“Candy Dish” (2021)
Shot in stop motion after my motion was stopped due to hip surgery fall 2020, this work reveals and revels in the “broken” body, the super-consumed body, a body replete with the markings of its 40-year career in the dance trenches, a body that serves as the site of specific traumas and victories, and a body that knows things that I need to listen to. This piece is also a reclamation of pleasure, mine, the viewer’s, even for the candy dish herself. Pleasure feels like the perfect antidote to the patriarchy these days. The rough cut of this film was shared with the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, Beth Ann Fennelly, and from it, she wrote the companion poem based on the film’s imagery and my own personal writing. I often work in reverse, inspired by poetry to create movement--it was a gift to invert this process and have the words follow the embodiment.