About Lyra

I am a theatre maker, dancer, choreographer, actor, and storyteller living with chronic pain and chronic illness. I make live physical performances: devised plays, dances, and rituals (sometimes all at once.) My work often moves back and forth across the line between dance and theatre; a kitchen scene morphing into a movement phrase in such a way as to make it impossible to pinpoint the moment one ended and the other began, or a large partner dance sequence getting smaller and smaller until the movements becomes the quotidien hand gestures of a conversation between the two people. 

My work offers the pleasure of being touched and the joy of our magnificent bodies. I believe that being in a room with other people, able to hear each other breathe, fundamentally shapes how we experience art. My work depends on that intimacy, immediacy, and physicality. I work primarily with ensembles of performers, employing bodies on stage to create landscapes, images, and weather systems in addition to character and narrative.

I make work about death, grief, sensuality, trauma, belonging, and the impact of our world on our bodies. I mix styles (mask, monologue, cabaret, intricately observed ritual movement, large athletic dance phrases), to reveal the kaleidoscopic nature of grief.

I believe living fully in our bodies is an anti-oppressive practice and that art making, especially with our bodies, is radical cultural and political work. I use anatomical education and tactile experience to help individuals, groups, and organizations identify habits that are causing harm and discover choices that support liberation, resilience, and ease. I apply this work to support myself, the artists I work with, and the audiences we create work for. 

I am just as dedicated to how my work is made as I am to what is made. My process values sustainability (in all forms), relationship, play, curiosity, accessibility, and generosity. I prefer to work inside of a collective. When I do make solo performance, I invite as much collaboration and partnership as the work allows. 

I live and work between Portland, OR and Philadelphia, PA. My bicoastal life greatly increases my access to audiences, collaborators, artists, and partnerships and my work is informed both by the overlap and the dramatic differences of these two cultures, communities, and landscapes. I am obsessed with mycelium, anatomy as metaphor, cellular memory, how dams affect rivers over time, and what happens when we remove them.

I am an Alexander Technique and movement teacher, a steward at FLOCK Dance Center and a collaborator with Our Bodhi Project and SSoMA.

Manifesto

Movement is my first language. I create live physical performance because it allows me to communicate things I cannot say in any other way. I believe that being in a room with other people, able to hear each other breathe, fundamentally changes how we experience art. My work depends on that intimacy, immediacy, and physicality.

I make work about death, the damage humans do to each other and our world, and all the awe and beauty that goes unnoticed. Work that agitates, delights, and disturbs in order to reconnect us to each other, our bodies, and the planet. Work that makes you feel the pleasure of being touched, the joy of our magnificent bodies, the discomfort of changing into something unknown, and the pain of being alive and human in this world.

I believe that dominant culture is a system of oppression that requires us to separate from our inherent connection to body, spirit, land, and community. We are not individually wrapped twinkies. Like single trees in a forest, we are part of an underground mycelial web of information, resources, and community. My work is a strong thump on the chest and a soft breath on the nape of the neck that reminds us that we encounter the world through our bodies, that spirit is real, that we are unable to extricate ourselves from the planet no matter how hard we try, and that we are always in community whether we believe it or not.

I am just as dedicated to how my work is made as I am to what is made. My process values sustainability (in all forms), relationship, play, and curiosity. My work is an organism that thrives in direct proportion with the health and wellbeing of all individuals, resources, and communities involved. Like any living thing, it requires an ecosystem to exist. I create with a commitment to furthering the liberation of that ecosystem and all it touches; I am learning to tend to the mycelial web, and to dismantle the structures that damage and threaten it. I am part of a creative community that practices unraveling the threads of oppressive structures that are woven through us. We are committed to queering as a practice, and to stewarding ourselves, each other, our work, and our relationships (human and non) as the ecological systems they are. 

I believe that living fully in our bodies is a radical act. I believe that radial cultural and political work is a spiritual practice. I believe the natural world has the answers to our unsolvable self-created problems. I believe art is essential for collective liberation. I believe that health, ease, interconnectedness, love, and belonging are inherent to our nature.