LA LEE LEE
From Dancer to Interdisciplinary Artist and Teacher
Dance is my first love. Dance is what I trained in most. My dances can be comedic, conceptually driven or deeply somatic. They’re decidedly in-between cross-genre and genre-less, in a way that is my own. Traces appear, inscribing their essential value in the space, without promising repetition. A new way of choreographing emerges.
I trained in Improvisation, Modern, Post Modern, Contemporary and Senegalese Dance. I’ve been a close collaborator as an improvisational-choreographic force with musician Paul Sprawl and dancer/teacher of Contact Improvisation and ensemble composition, Nita Little for over a decade. I’ve also performed for choreographers Annouk Van Djik, Rosy Simas, Tandy Beal and Scott Wells.
Performances are often instant composition and predetermined choreography and have an underlying ethos of “being dance” in a “doing society”. I make work to evaluate our relationship to socialized structures by inviting audiences into alternate worlds or by visiting more aspects of human. I might meet my inner ecofeminist one moment and a fool co-creating the Anthropocene, the next. At some point, space and time will open up to invert the world within a world and ultimately, the performance was a ritual …hopefully for change of perspective on topics of embodiment, freedom, philosophy, ethics and the politics alive in our choices including non-action.
When choreographing or teaching, I work with (un)Threading Dance to invite a range of embodied states, liberated movement and physical, creative flow. I also offer Embodiment Field Somatics for health and wellbeing by emphasizing sustained pleasure in movement, breath and creative emergence. The work is a combination of qi gong, BMC, self-reiki, dance improvisation, creative play movement and self-regulating, healing embodiment.
INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST
My video art is self-taught. Audio-visual creations are made with the perspective of a choreographer or the experientially sensorial world of an expressive dancer.
I developed a stronger visual sensibility by incorporating video into live performance before making stand alone video for galleries, film festivals and online streaming.
In the past several years, a combination of building off-grid in the Chihuahuan Desert and fated lockdowns made my video and print work more prolific. By 2022 , I parlayed my video artist skills into printmaking, selling at galleries and pop-ups while hunkered down in the desert and during visits to Nothern California.
More about VIDEO
My videos have been part of performance installations in theaters and public spaces, film festivals, residency showings and on online platforms such as Vagabond Streams and other social platforms.
I’m interested in viewers taking part in something undogmatically spiritual through focus on artistic embodiment, humor and a sense of being at home in the creative process. LEE LEE ET LE BUS, a 50 episode series, is an example where merging of life and art illuminated how embodiment practices liberate one’s creativity and can be done anywhere at anytime. The work integrated vocal and recorded sound and was edited with special attention to time, as a way to highlight Presence in the natural world. Filters, animation and color saturation emphasized imagination exercised while enduring lockdowns.
Lee Lee et Le Bus was a performative, visual and improvisational transdisciplinary weekly series. Often meta-comedic, it promoted insights about life, art and embodiment practices.
On tour and at awarded residencies, I crafted a series of FOUND INSTALLATIONS, to re-contextualize what can be done in a public space. I crafted video art from the creative processes and research that emerged from the immersive time in the spaces and showed the videos in gallery installations and a DVD.
