Helen Lee/Momentum Sensorium, Curiosities of Wellness in Bodies of Grief and Joy

Director/Choreographer: Helen Lee

Assistant Directors: Hannah Marcus, Tuli Bera

Performance Guides: Airos Medill, Ali Claiborne-Naranjo, Anniela Huidobro Castro, BelleAime Robinson, Christina Chammas, Cristal Sabbagh, Ed Clemons, Hannah Dubner, Harlan Rosen, Kezia Waters, La Mar Brown, Surinder Martignetti, Madelyn Loehr, Madison Mae Parker, Najee-Zaid, Sara Zalek, Silvita Diaz Brown, SK Kerastas, Sophie Minouche Allen, Surinder Martignetti, Xiaolu Wang

Performance Guide Assistants: BelleAime Robinson, Madelyn Loehr, Surinder Martignetti

Vocalist: Haruhi Kobayashi

Electric Guitar: Nick Turner

Viola: Scott Rubin

Composer: Wilhelm Brandl

Text: Helen Lee, J. Ruth Gendler, Rumi

Food provided by TXA TXA CLUB

Plant Medicines provided by Helen Lee from the teachings of Alex Williams at First Curve Apothecary.

Medicinal Herbs provided from the gardens of Amanda Maraist, Isabella Romero, and Sara Zalek.

Dried Flowers provided by Dayna Larson.

Facilitators: Helen Lee, Nick Turner

Sound Bowls: BelleAime Robinson

Hi hello! I’m Helen (they/she), born in Chicago by South Korean immigrant parents. My name means light. I was named after a flower shop. I am 47 and growing into my second childhood. Hawaii is my second home. It is where I began to honor my ancestors and feel more comfortable in my skin. I feel lucky and grateful to have studied Theatre, Modern Dance, and Butoh there. I have been practicing yoga, meditation, and mindfulness since 1999. I continue to study plant medicine and Reiki. I believe in the healing power of movement, touch, music, and nature. My curiosities continue to investigate the merging of oppositions and the spaces in between. I wonder how to be friends with anger and delight in play. Daily I reflect on the Earth’s support and the Sky’s spaciousness. I believe the weather to be a great and beautiful teacher for us. Spring and Fall teach us about transitions and balance. The light and darkness of Iceland and Finland’s summer and winters support each other and deeply resonate with me. You are invited to bring as much or as little as you are comfortable with. I’m an introvert with some extrovert tendencies. I can be silly and serious. I am sensitive and empathetic. I enjoy the whimsical, quirky, and introspective. In a world where we are grief-phobic—grief illiterate, it feels important to sit with our discomfort, in order to create a space of healing. Let’s try together. I look forward to meeting you and learning about you.

Hi! I’m Hannah (she/her). I’m someone who thrives inside of routine. My daily and weekly habits bring me immense joy. Sometimes I wish I was someone who wanders, but for me, getting to my destination is the most satisfying part. My mom loves to recount my birthing story, where I came into this world with swift gusto and started crowning in the kitchen! I’m inpatient by nature, so oftentimes, I forget to pause and reflect. I’m learning what it means to wait, to rest. To be patient with myself and my relationships. I believe we can come into the fullest versions of ourselves when we take time alone to process our wide emotional landscapes. I love to bike everywhere, hammock, grocery shop, watch heart-wrenching movies, listen to podcasts, and call my sister. I feel most grounded in myself and the world when I am dancing, and I love expressing different sides of my creativity through playing music or collaging. I come from a Jewish family who loves to sing and drum together—I credit those early memories as the origins of my artistry. Much of my interest now as a freelance performer/creator explores ideas around care, physical memory, and infrastructures of support.

