Artist Statement by dancer-choreographer, Alanna Morris

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

My choreographic practice over the last five years has been steeped in rigourous Self Inquiry, disciplined analysis, and emotional recall, that is then embodied. I engage multiple theses around (the nature, function of, qualities, and values of) performance, masquerade, self love, pleasure, and liberation. This praxis is being shaped by my relationship to my Black ancestors and rites of passage through remembrance. I am interested in embodying the full spectrum of human life with all of its colours. 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. My choreography also engages research on Black Political Thought and Black Feminist Politic. I am in conversation with traditional African sacred sciences, namely Ifá/Òrìṣà 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 of 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 also praxis and methodology, 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.

(updated January 2025)