DIS-TANZ-SOLO Research Period (01.01.2023 - 30.06.2023)

Chartreuse - A season of archiving and digitally contextualizing my dance work in parallel with medical transition

Gefördert durch die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien im Programm NEUSTART KULTUR, Hilfsprogramm DIS-TANZEN des Dachverband Tanz Deutschland

“The past four years of my life have been marked by many large parallel transitions... relocating from Seattle to Berlin in 2018, transitioning my sex and gender, and my artistic values and motivations shifting drastically within a new cultural context. I haven’t had the resources or time to properly archive the work I have done as a dancer/ choreographer throughout these four years and present it within my website and digital media in a context that is authentic to my current identity (uses correct pronouns, new name, and updated pictures). This stipend will enable me to carve out time to gather all of the documentation I have, translate my dance work and artistry into a digital identity, and then enable digital access to past and current work, opening doors for future projects, resources, and commissions. Furthermore, this stipend will also allow me to focus on non-physical work as my body undergoes months of multiple gender- affirming surgeries and a process of healing from those surgeries. Medically transitioning sex and gender can be an intimately personal, difficult, and costly process, and the challenges of undergoing this process while maintaining a full-time career as a freelance dance artist is rarely known by the wider dancer community. Navigating the trans-specific bureaucracy of the Krankenkasse easily becomes a full-time job in itself. Now that a large portion of this bureaucratic work is done, I have surgeries scheduled all throughout 2023. I am asking myself, ‘how do I sustain my freelance dance career and artistic growth while being in an intensive year of surgeries and healing from surgeries?’ Shifting the focus to admin, creative gestation, and archiving for six months will enable me to continue working and keep vital sources of income flowing for me to sustain my life, but also allow the space for my physical body to rest and heal. In addition to medical gender transition, my art-making transitioned with my relocation to Berlin. I carried with me a severe state of burnout. With a new desire to work more sustainably, preventing future cycles of burnout in my life, I began to value rest and healing as core tenets of my practice... and as inherently political to working as an artist within a capitalist society. I began researching queer care practices (coming from the approach of dance, somatic practitioners, bodyworkers, and sex workers) to specifically inform my recent work in creating mobile pop-up ‘queer care temple’ installations, focused on my sisters*, other trans women. This work is drastically different than my older work documented on my website, featuring primarily stage performances in theaters for a general public. It’s important my digital archive documents and shares this journey I’ve undergone. It is my story and is the current context of how I approach making work. My current website desperately needs a transition, to match my own. Please enable this process by allocating this stipend to support this work.”