In my first semester as a graduate student, I wrote a paper titled: “Where have all the queers gone?” In it, I began my own reckoning with the historical tradition of mainstream dance forms to erase anything deemed “other,” whether by intentional exclusion or by attempts at assimilation. These forms have long been contested by dance artists invested in lineages of political dance making. “The queers”, the feminists, artists of color, and artists with disabilities have been there all along, radically shifting the way dance and video art sits in the broader field. Studying with many of these artists, and now at the conclusion of my graduate study, the artworks I make are an attempt to visualize a future. It is a dense, saturated future where nonconformity is visible. It is an end of time, in which the “mainstream” complicates, ferments, and blooms a new and broadened understanding of what it looks like to be human. This screenshot is from “Shiny,” the third in a series of music/dance/video productions that locate my queer body, voice, and experience centrally, as a means by which these traditional popular media are mobilized to illuminate—in vibrant LED light—my non-binary identity.
