtains were made, revealing the unseen and the hands and the stories that made them.
THE FEAST OF KNOWING
I have resprouted. Remembering the mother that feeds me. This land in which I have been birthed from.
I have reconnected. Remembering the friendships that feed me. This land in which I have felt belonging.
I have rerooted. Remembering the earth that feeds me. This land in which I have been nourished.
I call back to my ancestors. I sing the songs of my grandmothers and aunties. I labour on this earth that my grandfathers and uncles have sweat. I touch the unseen that desperately want to be made visible. Water into air into fire into anything that can be dreamed. From within me this “mudanca”, A Portuguese word that means both movement & change. I dance to change. I change to dance.
And, in doing so, I return to this Earth. I return to my friends. I return to my mother.
Here I will lay for a bit more time. And in one hundred years my body will still know. Still know the home that provides me the feast of knowing.
In knowing, I come close to seeing. In seeing, I come closer to being. In being, I dance, I dance, I dance.