Hi! I’m Tuli—it’s a Bengali name given to me by my grandfather, who was a painter. It means paintbrush. I love to cook (and of course, eat!)—it’s a big part of who I am. It’s an activity that holds me as I go through all of life’s emotions. I love to dance too—it’s one of the ways I can move through and express the emotions I keep tucked away. As a young child, I didn’t talk much—I was very quiet and guarded—almost always in a slight state of fear. When I was on stage or in a dance class, nothing stopped me. I could be my fullest self. As I move into adulthood, I am focused on releasing my emotions with people I trust. All of them! I want to be witnessed in my anger, grief, joy, and all the feelings in between. A big question for me is, how can we lean into trusting strangers with our emotions? And, what are the practices that permit us to trust in ourselves?

My name is AiRos 頌恩 medill and I am a yellow nonbinary trans taiwanese scottish american care worker, storyteller, facilitator, circle keeper, bodyworker, dancer, songstress, and culture bearer who is moving to organize abundance in the ecology of home.

I love spending time tending to home with my animal kin, swimming, and singing to the dying things around.

I make wearable pieces as a way to stitch together airs inheritance, in affirmation of shape, color, and style.

I often resides in circle . join in the gather.

My name is Ali and I identify as a white, cis, queer woman with ADHD and Autism. I’m a modern dancer and I enjoy mindful movement practices and dancing in nature. I like to garden, crochet, paint, fix up old furniture, and really anything crafty. I love plants and animals. I have two cats and a dog and can often be found sitting in my yard with them or taking my dog on a long walk. I tend to dawdle through life a bit and need reminders of time. By nature, I am not speedy, but I am thoughtful and thorough. I am highly sensitive and easily overwhelmed, and I find that I need a lot of time for rest. For me, rest means having the freedom to tend to no one’s needs but my own, whether that be sleeping, day-dreaming, eating, crafting, watching tv, wandering, stretching, or rolling around on the floor. Letting my brain/body/heart’s desire carry me from one thing to the next without interruption is pure bliss. It’s really the space to notice and tend to my own needs without haste that feels restorative for me. Grief has been a major focus for me in the last few years. I used to think that grief was something I could avoid by making the “right” choices. I am grateful for the work I’ve done with my therapist to unpack that and embrace the complexity, unavoidability, and even necessity of grief. I sit with my grief and it sits with me. I fear it less than I used to. Grief often feels very private so can be hard to share. It’s also often unwelcome in public spaces, which I find strange and inhumane. What the heck are we all doing here if we can’t hold our grief together? I’ve been learning to voice my grief more casually and consistently and it feels good. I find that when I let my grief be known to those around me it can really change the tone in the room for the better, and invites others to do the same. I look forward to tending to our grief together.

My name is Anniela Huidobro Castro, and I am a Mexican immigrant. I’m the first of 16 grandchildren in the Castro Castillo family. I grew up surrounded by fabrics and sewing machines, in a home deeply rooted in the traditions of sewing, handicrafts, and painting.

I feel incredibly proud and grateful to carry Latin American roots—a rich mix of Indigenous, African, and European heritage. I was raised in Tlaltizapán de Zapata, a small town in the state of Morelos, Mexico, known for its flowing rivers and abundant water. That connection to water has stayed with me, and it’s one of the reasons I feel so at peace living in Chicago, near the vast and beautiful Lake Michigan.

My spiritual life is deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy and Vipassana meditation. I find joy in dancing to Latin and Afro-fusion rhythms. I grew up with salsa, cumbia, cha-cha-cha, and mambo pulsing through my body. I’m also a percussionist and have had the joy of collaborating on a variety of musical projects.

Through my artistic practice, I strive to reconnect with ancestral and Indigenous knowledge rooted in native communities. I’m inspired by the beauty of nature, the wisdom and cosmovision of our Indigenous cultures, and above all, by a longing to help build a more loving, less violent world—one that lives in harmony with the Earth. My memories, my bond with the land, and my cultural traditions are what sustain and inspire me.

I’m a deeply emotional, sensitive, and nostalgic person. I miss my family dearly and do everything I can to stay close to them and to those I love.

Today, I live in Chicago with my husband, Gabriel. Together, we’ve embarked on this journey to explore new horizons and opportunities—both personal and professional.

