Current Research

Statement of Research

Areas and Approaches: Dance & Critical Dance Studies; Performance Theory & Performance Studies; Spatial Analysis; Critical Ethnic Studies; Performance Ecology; Environmental History; Urban Sociology; Movement as Research.

Focuses: Hip Hop; Street Dance; History of Global Hip Hop (The Americas & the Middle East); Performance and Urban Spatial Politics; Black Vernacular Dance History (U.S.); 20^th c. Modern Dance History (U.S., Germany); Urbanized Wetland Ecologies.

My research looks at how moving life in space interacts with itself, other life-beings, and material stuff when dance or expressive movement is involved. What happens to space? What happens to stuff? What happens to life? And what does expressive movement do to every being involved? How do beings and their arrangment in space impact dance?

There are two facets to my approach to research: the archival and the embodied. While my work troubles the neat delineation of these two modes of investigation, their distinction nonetheless forms a useful rhetorical tool for understanding my approach. Uniting both facets, however, is my pursuit of issues connecting ecology, spatial analysis, materiality, and dance.

Ecology, Urban Spatiality, & Hip Hop in Southwest Asia

My archival research extends my interest in issues of ecological relation through my archival investigations of street dance, hip hop, urban spatiality, and the agency of shared communities of meaning through performance. This emergent field of research referred to as performance ecology focuses on the mutual interplay between expressive acts (performance) and ecology, which, in contrast to the scientific definition, is broadly defined as the interrelationality between living beings, objects, materials, energy, and systems. My research applies this analytical framework to the emergence of hip hop practices, including rap, DJing, graffiti, and dance forms like breaking, popping, and botting, to better understand how performance, local ecology, and the materiality of the built environment act on each other in crucial ways. As an increasingly significant aspect of youth culture in Southwest Asia since the 1990s, hip hop practices and the ways that young artists mediate and share these practices with a broader online world illuminate how embodied expression enacts a sense of autonomy, articulates a vital politics of fun, and activates a sense of shared identity.

Hip hop in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) is a subject that received a surge of attention in the wake of the Arab Spring as a result of the overstated importance attributed to El Général's rallying "Rais Lebled" by major media outlets and some scholars.¹ Nonetheless, a dearth of monographs on the topic of hip hop in the region continues to be a defining feature of the academic literature, with the notable exception of Hisham D. Aidi’s Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture (2014), which represents a vital contribution. The extant literature on hip hop in SWANA has tended to focus primarily if not exclusively on rappers to the occlusion of other hip hop practitioners, particularly dancers. This is also true of Aidi's monograph—notwithstanding its important insights. The absence of a monograph dedicated specifically to hip hop dance in the region remains a major lacuna.

My research seeks to redress some of this oversight through a spatial and performance analysis of hip hop dancers' online digital media publications in conjunction with a comparative historical investigation into the emergence of hip hop in Iran. This direction is deeply informed by the work of sociologist Asef Bayat and his concept of "street politics" which describes the struggle between state agents and the collective people as expressed in and shaped by the streets as staging areas of and targets for contestation.

In staging a so-far successful, if circumscribed, grassroots artistic revolt, hip hop artists in Tehran have created new meanings and uses of urban space and extended their social and political power in the city through performance.

Movement Research: Ecospatial Experience & the Embodied Archive

My movement research examines the intersection of ecological relationity, space, materiality, and embodied movement through structured expressive practice in order to better understand human–environment and human–nonhuman interactions. To accomplish this, I employ embodied movement investigations, which include solo and group movement scores, improvisation, dance performance, and participatory observation of social movements related to wetland ecosystems, particulary in urban corridors of the U.S. and Mexico. Quotidian considerations around sensory and locomotive access, balance, perceptions of danger and safety, discomfort aversion, institutional and state intervention, and ethics fold into analyses of ecological relation and the spatialized interactions of beings, objects, and materials to produce interpretive artifacts in the form of dance performances and durational practices which document these various wetland areas.

This research builds on the work of professor, choreographer, and dancer Jennifer Monson to argue that sensorial, movement-based experience is a vital investigative methdology and is, indeed, foundational to our experience of ecology and space. This approach grounds itself in two concepts: first, structured, movement-based practice and performance cultivate and integrate sensorial awareness with ecological phenomena to generate meaningful insights that are expressible in and interpretable through cultural artifacts, such as digital recordings, performance, movement scores, and the like; and, second, embodied sensorial experience, as an undertheorized and underutilized archival process of ecological knowledge production, is capable of generating ecological insights that other investigative frameworks might overlook. The body as it moves through space serves as something of a ruler and a pipette, in a sense, of the ecological systems in which it is embedded through its role in measuring distances, volumes, and dimensionalities, assessing surfaces and locomotive pathways, and taking in, giving out, and otherwise exchanging beings (e.g., microbes and seeds), materials (e.g., sediment and sweat), and substances (e.g., water vapor, oxygen, methane, and carbon dioxide).

Performance-based movement research aids in constructing meaningful and sometimes altogether new understandings of ecological systems and their constituent beings, objects, and materials. Together these insights complicate the perceived boundedness of self and environment in a way that strongly supports claims that all being is interimbricated and irreducibly multiple.

Dance, Materiality, & Postcolonial Ecologies

The materiality, structure, and liveliness of the particular outdoor spaces where I dance deeply inform my approach to movement research as I and the dancers that I collaborate with negotiate with the terrains, materials, objects, and other living beings — flora, fauna, fungi, et al. — that inhabit these areas in order to strengthen communities of shared meaning and collaborative existence, understanding that we are collectively constituted and sustained by the complex interactions of multiple living and nonliving systems. This approach first expressed its most apparent influence in my work "Myth Fail" (2009), which emerged from an extended investigation of the ecologically sensitive Tijuana River Estuary which straddles the political border between California and Baja California where the Pacific Ocean, Mexico, and the U.S. meet within the militarized and transnational San Diego–Tijuana urban corridor. After another four years of embodied engagement with this intertidal coastal wetland, which included three different movement frameworks (namely cross-border solidarity demonstrations, beach clean-ups, and dance improvisation), I performed and recorded a second work, "Beautiful Place" (2013), at the same location.

This multi-year, movement-based research produced experiential and documentary evidence of the intricate multi-species intimacies and complex being–object–material interactions of a rare coastal wetlands ecosystem situated on the periphery of a major urban zone. This research points toward the myriad ways in which space, race, gender, colonialism, militarization, urbanization, questions of access, and territorialized practices of meaning production are deeply imbricated in the biological diversity, history, and material present of the Tijuana River watershed. The goal of this research is to develop an artistic practice that "speak[s] to the soul", to use the words of bardic mythologist Martin Shaw, to activate, disseminate, and further collective counter-practices to transnational colonial legacies of environmental violence with its myriad and disproportionate impacts along gendered and racialized lines.

This work was foundational to my later archival investigations of ecologies of megacities as my research pivoted toward looking at the socioecology of global hip hop, specifically dance practices under the hip hop umbrella, as a grassroots, artistically oriented, youth-led social movement in cities like Tehran, New York, and Los Angeles. In these cities, embodied experiences of dense urbanity in the context of inconsistent state presence and often arbitrary intervention has led subaltern youth to recontextualize global hip hop practices in locally-relevant idioms of movement-based expression.