Philosophy + Methods

zoe | juniper's work extends beyond the stage through Master Classes, Workshops, Residencies and Commissions by bringing the company's unique creative process to schools and dance companies across the country. 

It is time to promote technique and unison in non-uniform, non-homogenized bodies. zoe | juniper aspires to enable people working, moving, and breathing towards a common desire. How can we practice Eurocentric-based technique without replicating toxic pedagogies, body mechanics, and hierarchies that riddle it? How do we dancers deal with the space between being trained in a form that demands an unachievable perfection and our attempts to meet these demands? We reject the homogeneity we were trained to believe was the process for creating unison bodies. To begin addressing the need for equity and diversity in the Seattle area dance community, Zoe founded FORM/S in 2018 with zoe | juniper. 

Our  work is situated in multiple mediums including, proscenium stage, installation, site responsive, film, photography, vinyl albums, 360 film, 2D collage, opera, zine magazines, art objects and sound installation. We work using a diversity of materiality and scale to best express and fully realize a project's aim/brief. And strongly encourage our students to work in the space/s and with the materials that best fit each specific work they are making. We firmly believe that it is our job to facilitate each student to do their best work. Our practice and classes choose patience, consistency, effortlessness, play, curiosity, joy, rigor, clarity, and compassion, all of which are necessary for growth and true artistic freedom and creativity. 

Classes, workshops and processes are rigorous in their exploration of what our bodies can do while maintaining a container of somatic support and structure. At the core of our work we are continually asking, what can dance do? And how do we make space for its potential?

Some of the influential texts, artists and scholars that I incorporate into my teaching and syllabus through dialogue, peer to peer teaching and more include: Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair, Sarah Schulman; A Third University is Possible, la paperson; Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, We Will Not Cancel Us, pleasure activism, adrienne marie brown; Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha; Queer Dance, Clare Croft; Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks, The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories, Jacqueline Shea Murphy; A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Kathryn Yusoff, Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant; In the Wake, On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe. Other scholars and artists include bell hooks, Dr. Rizvana Bradley, Thomas DeFrantz, Sara Ahmed, Erin Manning, Christina Sharpe, Sadiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Pope L., Miguel Guiterrez, Gesel Mason, Nancy Stark-Smith, Jumatatu Poe, Raja Feather Kelly, Reggie Willson, Bebe Miller, Nora Chipaumire, Okwui Okpokwasili, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Faustin Linyekula, Taylor Mac, Ligia Lewis among others.