The values of where I’m from, the island of Newfoundland, inform my ideas of what I think a livable future looks like. I remember my grandmother telling me that if I locked my car door it was an insult to my neighbor, because it implied I didn’t trust them. I come from a place where in the morning you might wake up and your neighbor is quietly making a cup of tea in your kitchen. That kind of coexistence might seem utopian, but it is part of my vision for how we can flourish and thrive. 

Artists have long created their own organizations and collectives, often focused on sharing resources, mutual advancement, and community. These networks and economies help de-bunk the idea of the artist as solitary and separate from society. Artists mobilize and alter communities and the organizations and systems we work within. 

Collaboration is intrinsic to my work whether I’m writing an essay, creating a performance, designing a participatory public program, or helping another artist realize their vision. Many of my choreographies (from staged works to social interventions) in many ways are not “mine” but there are things that are distinctive to me about them:

• multiplicity

• finding connections across diverse aesthetics, media, cultures and perspectives

• shared agency and responsibility in how they unfold in time in very intentional spaces 

And that’s true whether I’m editing a book or opening a new space or curating a festival of performances and community programs. 

Every day, as we choreograph our lives, the world choreographs us. Buildings and gardens choreograph how we move through them. The green street light says “go.” Red tells us to stop. But we also shape our environment. Cooks organize their kitchens so they can perform kitchen dances that flow with economy. When your body enters a space it transforms that space. 

Choreography is everywhere, in everything. In becoming aware of this relationship, we can move with growing awareness towards becoming more conscious choreographers of our own experience. The attention to movement and how our bodies co-exist – with our environment and each other – is central to my life philosophy.

In my own performances, I rarely choreograph steps. As an artist-curator and teacher I work with choreography as a bigger idea, choreographing patterns of embodied interaction between people, events and ideas; patterns of space, time and attention; so that people can manifest things that are meaningful to them. I see choreography as: a making possible.

My drive is curiosity. I remain more interested in what dance can be, than what it is not. Dancing can be a spiritual practice, a medicine, a ritual of belonging, a collaborative social practice, an organizing principle, an embodied experience of thought, a way of seeing and experiencing movement in the world. Dancing can be an act of catharsis, emancipation, mourning, protest, indoctrination, celebration. 

Dance is living on the frontiers of life, where you feel alive and can be in conversation with the world. 

I really do believe that the arts are critical to the health of our communities. The same way we need to protect the environment we live in, the arts are part of the health of our communities and cultural environment. Social choreography, in particular, fosters relationships and is a way we can come together in the most human way possible and share truly transformative experiences. Ultimately, I create spaces and situations to encourage authentic, reciprocal relationships and activate meaning making.

I understand and appreciate how we can learn resiliency through creative practice. The term "emergent strategies" has become popular in arts and social nonprofit circles. Dancers understand emergence in their bones—how simple actions can activate complex patterns of interconnection. How a small change in a system can create a chain of events with a larger impact down the line. In dance, creative research is often emergent: discovering the way on the way, navigating by trial and error, assessing and adjusting as you go. Creative research is both the practice and the means to develop the process.  

Many contemporary dancers have also developed knowledge and skills from negotiating social and economic precarity influenced, in part, by dance’s marginal status and labor practices. Many dance artists are freelancers, working wherever work takes them, often for low wages and little or no benefits. They have been working this way for most of their lives.

At the age of 9, I went across an ocean to study at The National Ballet School of Canada. Far from family, I learned how to navigate my new situation, and new fields of study. I embraced this learning and growth again as an O-1 US Visa recipient (for “Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement”), touring and collaborating with artists around the world. When I stepped into the role of Artistic & Executive Director of Velocity, the organization's artistic and financial revitalization required strategy, nimble action and collective determination.  

In human communities, resilience can emerge from informal social networks, mutual aid, and collective actions that arise spontaneously in response to a disaster or challenge. In our organizations, resiliency can emerge from knowledge sharing across stakeholders, co-ideation, and the ability to rapidly iterate and evolve new practices. These are all scenarios in which performing artists have more practice than most.

Artists need opportunities and systems of support to fully realize our vulnerable ideas. When we practice "creative administration" – ways of working to make art a reality that continually question the accepted view – we embrace experimentation, curiosity, research and creative process. We allow artists’ creative practices, and the art experience, to lead the way. 

In my experience as a performance-maker who found myself unexpectedly tasked with rescuing a struggling arts organization during The Great Recession, I applied what I had learned from being a part of countless dance and transdisciplinary collaborations – harnessing the power of activated, creative collaboration to accomplish the seemingly impossible. There have been artists generating effective strategies towards more equitable systems and more responsive arts administration for generations, and we can continue to build on these previous efforts by assessing what has been learned, questioning accepted views, and imagining new futures that create a public good in which we all have a stake.

Let us continue to hold space for artists' visions, take risks to resource and share underrepresented and emerging perspectives, further vital conversations, and endeavor in ways that inspire transformative change.