I am the manifestation of a secret night on Village Island, born into the hands of a loving Kwakwaka'wakw grandmother, and graciously wrapped in red cedar arms as I came from the spiritual world to this one. I dream from this otherworldly place and create stories driven by a Kwakwaka'wakw rhythm. When my stories enter the theatre, they are often known as “contemporary dance.” The fascinating thing is that when my community witnesses my choreography, it does not exist as art, but rather as the truth. Using the wild, effervescent, and mystical Kwakwaka'wakw worldview gifted to me by my family, I infuse my people's ways of life into movement and bring our traditional stories to the modern stage. This new setting provides challenges that are daring, but necessary. The use of Kwakwaka'wakw ceremonial dance is imperative to activating the body in a grounded, spiritual way. With the cultivation of a new breath, the work emerges through thick forest, with huckleberry ink smeared along its face, into a new world.

            The progression of this work is usually thick with story. Starting in the community, the process is born out of coastal landscapes and from traditional knowledge keepers. If lucky, these stories will bleed their way onto the paper of my creative mind and rewrite themselves as movement. This is the best part. Now that the story has cultivated a new meaning, the story is thrown back out onto moving bodies and reshaped until it is put back into the closest iteration of its original form. For me, dance is the closest formula of human expression to tell the stories of my people. The goal of my work is to ignite the feeling I had as a child, witnessing one of the most magical and supernatural places on the planet: my traditional territories (located in the Pacific Northwest on Vancouver Island). Designing an acoustic environment is paramount to housing the dance work. In our traditional big house, the gukwdzi, the sounds of crackling cedar wood, wind through the wood panels, bells and whistles in the back, and elder's chatter seize the space. Once establishing a clear sound to the work, the dancing emerges from a deep cavern in my salmon skin body. Born from all of this is movement that both aches and revels in the stories of my people. Suddenly, as my mother would say, the "grandmothers are dancing in my hair", and something has been reborn.