Artist Statement by dancer-choreographer, Alanna Morris

“Where is the Love?” (attributed to Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway)

"I am interested in embodying the full spectrum of human life with all of its colours.  This requires a rigourous process of self inquiry, disciplined analysis, and emotional recall, that is then embodied.  This praxis is being shaped by my relationship with my Black ancestors and rites of passage through remembrance.  My choreography engages multiple theses around (the nature, function of, qualities, and values of) performance, masquerade, self love,  pleasure, liberation, and others.  Evaluating, then re-constructing the manifestations, I then seek to turn these entities inside out, which becomes a meta narrative on the nature of form itself. The research engages Black Political Thought and Black Feminist Politic. It is in conversation with traditional African sacred sciences, namely Ifá/Òrìsà practice of the Yorùbá people (and its expressions in the African diaspora), and Vodou, as birthed in The Republic of Benin and Haiti—all as cosmological, political, and ontological, and axiological frameworks and embodied wisdoms.  The philosophical ethos of my work is anti-capitalist. I value the slow and deep and seek to open up space between risk/trust, knowledge/questions, commitment/revolution, rigour/pleasure, softness/force, and autonomy/community. This Work is praxis (embodied practice), where the product never deviates from the process and the process is maintained integrally in performance. In this way it turns over on itself and can clearly be seen from any vantage point. I know this to be ritual performance and I am just getting started.

(updated June 2024)