Peace! My name is BelleAime (belle-uh-me, she/her). I am a southern girl that has found home in the Midwest! My roots begin in Atlanta, GA and I came of age in Houston, TX. I am a singer, producer, sound bowl practitioner, and yoga teacher.

I use art to make sense of this thing called life and my primary communication is music. My art and teaching practice centers around personal, ancestral, and communal spirituality and liberation. In recent years, I have learned to slow down and listen to my intuition and body more closely. In 2024 after reading “Rest is Resistance” by Tricia Hersey, I began using rest as a tool for personal freedom and fulfillment. Since then, I have invited myself to do less by prioritizing more of what is important to me.

As I learn to honor, see, and express my full self, I invite others to do the same. Welcome. 🙂

Hi, my name is Christina.

I’m a lover of art in all its weird and wonderful forms, especially dance and performance. I love and need dance in my life as a way to feel connected to myself and others. I’m usually quiet and shy at first, and once I get to know someone I become more extroverted. For me resting doesn’t mean not doing anything, but rather being intentional about time spent with myself. I’m learning to listen and take cues from my body about what I need to rest and recharge in the moment. I love cooking, reading, crocheting, and riding my bike. I enjoy learning new things and consider myself a collector of hobbies. Being in nature relaxes me and connects me to childlike wonder and awe. I’m the type of person who interrupts you to point out the moon. I especially have a soft spot for animals. I have two dogs and recently started fostering pigeons. Loving an animal is a great teacher of grief, and I’m still learning. I look forward to going on this journey together.

I am 53 years young, a mother of two amazing teens, as well as a wife and an art teacher, movement artist, and curator. While I’ve been going through all of the hormonal changes surrounding perimenopause, I’ve also been navigating hormonal shifts with my teens. Researching and inevitably starting HRT has been a huge game changer. If you know me you know I swear by King Spa for self care and sound meditation.

My practice also looks outward to portraits of the world around me, taking the forms of traditionally drawn portraits, figurative ceramic sculptures, and nontraditional portraits on ceramic mugs. I labor over each piece that act as homage and memorials, and are a resistance to white-supremacy. Not only do these works infuse the user’s everyday coffee and tea rituals, but their ceramic forms will stand the test of time, potentially outliving the user by thousands of years and leaving traces of how we lived recorded by my hand.

I love watching great cinema and TV shows and my favorite genres are drama, psychological horror, sci fi, and musicals. The movie Sinners knocked me out this year and I’ve seen it several times in the theater. Stay tuned for my portrait mug tribute to this movie.

Greetings~ My name is Ed Clemons, I am a movement and music artist born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. Legend has it that my mom went into labor with me on the dance floor, and I’ve been grooving since then. From Michael Jackson impressions, to street and club dance styles, mainly breaking and house dance, they have offered a means of expression that I felt I could spiritually speak through. I have also been fortunate to travel internationally, and where ever I go music and dance has served as a universal language to bring me together with like-minded souls.

Behind my passion for the arts, I have been deeply curious about the nuances of the human condition, the psychology of our relationship dynamics, and generational memories. Music and dance has been very therapeutic and informative on my learning journey, and I hope to share with you all something that we all can build or release with.

Hi! I’m Hannah—a Jewish seeker, artist, and earth lover from the boonies of Connecticut, where trees were my first friends. I’ve always loved to collaborate and create because it helps me make sense of the world. I’m an actor, poet, movement artist, and lately, a painter.

Since a recurring injury in 2010, I’ve been on a healing journey, learning to meet myself with more acceptance and love. I’ve got a squiggly brain, an inner critic I’m learning to soften, and a silly streak that loves to cackle. Homemade snack plates, wildflowers, and Mary Oliver keep me inspired. My curiosities live where creativity and healing meet—I’ve been teaching yoga, breathwork, and meditation for over a decade, and I lead The Artist’s Way groups because I believe we’re all powerful creators. My practice explores opening to the sensory body and playing with compassion, interconnectedness, sustainability, and the beauty of cycles.

