Muscle Memory. Charcoal Drawing on paper, Embroidery, and Video (5:30 Minutes), 2025

As a young ballet student, I became very disillusioned by dance culture early on in my life. Hypermobility did not grant me the flexibility for the mental gymnastics required to see ballet as a prestigious act worthy of my body’s destruction. The practice that enabled my hypermobility also created a reliance on controlling the body through external and internalized governance. For all the beauty ballet has offered, it does not outweigh the grotesque reality underneath the glimmering pointe shoes and chiffon skirts.

How do I reconcile the trauma incurred by dance culture with the very tactile joy that comes from intelligent movement? It's these questions that my installation raises. The space is transformed by a low light atmosphere and projected video intersecting large scale drawings. The paper in these drawings represents my own body, torn from the harsh conditioning filled with rhetoric that both worshiped the body's capabilities and condemned its limitations. The thread that’s embroidered across each piece demonstrates the role connective tissue’s play in the retention of memory and control of the body. My connective tissue simultaneously inhibits my movement and is the key to working through the trauma stored in my muscles and discovering the body's own intelligent way of relating to space. The video in this installation conveys the repetition of classical training contrasted with the body’s desire to escape this restrictive methodology and find kinesthetic freedom.

Photography credit: Gerard Regot