The idea of having an academic analyze and comment on my Nicaraguan “social experiment” came about partly from a sense of mischief and also because I was genuinely interested in what an academic from Latin America would have to say about it. As an artist, and in particular, a body artist, I am interested in the kinds of truth that could be expressed through dance, which comes from a different realm from that which finds its expression in the arrangement of words and their meanings. At the same time, I was drawn to words and meanings that come from creative scholarship.

I was delighted and completely engaged when I began discussing my ideas with María Constanza, as we found many points on which we connected. Through those initial discussions with her, it quickly became apparent that my thinking around “becoming Nicaraguan” as the premise for a dance-theatre piece was very much allied to the field of translation and linguistics. From what she brought to the discourse during the creation of Fluency, most striking and salient for me were the notions that “translation means regulated transformation” and attendantly that “cultural contact is an ongoing process of becoming.” As a dance/theatre artist, I have always held transformation as a fundamental guiding principle, even in a shamanistic sense, where a performative act offers a real opportunity, to me and to witnesses of that act, of transformation and transcendence. The explicit intention of engaging with ritual transformation, beyond theatrical representationalism, for me as an artist and a human being, was certainly a path towards “the process of becoming” or, put another way, of knowing who/what I am.

I was very excited by María Constanza’s willingness to enter into a performative endeavor, utilizing her own ideas, shaped by me in collaboration with her. This process itself, of negotiation between two streams of practice, with both shared commonalities as well as divergent ways of thinking and being, guided by openness to one another through empathy, mirrored beautifully the themes of Fluency itself. That is why both as an artist researching in Nicaragua, and as an artist in the studio collaborating with other people, I have always believed it important to be porous to the influences around me, and to allow unexpected ideas and information to come into the process, by seeing the value of them and having a desire to be granted insight into what it is to be someone else.