The pregnant months

In the fall of 2007 I choreographed a hip hop piece. The talented Dr. David Tolley wrote the music and we hired students to perform the dance and rap. The work was conceived of by Dr. Susan Fisher, an OSU professor who has dreamed up some super innovative solutions for teaching science concepts to undergraduates. Bio Rap is part of a larger Rock Opera about evolution…fun! I set the piece while nine months pregnant. Thirty hours after watching the students perform it for the first time, I was in labor. This clip shows me marking the chorus in our family room. I include it because I learned a lot about my own movement while carrying those 30 extra squirming pounds.

Berkman Collaboration

While in San Francisco I collaborated with musician Daniel Berkman to create a soundtrack for my piece “Barbie Loves Math”. This piece was inspired by a Maureen Dowd editorial in The New York Times. She coined the title in the article while talking about the whistle blowers for corrupt corporations like Enron…turns out that most of the whistle blowers were women. Dowd suggested that these women were able to get access to financial documents proving corporate fraud because the men controlling the businesses underestimated the ability of the women to understand the documents. We used sounds from the talking barbie head and from a CD of old Barbie commercials to establish the Barbie world. Daniel created a hard driving techno beat to break through the Barbie sounds and overlaid my voice reciting math equations and signal processing terms. I also had to use my own voice to say the infamous phrase “Math is Hard” in a Barbie voice…looked everywhere on line but couldn’t find Barbie’s voice saying that phrase…seems to have been wiped from the e-records.

Here is the soundtrack and excerpts from the editorial (for those who can read very small print).

The Chaddick years

I was very lucky to work with Company Chaddick in San Francisco. Cheryl Chaddick is an inspiration… if you want to check out more Chaddick choreography watch for her in Austin, Texas, her new home base. This is a video of Interiors, performed in Cheryl’s 20th Anniversary Season show. I am the red head on the far left

and this is the first part of the Ask No More Finale. Another defining work by Cheryl Chaddick performed during her 20th Anniversary Season performances. The music is a Czech singer, Iva Bittova. I’m still the red head with hair pulled back. The tallest male dancer is dancing with a painful broken toe – crazy – but the show did go on.

PS I’ll post more of her work if she is ok with it…more on that later.

Video edit experiments

American Dingo Puppy is a short film about our first puppy, CJ Craig Worthen Chaudhari. CJ is a mischievous, loving puppy…without trying very hard she makes us laugh a lot.

Here are excerpts from a longer video work I created, Submerged, set to music by my friend Daniel Berkman.