Grief has taught me so much about the depth of love—and it’s given me a clarifying tenderness toward impermanence. TBH, rest has never been my default! I find every day is a humbling practice of letting go of striving and softening the part of me that believes I have to get somewhere to be worthy of my own love. I’m learning to honor rest as a slow, necessary undoing, and I often turn to nature as my teacher.

This season is ripe with change: I recently married my sweetheart, and as both my parents face health challenges, my priorities are rearranging themselves in ways I hadn’t imagined. I find myself asking, how can I rest in the dissolve? Wherever this finds you, I’m grateful to be going on this adventure with you!

Hello! I’m Harlan (they/them), a Chicagoland-native artist and performer.

By the age of 12, I had lost my mother and all four grandparents, whose deaths I continue to grieve in addition to many more, several former selves, humanity, and the Earth. Grief is often presented as only retrospective, lachrymose, and obstructive. Not to discount those qualities, which can even offer pleasure and power, but I am curious about what else might become possible when we allow ourselves to grieve for the past, present, and future as part of daily life. Will it become easier to bear when we all bear it together? Can grief clear the way for change and renewal? (This last question has been coming up a lot for me on either side of my recent 30th birthday.)

My early confrontations with death may have drawn me toward Japanese Butoh dance, which I have been studying and performing since 2015. For me, Butoh enlivens the concept of death through dis-integrating egoic human constructs and communally imagining non-human cycles of life and rebirth. I frequently find joy here, like the ecstatic joy of dancing together, or the insightful joy of slowing down enough to drink in my surroundings in sharper detail. My version of rest replicates this somatic mindfulness with a loose grip on objectives and expectations.

When I’m not out in the art world, you can find me gazing wistfully at the lake, or strolling/biking with earphones in, singing along to renegade divas of the late 20th century like Björk, Tori Amos, and Kate Bush. It would bring me great joy for my ashes to be scattered in a body of water. I look forward to meeting you and diving in together!

Hello, my name is Kezia Waters (he/they). I tend to always live near some large body of water lake, river, ocean. I love the early mornings when the world is still a bit quiet, and you can hear the birds and enjoy a cup of tea. That warms me beyond what I can express in this short introduction. I love to read as part of my morning rituals. One of my favorite books is Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Patrice Somé. Reading is rest, cooking is rest, moving my body is rest, sleeping is rest. When I think of rest, I think of recalibration—of body and soul rhythm. Grief is part of that natural rhythm. I am reminded of the childhood nursery rhyme Going on a Bear Hunt, and one of my favorite lines that I apply to grief: “Can’t go over it, can’t go under it, gotta go through it.” Grief is a season. I am currently most curious about humans’ desire to change and long-form information, like encyclopedias and dictionaries.

Hello. My first name is La Mar. The meaning of my name is “near or by the water,” and coincidentally the way I spell it literally translates to “The Sea.” I am black American and was raised in the military. I moved around a lot, mostly in and out of Texas.

I dance and sing professionally, and I am also an arts administrator and producer. When I am not working, I love to cook, play games, read (lots of things, but mostly Sci-Fi & Fantasy), spend time in nature (yes, the beach included), listen to music and podcasts, dine out, and spend time with loved ones.

I have many curiosities. I enjoy learning. I am aware of the things I do not know and crave to expand my knowledge and abilities as I am able. I welcome being challenged. I believe caring for another requires patience, active listening, the ability to “see oneself in another’s shoes,” and respect.

I’m looking forward to meeting with you, and going on a journey together.

Hei hei! My name is Madelyn (she/they), I usually go by Maddy, and I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. I absolutely adore cats, have been vegan for 11 years, and feel a deep connection to earthly beings—animals and nature—and work to honor the sacred cyclical energy of life and death that weaves us all together.

