Hi Paige,

Thank you for coming to the performance.  Here is a letter I sent in response but with a few more thoughts.

Please know that just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean that it lacks sense or its own logic. Potent art relies on the specificity of the artist’s vision,perception, and experience to create work that plays along the spectrum of personal/universal.  When it doesn’t or isn’t allowed to do so, you get the blandest of works that is fit to stick on a street corner or in a waiting room.
In reference to “this is a forgery”, what happens when a person is laden with beliefs, limitations, history,and patterns that are no longer serving them and then works to break those patterns through in depth self reflection and ritual, to reveal a purer version of themselves?  you are left with with a human, in front of you, alive, honest,dancing in that freedom and clarity. The presence of video/elements in the first section and not in later section is in relationship to that. I see your criticism as a success on my part.  It is the gestalt of the whole piece through time that interests me, one element will be more in focus than the other at any given time… they work together to create a living image.  You may need me, the dancer onstage, to be the focus the whole time, but I don’t need that. The piece didn’t need that.

In general,the arc of my pieces change over time like a spiral and come together by the end. This piece comes from a personal process of the last few years. It is a reflection of that as well as a device to use structure/ritual/metaphor to transform in the process of performance. If you are not open to the non-linear, and need everything handed to you, then my work is not for you.

As far as I know, no institution or organization has license over the content or specific execution of the artist’s work. That is the artist’s domain. I would have made the SAME piece without that AWARD Show grant, just with fewer paychecks to go around.   I find that your distaste for the degree of my artistic freedom means that it existed and that I did something successfully, regardless of your opinion. I follow the work and my body. It was my intention to free myself of limitation. I make ABSOLUTELY no apology for the freedom I got a taste of.

Amelia

P.S. what does it matter if it is dance/performance art or whatever? that is not  relevant.  I perform and use any means necessary for the work.  That attaching a label or claiming something doesn’t  fit within your label can somehow be used as a weapon  is continually frustrating and boring to me.