Artist Statement

I am a multidisciplinary artist, immigrant, mother, and educator. My work floats between dance and performance art. This body, my Mexican body, travels between them bringing with it a fascination with blood and color, rebellion and fight, music and silence.  Concepts of race, trauma, and feeling as “the other,” pulse underneath.

I was born in Mexico City in a family of performers who laid the groundwork for my curiosity for experimentation. My mother always told me to do what I wanted despite what society told me, and as a good daughter, I listened. As a teenager, I was part of a countercultural group of people in Mexico City who rejected the repression coming from politics and religion and organized protest performances to speak out.  I left Mexico at age eighteen to study dance in the USA, speaking not one word of English.  My first English teachers and friends were the homeless in Harvard Square.

I have always been drawn to games, psychology, and human experiments. I create performances that reveal or challenge myself to face my own fears and even discover new ones.  I am fascinated by human relationships, which becomes obvious in the way I make the viewers my collaborators and complicit in my pieces whether they are live or connected through technology.

I may set up a situation in which the audience must catch me as I let myself fall backward from a tall ladder, or improvise a movement piece while blindfolded, with music selected by one of the viewers. I may pass my camera around for audiences to document the piece as they witness me going through a physically challenging task.

Technology has become my partner, allowing me to connect with audiences close and far. I can use the camera on my phone to control an audience in a gallery far away while performing in front of a local group of people, creating two performances at once. Or I can perform alone at home to unknown viewers who interact with me with “speech to chat '' as they watch my actions.

I reject the division of audience and performer, the make-believe, the endless pursuit for a perfect performance and a perfect body.

What I do in my work is often what I am afraid of doing in real life.

I do not seek to hide the struggle.