Where would I be if my mentors hadn't believed in me? Where would my cast be if I didn't believe in them?

When I reflect on my professional experience, I am always brought to the moment where Ron Cunningham, artistic director of the Sacramento Ballet from 1988 to 2018, asked me to be part of the 2017-2018 season performing in various shows. I owe a lot to the foundation of my career to him.

For this section it first was just movement that I had created for the small studio I used to work for before the pandemic and then it developed into what it is now. This was one of those moments where it needed to be "cleaned" and that was what we did all the way through the end of show. In the first video you can see that the choreography was messy and not together and that some of the dancers didn't even know the steps versus in the second video you can see all of the transitions and formation changes and how they work much smoother compositionally.

As a choreographer, you have to use the punches that are thrown at you to your advantage. For me as a choreographer and had the first month of the semester online through zoom, I had to find a way for the cast to create movement and get "the ball rolling". It was sort of an unintentional masterpiece. A blessing in disguise.

The score that was given to the cast was that each of them were assigned to write a letter to themselves about an incident where they felt like they couldn't express who they really are. Some reflected on being new to San Diego as a transfer and others reflected on their high school experiences. I was more interested in words that could recall a sense of feeling.

In the next rehearsal on zoom I asked them all to take their letters and find 15 words that they could find within the manuscript and then I put them all into random break out rooms to give those words to a random cast mate.

Reflecting on the section "Thule", I wish there was a bit more time in the rehearsal process to have developed each a bit further. But it felt like we were in a time constraint with everything.

The sub score for Thule, was a chorographical tool I learned from one of my professors at Cal State, Fullerton. While on zoom we were asked to analyze a room that we were in and generate gestures from things that we saw and could interact with. This is called a room read.

Along with the many gestures and phrases they created they can also add moments where they could interact with a random object that was placed in their "room". This is an idea that I found in my research studying Ana Sokolow and her work "Rooms". How could an object be more than just an object in the room? What if the dancers where the object and the object the performers?

In everyday life there are echos of evil all around us. As director, I wanted to add a vulnerable element of myself that I don't really quite share with a lot of people in my life. As someone who suffers from suicidal depression, anxiety, PTSD, and ADHD, I asked myself how I could create movement that could encompass the feeling of all four, but also be 'more' than just those four illnesses. What was the 'more' I was searching for? I wanted it to be movement that could be interpreted into anything the viewer wanted it to be. When it came down to the rehearsal, I asked the dancers to dance what they thought they should be embodying. Some of the cast had reflected and reported back that they were demons, another talked about how the dancers reminded them of how they felt after their experience being sexually assaulted, another being addicted to drugs. This raised another question for me where I was wondering why so many of us had experienced traumas and put masks over ourselves to cover the emotions we felt. So many of us, myself included, hide behind the thing that scares us most... what are we so afraid of that doesn't allow us to be ourselves?

As I reflect on this score for the dancers, I remember thinking to myself what is the most 'human' or tangible thing close to 'human' that we do every day that the audience will be able to connect to the dancers with. We were working on backwards walking in my dance techniques class at San Diego State University at the time, so I wanted to have the cast embody that. What was walking? What was 'human'? I added sub layers to the score of walking which included any type of walking which could be the 'grandma walk', the 'power walk', skipping, hopping, and so forth. Some even started running. In later rehearsals I added more sub scores to the base score of meditation and what prayer meant to some of the cast, and dancing and what dance meant to them. Later, I added more sub scores of queering, shaking, and touching which comes from "till your eyes water"* by Jessica Humphrey, Eric Gieger, and Leslie Seiters. I was fascinated by what I was viewing and how simple humanist movements could be works of art. As I read more into the movement and the accompanied article "shaking is the new plie, touching is a dialog, and queer as a verb"* by Jess, Leslie, and Eric, I was intrigued in how each different part of movement could be used as a tool for freedom in expression. How could all three be happening at the same time? How can I create movement that each individual dancer could queer and make it their own?