Has it been 20 years since I graduated from CFL?
Yes, it has.
And just like a good pickle, my experiences as a student there have soaked right into who I am and it’s difficult to separate the mango from the spices!
At this stage of my life, I think of myself primarily as a researcher: my work is driven by questions and curiosities. I am interested in the potential and role of the body in learning, in knowledge production, and as a site of knowing. The theoretical structures that my work is grounded in are theories of performance, embodiment, education and phenomenology. Performance is the medium or language of my work. Education and performance are the contexts in which I work. And sometimes, I write.
My interests, in some measure, have been shaped by the questions and experiences that CFL provided. Questions around identity and self; experiences rooted in the body and art.
The ability to resist defining my work through easy categories comes, at least in part, from being comfortable with uncertainty, being able to question the ‘way things are’, and having trust that it makes sense somehow: all qualities that are embodied by the project undertaken by the CFL community.
And yet, CFL is not a constant. It has changed and evolved a lot over the years, as any dynamic entity will. CFL now is not what it was in the 1990s and neither is the world! Still, my experiences and memories as one of the first students of the school are precious to me, and shape me in ways that are revealed to me in different aspects and stages of my life.