I’ve called Chicago home for the past eight years, where I have developed a practice in examining what it means to be alive and deceased through work as a solo performance artist, writer, yoga instructor, and actor. My work involves exploring relationships between all types of animals, human and non-human, and has ranged from examining how trauma is passed down from parents to children (how I was raised with my familial trauma, and what that means for my relationship to love and sex as an adult), to the fraught and complicated intersection of eating meat and sex work (through a solo show about a baby cow at a strip club). I do worry I overshare, but I truly feel that sharing is how we connect, how we learn, and is something that makes life worth living.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I love to laugh and make others laugh too! My humor skews towards the absurd, the naughty, and the very very silly. I’ve been recently getting more into clowning as an art form and am curious and eager to break down the barrier between the observer and the observed in performance.

As someone who was in a neutralizing relationship for many years, I’ve now been on a three-years-long journey to feel my feelings more. As I have learned to allow myself to feel my grief, my sadness, and my anger, I have felt more free to also feel my joy, my pleasure, and my contentment. I am still learning this, and I invite you to bring the parts of yourself that you are nurturing as we travel into holding grief together.

Hello you! My name is Madison Mae Parker, aka Madi, aka Maeson (they/she). I am a word witch, a ritual artist, a space maker, an arts educator, an arts doula, and a somatic practitioner. What all of these things really mean is that I view the body as the first source of wisdom and I am striving to understand what it is to love this bodily daily—this body that is white, disabled, chronically ill, queer, neurodivergent, recovered eating disordered person, and in the 34th year of life.

I strive to view all things, creatures, nature, and people as my teacher. I am in love with language and the language of poetry—particularly the ways poetry points to the failure of the English language.

In 2021, I trained in somatics to deepen my connection to intuition as a creative life force. I have been exploring somatic practices since 2017 and have been facilitating groups and 1:1 spaces as an arts doula since. Embodiment, to me, is about being in relationship to and with our bodies. How might I be in relationship with my body today? To listen to this body, like I would a dear friend? To share in kindness and compassion. To me, the body is a prayer. How might I pray with my body today?

I am currently on a journey of undoing perfectionism, falling in love with failure, and letting rest be my guide, which feels easier in words than actions some days. I believe creativity is something we are in relationship with, that rest is a ritual, and grief/joy share the same embrace (couldn’t recommend Ross Gay enough for this work).

I hope you feel that you can show up exactly as you are—that I can show up exactly as I am. That we can encounter our mysterious together.

My name is Najee-Zaid (najee for short). Born in the lands of the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwaa, Odawa, Potawotami) and other native lineages autochthonous to these soils. This land called Chicago. I am a 34 year old who enjoys meditation, joy, creativity, and adventure! I proudly love and am loved by my beloved partner and our little doggie.

I’ve been an active interdisciplinary artist in Chicago for about 10 years and have recently been exploring practices of rest, home, and resilience. Rest for me is personal and collective. It can be as brief as a moment of stillness and as vivid as a summer dream. I’ve also been dealing with grief lately. Grief, to me, is a teacher. A teacher that visits whenever it is called on by the divine forces of existence. Grief is a healer and a breaker and when we incorporate the power of grief and rest into our natural transformations, I believe we begin to realize how beautiful the cycles and patterns of love and life are.

p.s. A book I feel called to share is Ayiti by Roxanne Gay.

My name is Sara Zalek (they/them), and recently have been going by Sharkey. I am a person of many identities, and I cherish the present one, earned by the honor of learning through grief. I carry my ancestors on my back. I didn’t always see that in my life, but that is more clear to me now, and a position I take both seriously and playfully. Performance is a creative ritual I love for it’s power to transform who and what we can be to ourselves and each other. I wish to activate towards peace and away from oppression.

There is nothing like having experiences; we are building our knowledge through learning with our whole body and soul. Each of our bodies is a microcosm of the collective. An integral part of the whole. I feel the tremendous burden and joy of being part of this collective.

Lately I rediscovered my passion for music in the piano and in my voice, and that has been a wonderful way to exercise my perseverance, diligence, and steadfastness. Dance continues to be a forever love, and it keeps me young at heart.

