I am an artist passionately committed to exploring the confluence of music, sound and movement. My creative endeavors include many types of collaborations in modern dance, percussion performance, sound design, audio engineering, and teaching.
One afternoon five years ago, I unwittingly accepted an invitation to join two friends playing music at a demonstration of something called “contact improvisation”. For years, I’d performed in a wide variety of musical contexts; Professional symphony orchestras, world music ensembles, rock and jazz bands, and in musical theatre. But that day, I found purpose which I had been seeking over all those years. I experienced the thrilling exchange between dancer and musician, where inspiration and inspired action become one, igniting a new passion and starting me on the path of devoting my creative life to The Dance.
Since that landmark contact improvisation jam, I have found that dance truly is the community in which I belong, and today I identify primarily as an “artist in dance”. I strive to have a broad and informed dance sensibility, utilizing music and technology as a means to and in service of the art. Today, I work as an accompanist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Dance. During my MFA studies in Sound Design at the UIUC, (completed May 2012), I was mentored by Music Director and Associate Professor of Dance John Toenjes, whom I assisted developing and teaching two classes on music/dance relationships, I studied the improvisational movement practice of Kirstie Simson, I played classes with teacher/choreographers Cynthia Oliver, Jan Erkert and Kirstie Simson, and I danced in found, choreographed by Tamin Totzke.
As a sound designer/artist, my performance and research work is characterized by live “sound performance”, audience movement participation, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative uses of sound and video technology. In my most recent project, Resonance FOUND, audience members explore a sonic/visual playground which changes constantly in response to their movement, and that dynamic environment catalyzes the ensuing improvised music/dance performance. In 2010, I co-created and performed in View Profile, a multi-site, telematic (networked) performance of music and dance, taking place on the internet, two campus locations at the University of Illinois, and the Sonic Arts Research Center in Northern Ireland.
From 2009-2012, I worked as a graduate assistant at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, a large professional performing arts center on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. At Krannert, I designed sound and music for dance, theatre, film and installation, and mixed front of house and monitors, recorded, designed and installed sound systems I worked alongside world-class artists like the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Trisha Brown Dance Company, Armitage Gone!, and L.A. Theatre Works, to name a few.
My audio engineering work can be heard on recent commercial CD releases by roots-rock band Sonny Stubble, piano virtuoso Ian Hobson, the Atlantic Harp Duo and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Buckley, and djembe master Bolokada Conde from Guinea, West Africa.
