georgia rood

as a movement-based artist, my work is a constant exploration of expression through the body, shaping stories that blur the boundaries between dance, theater, film, and installation. my choreography draws deeply from the natural world and the nostalgia of my childhood, where i find a raw and unspoken language that resonates with me. i began ballet lessons when i was two, my mother let me go after days spent babbling and twirling in front of our television when a pbs special coincided with the room filling with light in the late afternoon. dance became my first outlet of communication, before i could even speak i was finding comfort in the silly pantomimes and patterns that come of children’s ballet and i became hooked on the feeling of declaration that came with learning each combination.

as i grew, i took to ballet like a fish to breathing. my body rebelled in every position and i struggled, my study of ballet separated from expression to a rule of life and i found myself revolving around it as my sun. i trained as if reaching towards that center, feigning release in long hours spent trying to perfect finite movements. i felt separated from my lifeline of expression, an awkward locution that swept me further upstream from my original love while i chased an ideal, ignoring any process. it was not until i was studying at terminus modern ballet theatre that i had the opportunity to be taught by sarah hilmer, she taught contemporary dance to us through improvisational movement and meditation. i was terrified. where was my beloved structure, oh how i was stumbling around like someone without a foundation. my frustration fueled me to stubbornly learn the games and experiments we practiced until one day, the world stopped. the coronavirus pandemic swept across the world and, coming from a family that was immunocompromised, i went from being in the midst of my junior year of high school worrying about prom and the next show to being cut off from everyone in a matter of a day.

i am very bad at sitting still, i was worse yet then and my restless nature called to me. i went from trying to reach for my lost sense of expression to clawing at it. for a time, i had no class and no studio, no school and nothing to study, i was immobilized by having nothing to do. one day i spent the whole night awake and in awe, countless hours of being online had led me to a series of dance films by pina bausch. it was so different from what i had dedicated my life to, where i was familiar with fantastical stories and clear, universal steps. i was now confronted with a new form of communication, a new dialect in which i could think in. i went into my family’s garage, a little enclosed concrete square about fifteen feet across, and spent the next weeks in the late spring rain experimenting with movement and observing my connection with it. i returned to my childhood feeling of release through expression, my frustration washing away with the rain that pooled on the floor.

in my improvisational studies i have always had a similar goal: to observe what i am doing without judgement. in the beginning this was to separate myself from how i had trained myself to understand what was good dancing and what was bad dancing. i feel that when dance is taken as an expression there is more emphasis on what is communicated than how. this is how i made that distinction in my mind, i focused on why i was choosing each movement and compensated for my lack of comprehension of how to move without structure into creating a narrative. each step was a word, each direction an intonation, it began to alter how i consume dance and music as my natural synesthesia shifted from colors and vague patterns into clear directions and momentum supporting the weight of whatever story i was dreaming. this shift of understanding made me consider dance from a new perspective, i am not one to judge a story on its grammar and yet i had spent my life dancing as if i did. a weight lifted off of my ability to create and i began to approach the world from a new perspective, one of watching the world to appreciate its beauty and moments of chance and my work and experimenting became a communication of my reactions.

i am continually inspired by the beauty found in the mundane, the overlooked moments that often go unnoticed yet hold profound meaning, it is the crutch where i find peace and rest in an otherwise hectic world. my life is in want to be calm, since i was young i have had to mature in order to pull myself and the ones i love into a new day regardless of how big my impact is. when i went to college, i faced an intense period of loss that seemed without end. i lost almost twenty people in two years, grandparents, aunts, cousins, uncles, friends, mentors, teachers. each loss impacted me the same, each one carried a weight in which i felt obliged to burden myself with. it pulled and tore at my center until my health began to decline, a childhood fainting disability resurfaced and i felt a new sense of loss, one of control over my body that i had spent so long training to understand. it was like going mute, i felt lost and unable to communicate, i no longer felt welcome in my art that can be so exclusionary towards those who are disabled, i felt invisible.

in what felt like the most profound loss in my young life, i retreated into myself and what small movements i could do. i leaned on my observations, watching classes only to write pages on what it would have felt like to participate. navigating the world as an outsider, i seek to reflect this perspective in my work, finding connection and beauty where others might see only the ordinary. i had the opportunity to create a piece at the height of this grief, creating work at that time felt like shouting with a raw throat. because of this, i stepped back, i spent the time allotted for creating the piece in a local forest. i wanted to watch the murmurations of birds, i wanted to escape with them into the clouds and fly away from my experience. but it was january, and the birds had flown south. i found, instead, a sentinel of trees draped in kudzu that waved hopefully to me, each time catching my eye as i hoped to find a bird. it was through this repeated series of small hopes and disappointments that i finally realized my desire for escape was clouding my ability to appreciate the serenity of the woods in front of myself. i had become untethered and it was time to find grounding. my work is a continued effort for this, to find the strength to accept what is through communicating my observations of the world.

through my choreography, i invite audiences to look closer, to feel deeper, and to see the world with new eyes. my practice is an ongoing search for the unseen, the subtle, and the deeply human, seeking to create spaces where movement becomes a language all its own, one that transcends time, place, and experience. i want to include the audience in my exploration of observations, to expand my own process beyond myself by creating illustrations of my own discoveries. i aim to create moving vignettes, to develop worlds in which the performers enact their own experiments while reaching towards and challenging the audience with their presence. i do not believe any longer in the sanctity of structure, that there is a formulaic answer to every form of expression. i believe in an exploration fueled rhetoric, a practice of pursuing non-linear narration and intuitive movement in order to impact the audience and illicit reflection. my work is an ever changing process, as i learn and explore in order to grow my work follows along with me as an extension to the narrative of my own life.

as i continue to navigate the world, my work evolves alongside me, reflecting the challenges, discoveries, and growth i experience. each piece becomes a mirror, capturing moments of clarity, struggle, and connection, inviting others to see themselves within the movement. in embracing the fluidity of change, i find solace in the process, knowing that my art is as much about discovery as it is about expression. through my choreography, i hope to offer a space where both the performers and the audience can come together to reflect, connect, and find meaning in the subtle, in-between moments of life. my journey is not one of destination, but of constant exploration, a quest to understand, to communicate, and to share the beauty in all that is unseen.