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Some interviews do not unfold in straight lines. They arrive in waves. Speaking with Jalak felt like entering water slowly... First the ankles, then the knees, then the quiet surrender of the body to something larger. What emerged was not simply a conversation about choreography or the ocean, but a meditation on listening. Water, in Jalak’s life and work, is never just a setting. It is a collaborator, a teacher and a living presence. Growing up on Turtle Island, far from the

Interviewer (Karissa) Can you give an introduction, or some insight into your works and experiences with water or the ocean? Jalak "Sure. That's a beautiful question. I have been choreographing since I was a child and I grew up in an area, Turtle Island, where it was very much landlocked. There was a lot of water, and we would spend a lot of time in the summer swimming, being in the river and the lakes. But it was later in life when I moved to California, and I really had a c

Human beings are sixty to seventy percent water. Water moves in ways no map can predict, slipping through form, refusing the stillness demanded by borders. It is never only one thing neither calm nor chaos, neither male nor female, but the endless space between. It mirrors the moon, yet holds its own gravity. It becomes what it touches and in each shape, it remains itself. Yet I, something made deeply of these elements Am somehow bound by constrictions. Told to flow in st

In water, nothing stays still for long. It shifts, bends, and reshapes itself endlessly. To move like water is to surrender the illusion of solidity and maybe that is exactly what queer dance and the queer experience invites us to do. Judith Butler, in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,”  writes that gender is not something we are  but something we do . For Butler, identity is a choreography of gestures and expectations, continuously performed, sustained, and sometim

If nature refuses containment, why do we still try to contain gender? For as far back as I can remember, I have both adored and struggled...