I live and work in Chicago with my partner Chris and our cat Kiki. I travel often to visit my family in Hawaii, and am lucky enough to consider it also home.

I am a mestiza—Mexicana and Americana—born and raised in Puebla, Mexico. I was mostly raised by my father, Paco, after my mother, Marcela, passed away tragically when I was just five years old. Those early years were difficult for both me and my brother, Paco Chico. I grew into a quiet and fearful child, until I discovered dance and theater—two powerful mediums that helped me express myself and begin to heal.

Today, I create dances that are deeply rooted in my Mexican heritage, personal history, fears, dreams, and hopes. Healing has been at the heart of my life’s journey. Along the way, as I navigated some unhealthy dance environments, I found yoga—a practice that transformed my spirit and strengthened both my creative process and my everyday life. I’ve been practicing and teaching yoga for over 18 years, and I wholeheartedly believe in its power to heal.

Movement, for me, is medicine.

I spent some formative years in Toronto, where my daughter, Arianna, was born. In 2008, we moved to Chicago, which has been our home ever since. My art and yoga practices have grown here, and so has my daughter—who’s now heading to college this fall!

Despite all the chaos in the world, I remain a hopeful person. I believe in the goodness of people, and I cherish family time, traveling, and sharing meaningful moments with others.

Hey hey, I’m SK (they/them). I’m a social justice-driven live arts producer, community organizer, and artist. I play tennis and meditate a lot: Insight and Vipassana. East Bay Meditation Center and Dhamma Dena are my roots. I am also a third-culture kid. Born in Evanston, my family moved to Tokyo when I was five. After eight years, we returned. I moved to Montreal after high school and returned to Chicago five years later. Then a large grant took me to Oakland where I lived for nine years. In 2023, I came back to Chicago again. It was my third return. I have heard that healing moves in spirals; we encounter the same issues again and again, but in deeper ways. We want the thing to change, but the truer healing is how our relationship to the thing changes. In meditation practice, the return is the liberatory act.  I’ve told Chicago I’m staying around. And here we are together.

Hi, my name is Sophia Minouche Allen (but I’ve always gone by Sophie). I include my middle name to honor my late Oma and to make her and the connection between her, my Mom, and I more visible. My work is shaped by cycles of care between the three of us. I am drawn to embody and embolden this lineage, which grounds my artistry and life in different shades of love, womanhood, and vulnerability.

I am a gatherer. It’s hard for me to let things go and to say goodbye. I am 28 and have been told I have an old soul. I am playful but might look very serious when I’m concentrating. Sometimes slowing down makes my heart speed up, and that reminds me to check the pulse of my grief. Solitude helps me recharge my energy, but being with others fills my cup.

I believe dance is made and done for people to come together. And I want people to come together. I also believe in trial and error and starting before you’re ready. I invite you to nurture your intuitions while trying something new and to allow yourself to experience potential comfort and discomfort with less judgement. I wonder what doing this together will feel like and I look forward to meeting you.

My art is deeply rooted in my experiences as a biracial woman who has traveled extensively, exploring themes of memory, place, home, belonging, third-culture, identity, and the ways we code-switch to navigate different environments. I was born in Australia and grew up between rural Australia (Lawrence, NSW) and Malaysia (Kampong Sungai Buloh).

I have had a yoga practice since I was about 16; I’m now 49. I also love digging in the dirt and growing things, mostly vegetables. I also love making miniature objects, all things art making and have recently started painting. I am terrible, but I believe you don’t have to be good at something to love it.

For a long time, I had a strange relationship with rest; rest is essential. I have learned the hard way . . . I wouldn’t rest until my body literally broke, I sent my self to the ER five times from sickness and exhaustion because I didn’t take enough time to recover and literally worked myself into the ground. I still sometimes feel guilty when I am resting; I should be working harder, doing more . . . I am realizing the only way I can really show up for others and have a healthy relationship with my body is by resting. For a while now I have been exploring my different cultural identities and struggling with being home in one country or another and the constant feeling of missing one when I am in the other. I used to think I was super extroverted, but I have come to realize that my extroverted tendencies were an expectation placed on me.

