“Eat so God can love you.”
An interdisciplinary research practice that examines how care, sacrifice, and belonging are shaped through religious, cultural, and aesthetic traditions. The work is both choreographic and theoretical — it draws from performance studies, Black feminist thought, somatic research, and cultural memory. I’m interested in how bodies internalize systems of value, and how performance can serve as a site of re-patterning, reclamation, and liberation.
This solo project is developing in three strands:
Movement research exploring ritual, repetition, and embodied cosmology
Sonic and text-based inquiries into lineage, belief structures, and desire
Public-facing formats that function as archive, study, and community exchange.
I’m building a body of work that lives beyond the stage — something that will engage in discourse with communities, healing practices, and (hopefully) birth new cultural frameworks.
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“Eat so God can love you.”
Origin: Brooklyn, NY.
My first site of excavation is Brooklyn. This work mines my early life. Within the Caribbean diasporic community and the grind culture of New York City, my early life was shaped by religious dogma and internalized scripts on the economy of care. The project’s title, “Eat so God can love you.”, emerges directly from a cultural context— spoken by elders at the dinner table, where nourishment, obedience, love, and worth were intimately entangled.
“Eat so God can love you.” is both an archive of my personal journey towards liberation and an unfolding of the universal human story of enlightenment, expressed through contemporary and traditional dance, story and experiential soundscape.
I am seeking a focused, self-directed period of creative practice within a supportive artistic community to advance this ethno-autobiographical performance research. During my residency, I plan to maintain a daily practice centered on movement, vocal composition, and ritual score development, supported by reading, writing, and archival reflection. This process will culminate in choreographic studies, sonic material, and a refined performance framework that can be shared with presenters and academic partners following my residency.
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“Eat so God can love you.”
Diagnosis: Our Congenial Society
It is my assessment that in our world today, spiritual doctrine, domestic ritual, and cultural memory live largely unexamined in its relationship to how care is given, withheld, and performed.
All over the world, the doctrines of puritanism, asceticism, original sin, chosen-ness, eschatology, patriarchy–as well as western society’s concepts on earned love and human worth–do not just whisper in our ears.
They are not confined to theory.
They are not contained in study.
They are made manifest
in our homes,
in our relationships,
in our governments.
This project is in vital conversation with the breakdown of our congenial society.
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“Eat so God can love you.”
The Minnesota era
I spent 17 years in Minnesota.
At first, I was a dancer.
Then a dancer-choreographer.
Then an educator as well.
Then a dancer-choreographer, educator, and community organizer.
At some point, I needed to break from the internal shackles of my cultural conditioning as an elite high-brow artist.
Psychologically and physically, I left the prevailing culture of the concert dance world.
Because I felt it largely practiced the same type of harm we fault corporations for.
Those rooms demanded obedience
without demonstrating good character in leadership.
They praised top-down leadership
and shunned dancer agency and consent.
They sacrificed slow and deep listening
for a results-oriented, product-centered culture.
Instead of communal responsibility,
I saw and experienced abuse.
And in myself–
I saw a growing distrust of my own voice.
A neglect of my own body
for the sake of the Voice in the front of the room.
Submission to these structures required bypassing self and communal care
for the good of the program,
the institution,
the movement,
the aesthetic,
the work.
As I began to more fully study and practice the religions of my African and Afro-Caribbean ancestors,
I surrounded myself with healers who moved in a way that honoured all life forms and indigenous approaches to wellness.
I transformed from the inside-out.
In 2023, my ancestors told me to go and teach what I know.
I set up movement trainings in the Twin Cities–
inviting activists, dancers, scholars, healers and somatic therapists.
Then the container collapsed.
Because this work requires deeper resources.
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“Eat so God can love you.”
The Florida era
I am now in Florida, working out of a studio I had the resources to build for my practice thanks to a grant from the Wallace Foundation, administered by the International Association of Blacks in Dance.
Being in a warmer climate–and now closer to the ocean, which remembers our histories–has always been important for me.
I would like this work to be sponsored by institutions, communities, and cultural ecosystems that are aligned with its research.
Until we can all make a meal together in the spirit of the konbit.
And sit at the same table, knowing that our politics are no different from our heart’s alignment with All That is.
Until we can truly eat–
without the “us vs. them,”
my god against yours,
my gender against yours.
Until we can turn what, for the first 37 years of my life, I believed to be a curse into a shared blessing.
“Eat so God can love you.”
