on our collaborative process
GILLESPIE - My art practice builds experiences that celebrate and channel the unruly chaos of bodies. I work with and push against known forms to find moments of harmony from uniting the varied & textured grains of the body. As a dancemaker, I believe liberation begins in and lives through the body and so it is the primary text for my process. I improvise, work with voice, text, media, light, objects, sound, other bodies to find new ideas that converge and rupture into strange or elegant manners of being. I am inspired by creating in collective settings and thrive when working in interdisciplinary collaboration - honed with collaborators, Nguyen and Kevin. Having created & performed together for many years, our practice galvanized my passion for collaboration. to get there from here re-ignites and leverages our shared histories, individual approaches to auto-ethnography and embodied subjectivity to investigate isolation, migration and resilience and create a united visual and kinetic topography.
NGUYEN - As a choreographer, I make works that are layered autobiographical narrative to express the complexity of identity by looking at public versus private memory, collective versus personal, and the universal versus the particular. My explorations are not meant to merely reveal binaries, but rather to express simultaneity, an integration of all the parts to make the whole. It is as much a conversation as it is an introspection, a reflection of “who we are" as much as "who I am." I have been working with Maria Gillespie and Kevin Williamson for the past 20 years. Our shared history, body memory, and creative generosity with one another is an enduring source of nourishment for my process. This endeavor, to get there from here, reflects our continual dialectical journey. We embody our desires – aesthetic, cultural, political, economic, personal or otherwise – holding them together in the same bodily time and space.
WILLIAMSON - For the past two and a half decades, I have been working as a director, choreographer, performer, and educator in concert dance, theater, and opera in the US and abroad. My primary focus has been producing dance works with my collective KW + Company with an objective to make alienating social structures malleable through dancing and self-reflexive critique while celebrating queer ideals for empathy, multiplicity, unruliness, and belonging. Meanwhile, artistic collaborations in other disciplines and design roles encourage discovery of new insights that deepen and expand my personal experience and inform productions of my own design. This project furthers my inquiry both in practice and discipline, providing an opportunity to discourse extensively with Maria and Nguyen to investigate the impact of climate change and social stressors as a collective - sourcing imagery from nature and the body to explore the value of each.