I ask myself: how do we (I) move through others’ expectations? How do we (I) find and be our true selves? How can we (I) show up and care for others without forgetting to care for ourselves? How do you (Can I) grieve the loss of someone when they are still alive? How do we (I) find compassion for ourselves and others in hurtful situations?

I would like to hold space for you to answer your own questions and hold our time together with support and compassion for wherever we are in our life’s journeys.

Hi my name is Xiaolu and I was born in Ningxia Muslim Autonomous Region of northwestern China in 1991, and brought up by my grandparents who instilled in me the hunger for poetry and practicality.

I like to work at the intersection of film and translation probably due to the fact I worked at a video rental store in order to learn English to survive the life of a transplant stranded on Occupied Dakota land.

I propose works charged with the affect of absence, misunderstandings, and migration, as a way to overlap distant realities. I develop video collage and friendships as methods to shift relational possibilities within text, image, and sound. You can also find me in the company of cats and flying kites.

Hi hi! I’m Haruhi (she/her). I’m a big city girl, raised in Tokyo, currently based in Chicago. My full name means A small forest on a spring day. 

I am, what I call, a sound and sonics person. I love all things sound. I love how different frequency ranges feel in the body, how different keys and chords feel emotionally, and how we use them to express ourselves. I have always used music as a way to capture memories and process my big feelings. Otherwise, I LOVE to cook, eat, play video games, and I’ve been slowly getting into fitness and sewing. My relationship to grief is quite foreign, but I feel very aware of the distance I have from it. I hope I can be the bridge for people who also haven’t experienced the depth of grief, to walk through with me throughout this process.

Hey there! I’m Nick! I am a clinical social worker and musician that is based in Chicago. Music has been a huge part of my life since I was very young. In retirement, my grandpa (pappa) bought a singing machine and performed at nursing homes and Italian festivals around the Chicagoland area. My parents also had an extensive cassette and record collection and we sang songs each night as part of our bedtime routine. As I entered my teens, I started collecting records myself and began taking guitar lessons and playing in bands. For me, music is very much linked to emotional experiencing and expression. I can’t always pinpoint how I’m feeling at any given moment but if I pick up my guitar and begin following the sounds, I can pretty quickly release whatever I’ve been holding onto. As a therapist, I also help others develop creative practices that allow them to experience and express their emotions. Creativity and play are important aspects of mental health, which are often devalued and overlooked in a world fueled by capitalism. Collaborating with other artists, dancers, and musicians has also been a very meaningful and growth inducing experience for me in recent years and I feel very lucky to be a part of Curiosities of Wellness in Bodies of Grief and Joy.

Hi, I’m Scott, and I make music. Sometimes I use a viola, sometimes I use electronic technology, and for the past 11 years, I’ve been drawn to collaborating and improvising with movement artists. I like empathizing with what the dancer is experiencing when they move. Not only the movement itself, but the labor behind the movement, and the emotions behind the labor. How can I recontexualize that labor and those emotions in my own body, and how does my body move around my instrument, and how does it all sound? Music for me isn’t just about how things sound, but it’s the sonic-physical manifestations of the relationships between the performers. It’s a feedback loop where the dancer’s body is amplified, and the instrument’s sound is sculpted by the dancer’s body. I love riding bicycles, drinking coffee, and learning history. It’s very difficult for me to rest. I can be very neurotic, so rest for me is a practice of letting go.

I’m a music composer from Quebec, with family roots in Austria. My work tends to drift somewhere between music and sound design. I’ve always been fascinated by how sound carries emotion—how even a single tone can shift the way we feel. I try to stay close to those moments and see where they lead. I don’t really think of music as something to control. For me it’s a messy, unpredictable process— ideas just sort of appear, change, or fall apart, and my job is to give them space and help them take shape. I feel lucky to be part of this project, and grateful for the chance to share a bit of that process and energy with others.