Performance as Ceremony
is the artistic and research framework through which I bring choreography, embodied inquiry, and Indigenous knowledge into relationship. It begins with our bodies: our capacity to listen, carry history, respond to place, and enter into relation with others.
Grounded in my experience as a Yaqui artist and Native adoptee, the framework brings together physical training, attentional practice, modern dance reconstruction, and interdisciplinary performance. Movement, sound, light, space, and writing become ways of investigating how knowledge is carried and how relationships are renewed.
The central question is practical: What conditions allow performance to become an encounter through which something can be remembered, recognized, or changed?
Why Ceremony?
Ceremony names a responsibility within the work. It asks how we arrive, what we attend to, whose histories we carry, and what our presence asks of others.
I approach performance as a process of renewing relationships between people, land, memory, and time. This begins before an audience enters and extends beyond the event itself. Preparation, rehearsal, collaboration, and the conditions of gathering all belong to the practice.
My use of ceremony is situated in my own Yaqui experience and ongoing relationship with cultural knowledge. It does not stand for a single, universal Indigenous worldview. It gives direction to the work: toward attention, reciprocity, and an understanding that making something also means becoming responsible for the relationships through which it is made.
The Body as an Archive
My experience of foster care, adoption, and displacement informs how I understand the body’s relationship to knowledge. Cultural inheritance can persist even where access to language, land, or family history has been interrupted. Performance gives me a way to approach that inheritance through sensation, movement, memory, and return.
The embodied archive includes what can be recalled and what remains difficult to name. It holds learned technique alongside uncertainty, absence, and the possibility of recognition. Working with this archive means allowing those conditions to shape the inquiry.
Survivance, the active presence and continuance of Indigenous life, gives this work its stakes. The body carries history while participating in what comes next.
Methodologies
Muscle/Bone, Preparing to Listen
My Muscle/Bone practice draws from Min Tanaka’s Body Weather. Physical training develops grounding, stamina, sensitivity, and the capacity to respond to changing conditions.
This preparation tunes attention to weight, effort, contact, and the relationship between the body and its surroundings. It asks the performer to become available: to notice habitual responses, sustain physical listening, and remain responsive to what a space or another person introduces.
Training establishes the conditions from which choreography can emerge.
Attention, Allowing Form to Emerge
Attention is a compositional practice. Sustained listening allows movement material and relationships to become perceptible before they are fixed into form.
The work asks: What draws the body toward movement? What changes when attention shifts? How does an individual action become part of a collective pattern?
Emergence requires rigor. The performer must distinguish between following a familiar impulse and responding to what is happening. Choreography develops through that discernment, through choosing when to act, repeat, wait, or allow a relationship to change.
Limón Lineage, Moving with History
My reconstruction of José Limón’s The Unsung (Deer Solo) and Danzas Mexicanas (Indio Solo), undertaken with Dante Puleio, brings historical choreography into contact with my experience as a Yaqui performer.
Reconstruction becomes a method of inquiry. What does a movement transmit? What assumptions accompany its preservation? How does its meaning shift through the person dancing it?
The score, its transmission, and my embodied experience meet in performance. This encounter allows me to investigate Indigenous presence within modern dance history and the possibilities of cultural return through repertoire.
Yaqui Knowledge and Relation, Locating the Practice
Yaqui knowledge gives my work its particular orientation toward land, memory, and the living world. I approach these relationships through ongoing learning and embodied research.
Within the framework, land participates in the encounter. Time can be experienced through recurrence and return, with past and present entering the same movement. These understandings shape how I compose, listen, and inhabit a performance environment.
Relation also asks something of the artist: to remain attentive to where knowledge comes from, how it is carried, and the responsibilities involved in sharing it.
From Practice to Performance
These methods work together. Physical preparation supports sustained attention. Attention brings relationships into focus. Historical and cultural inquiry deepen what those relationships ask of the performer. Composition gives the encounter a form that others can enter.
In Juya Nokakamea, research into the Yaqui story of the talking tree develops through movement, sound, and an immersive environment. The story shapes a practice of listening and a way of inhabiting the space. In the Limón reconstructions, an inherited movement score becomes the ground for investigating memory, lineage, and Indigenous presence.
Each work tests the framework differently. The methods remain responsive to the questions, people, and places involved.
Witnessing and Research
The audience enters this field of attention through the act of witnessing. Watching, listening, and sharing duration contribute to the encounter without requiring everyone to arrive at the same interpretation.
Performance is also a way of conducting research. Rehearsal generates questions that movement can investigate; writing gives those discoveries language and brings further questions back to the body. The practice develops through repeated cycles of preparation, encounter, reflection, and return.
Performance as Ceremony remains an evolving framework. Its continuity lies in a commitment: to make work through which presence becomes a practice of relationship, and relationship becomes a responsibility.