I had no business learning to dance salsa. I was the last kid in my class to learn to skip, the last kid picked for every team sport in school. I am not physically coordinated. And yet, I felt a conviction in my soul to try. Why salsa specifically, of all dances? I don’t know for sure, but partner dancing to salsa music was the first place I was able to practice mindfulness. Perhaps

Abramović, Marina. The Artist Is Present. 2010. Performance. Ahmed, Mara. “Difference as Liberatory Politics.” Counter Currents (blog), March 2, 2019. Ballroom Dance That Breaks Gender Roles. TedxMontreal, 2015. https://www.ted.com/talks/trevor_copp_and_jeff_fox_ballroom_dance_that_breaks_gender_roles?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare. Blash, Philip. First Dance. Waterloo, 2011. https://youtu.be/GgwLEWolQME. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. France: Les Presse Du Reel, 1998. Camnitzer, Luis. “Thinking About Art Thinking.” E-Flux Journal, no. # 65 SUPERCOMMUNITY (August 2015). Cohen, Leonard. Anthem. 1992. Lyrics. Cordero-Guzmán, Héctor R. “The Latino Population in New York City.” American Sociological Association, July 9, 2019.

Note: This prologue was completed during a performance workshop conducted by Ernesto Pujol, social choreographer, that he facilitates annually for second year School of Visual Arts, Art Practice graduate students. Since it was the basis of thinking about the material of my life as a starting point for considering the direction of this project, I offer it here as a form of personal introduction and context.  I have one memory as a baby. In that

Lately, I've been researching game playing as an art practice. I've mostly played competitive board games, but I started wondering about what cooperative games might exist. A Google search later I realized that there is a whole world of cooperative board games, and an international community of folks invested in the practice of their play.  I learned that many cooperative games are based on the narrative of the characters involved, and that this allows

I was exploring the idea of choreographing my own wasp dance when I was turned on to the work of interdisciplinary artist, aricoco (Ari Tabei), by my mentor and artist, Iviva Olenick. aricoco too, for different reasons, has a lifelong fascination with insect communities. Her current project, PIPORNOT[1], which explores division of labor within communities was under development when she let me interview her. The day we spoke also happened to be November 4,

One day when I was a little girl, I was standing on the sidewalk outside of our house waiting for my mom so we could leave. I was gleefully entertaining myself with a game of stomp the ants, specifically red ants because they deliver painful stings. When my mom finally came outside, she asked what I was doing. I said, “killing these ants.” She looked at me with a type of disapproval I had

When I was in New York during the first summer of our Art Practice journey, I went to a locally owned music shop in Spanish Harlem. Everything for sale in this store was music related - records, CDs, even cassette tapes, instruments, and a few books. The one exception was that someone had taken the time to handcraft magnets. The magnets were dollhouse miniature-sized plates of beans and rice, complete with a sunny side

Cooking Red Beans and Rice with Courtney Discussing growing up in Louisiana, weekly rituals and their loss, and finding a piece of Louisiana in Alaska. Discussion Highlights: 28:10- Sundays and red beans 40:55- Displacement/relocation & food 55:05- Loss of traditions  Under Construction

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