A friend with very little dance experience once said to me, "When I watch dance, I come away with very strong feelings - and I don't know why." One can think of dance as tapping into the soul through the body. A person does not need to have a dance practice for their body's wisdom to profoundly affect their life. When one watches dancers express themselves, one can access emotions otherwise blocked. When one expresses themselves through their body, one can release emotions.

Combining dance with other media means bringing the body's wisdom to a story, to a visual, to music. I look for opportunities to combine forms all of the time in my own multidisciplinary work and in the work I create with collaborators.

The Mortality Machine was the first time I brought movement design to live action role-play (larp). Larp is a collective storytelling artform that features the hero's journeys of its "player-characters (PCs)". One can think of larp as the experience of stepping inside of a video game, where the player is the avatar who discovers and affects the world of the game. My task was to make dance a part of the world the player discovers.

I designed movement not only for performance but for interaction. The PCs and performers (the "non-player characters", or "NPCs") communicated with each other through dance. PCs learned movements from the NPCs diegetically and used dance to steer their stories. My design combined formal and casual dance education techniques with game mechanics to make the interactive components of the larp seamless.

The stylization of the NPC's movement affected the PCs' experience of the world as well. I stylized the NPC's movement to match the surreal quality of the larp. The choreography codified to specific meaning within the larp felt like a natural expression of the NPCs delivering it that tied to their history and circumstances in the story.

Producer: Sinking Ship Creations
Project: The Mortality Machine  Immersive Theater Production
Writer + Director: Ryan Hart
Choreographer + Co-Director: Lara Marcin
Game Writer: Tommy Honton