GRIEF SNAKE SKIN
An evolving performance and visual research project
Grief Snake Skin is an evolving body of performance and visual research exploring grief, intimacy, memory, and transformation through embodied ritual. The project investigates how skin holds history—personal, familial, cultural—and how acts of shedding can function as both mourning and renewal.
Working across dance-theater, burlesque-informed performance, photography, film, and installation, the project treats intimacy not as subject matter but as method. Humor, erotic address, vulnerability, and repetition operate as tools for metabolizing grief and inherited expectation—asking what it means to remain with loss long enough for transformation to occur.
GOOD GRIEF!
Ritual performance
Good Grief! is a live performance manifestation of Grief Snake Skin, unfolding through solo and duet dance-theater, burlesque-informed peel, song, and audience address. The work treats grief as a living material—absurd, tender, grotesque, and ecstatic—inviting collective witnessing through ritualized acts of shedding.
The video above is projected onto the theater scrim as the opening moment of Good Grief!. It functions as a sensory preface to the live work and is followed by the Snake Host’s character’s introduction of skin, shedding, and the erotic as central through-lines in the performance. Stills below document moments from the live ritual.
MATERIAL STUDIES: SHED & PEEL
Material and image-based research
This work centers material and image-based exploration developed through collaborative play. Working with dancers and collaborators, I experiment with application, pressure, color, and removal—working with the body as a site for making, looking, and attention rather than narrative extraction.
These experiments generate photographs, video, and physical residue—skins that hold trace and gesture. While not yet installed as autonomous works, these materials point toward future spatial installations that gather image, sound, and accumulated skins as sites of collective memory.
SHEDDING/TERRAIN
Embodied research in development
This ongoing collaborative research explores shedding as a biological, sensory, and cultural process—shaped by evolution, environment, and social meaning. Working through movement, presence, and image-making, the research approaches skin as sensual terrain: a site of contact, projection, memory, and change.
Developed in collaboration with photographer Ron Tarver, the work privileges shared presence and slow process over predetermined outcomes, allowing form, collaborators, and questions to emerge over time.