How has living in Los Angeles impacted you creatively and emotionally?

When I moved here in 2008 for grad school, I immediately became part of a close-knit family of peers. The friends I made in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance are still some of my deepest adult relationships. When I finished UCLA, though, I  shifted my center further outside the dance world, into the performance art community. Los Angeles has an incredible experimental performance scene, and the first thing that made an impression on me was that people here are constantly creating opportunities for one another—from opening art spaces, to producing festivals or guerilla-style pop-up performance events, I immediately felt the invitation to join in, as opposed to a pressure to compete. Resources here are as scarce as anywhere, but the artists I gravitated to seemed to feel like we would all have a better chance of succeeding together, rather than in competition.

How do you balance between supporting other artists through your work at CCI and Rhizomatic Arts and your own arts practice? What has shifted for you over the years in terms of this balance?

It’s definitely a challenge. I don’t dedicate nearly as much time to creating my performance works as I would like to. But I’ve also been shifting the way I think about my work as an artist. I’ve started writing, and I am more frequently facilitating collaborations around the actual creation process—which is actually my favorite part of making work. I’m much more interested in the process than in the product.

Los Angeles has an incredible experimental performance scene, and the first thing that made an impression on me was that people here are constantly creating opportunities for one another—from opening art spaces, to producing festivals or guerilla-style pop-up performance events, I immediately felt the invitation to join in, as opposed to a pressure to compete.

But also, after the 2016 presidential election fiasco I quickly re-assessed my goals and decided that I would rather put my energy into creating opportunities for more marginalized artists than focusing on “making it” myself, because there are some voices that we really need to hear right now, and some bodies that we need to see in institutional spaces. Shortly thereafter, I got the job at CCI, which has given me the opportunity to hire artists of color as trainers, and administer a grant program supporting arts-based entrepreneurial projects serving marginalized communities in Los Angeles. Working at CCI forced me to step up to the plate as an arts worker in Los Angeles, not as a performer, but as a facilitator of interpersonal connections and equitable resource distribution. It’s pretty radical work, when I step back and look at it. I’m pretty proud of what I’m contributing to there, and it’s totally in alignment with Rhizomatic Arts, which continues to sustain me as well.

How have you been able to fund the creation of your artworks? Is there anything you've learned about the business of art that you wish you knew when you first got started?

Funding is always a challenge. My larger projects have been funded by international festivals (in Canada, specifically) and in partnerships with my collaborators in Australia. But I’ve generally scaled back my work in the past 10 years so that I’m doing very low-impact, easily tourable work—work that can be performed essentially anywhere. I’m not super interested in working in theaters for hundreds of people. I’m more interested in performances for one person at a time, or popping up in a public space unexpectedly, for an accidental audience. For the past 6 years I’ve been part of a group of artists in Los Angeles who engage in a practice called “Encounter.” Encounters are unplanned, improvisational events that take place in public and private spaces usually without any announcement. We’re not interested in performing for an audience or documenting the event; we’re instead interested in how we encounter different spaces and different collections of co-performers, in performance mode.

De-coupling the work from the funding structure can be really healthy. I think I’d encourage young people to make the work they want to make regardless of its fundability, and to work with the human network in your community.

So, to return to your question about funding—I suppose I could have been exposed earlier to different models for performance outside the concert format… But I was, really. I was always interested in performance in protest settings, street performances, salons, poor theater, and things like Fluxus, Allan Kaprow’s “happenings,” or Anna Halprin’s dances in nature. Those kinds of works or experiences don’t require the kind of funding that concert performances do. (To say nothing of the fact that they’re often unfundable.) De-coupling the work from the funding structure can be really healthy. I think I’d encourage young people to make the work they want to make regardless of its fundability, and to work with the human network in your community. There’s a lot of abundance there if you ask.

Do you feel that community building for performance art is uniquely different from community building for other forms of art?

I don’t know… My community is very interdisciplinary, and includes primarily visual artists, as well as dancers, and also philosophers and writers. I have never found much value in identifying performance art as something distinct from the “fine arts” or “performing arts” because we all tend to bump up against one another, and our work mixes together… I suppose if anything live performance has the advantage of generally calling upon people to show up, in person, at the same time and place, so in that way it is theoretically conducive to face-to-face community building… though you can be plenty anonymous in a dark theater, and art openings are all about the social. So, I guess the answer is “no.”