Artist Statement:

COMFORT OR DISCOMFORT 

SELF EXPRESSION OR SUCCESS 

My relationship with Irish dance is made up of multiple elements that can be sorted unambiguously into feelings of comfort or discomfort.

• I am comfortable with: almost every day practices, training for three majors a year (aka it’s competition cycle), repetitive nature of practicing choreography or doing drills, the joy I experience while I am dancing, extreme sweat from stamina, getting corrections from my teacher and peers

• I am uncomfortable with: the thought of not being masculine enough, how the judges perceive me, conforming to expectations about male choreography, conforming to a traditional male costume appearance, the imbalance of external validation vs internal validation (success at what cost), not wanting to disregard imposed regulations on my self expression, the tendency to abandon myself in hopes of being judged fairly

“What will you choose?” I ask myself. It is between this comfort and discomfort where I house myself. I live here constantly. There is a constant push and pull of what is rewarding versus what is not. This is also where I find myself making my art.

The nature of my relationship to Irish dance can be explained in these binary modes I speak of. Expression and conformity. Comfort and discomfort. Not just because gender explicitly prescribes the way one engages with the form—there are, for example,  only male or female categories—but because I see my relationship with dance as dichotomous. Dance is an expressive outlet, but it is also a space where I feel I have to conform to traditional gender expectations in order to reap success. I love to choreograph my own steps and perform them, but I have to remember not to use certain moves or be too flamboyant. I love to design my costumes, but make sure the silhouette is masculine enough. I have to confront if the desire for external validation, like success, is more important than my internal validation, self expression.

Contextualized within my artistic practice, I create work that ruminates on the choices I am forced to make considering my identity and expression in my dance career. The work can more explicitly showcase a sense of discomfort, based on lived experiences that have negatively impacted my relationship with the sport. It can also take on a lighter note, as my work is always informed by my immense admiration for Irish dance. I may have a complicated relationship with its politics of identity, but no matter the discomfort I always come back to it. I see the lighthearted pieces as more of a reaction to the uncomfortability.  What better way to deal with tension than to laugh about it?

I draw inspiration from things like Irish dance costuming and choreography, using digital or physical representations to best mimic my feelings about competitive Irish dance. I seek to immerse the audience into my world, creating an environment in which they too have to face my experience. 

This installation is soundtracked by a recording of one of my dance classes, with its video, Friday night, covering an entire wall. This is opposed by two hanging works– Wear and Dancer 4+Dancer 1. The positioning urges the viewer to confront reality. Reality in my actual dance class– a space where I feel comfort, reality in the vest constructed out of the shoe worn for the more masculine dances, and unattainable dreams of dancing an entrechat in a girls costume. Prescription houses its own wall, a documented performance piece in which I asked the audience to rearrange a systematized version of my competition steps to then perform their “prescription”. The performance is a play on agency where I wish to embody conformity, echoed in the large photos on the adjacent wall where I am wearing Dancer 4– having the shoes adorn my body in the shape of a male costume. Lastly, When the night comes is a short film tracking the disorientation I have with the constant push and pull I spoke of earlier. Its intimate viewing situation isolates the viewer and transports them into a world where they are forced to perform.