Artist Statement

A self-interview. Annie Lo + Performance:

Performance came to me out of a pivotal moment where I had to decide whether to continue to hold everything that pained and consumed me inside, or express it through my body, process it and letting it go and become something in the world. I think before I took that first Butoh class at Warren Wilson in the spring of 2010, I had been holding in a lot of pain and didn’t know how to express it. I grew up, for almost twenty yea

rs of my life, writing poetry, writing music, singing, playing guitar and piano, doing photography and other visual art. And all this time, there was something I was searching to express that I never could. Part of the pain would always remain inside me, no matter how hard I sang or how much my words cried on paper. Something was never releasing. I was never into sports growing up, so my body was holding onto a lot of suffering from the emotional depth I used to carry. Then, I made the decision to heal it.

So yoga, meditation and finally dance and performance. I moved my body, and as I moved, expressions of both my inner self and my outer personality came out like explosions of color I had never seen before. It was like never being able to see color all your life, and then finally one day, waking up and seeing the vast multitude that comprises a rainbow. So it was with my body, with movement. I began to understand space differently. In the end, dance was the only thing in life that could have possibly freed me. When I dance, I am completely free. And my goal in life is and always has been complete absolute freedom. I am obsessed with freedom. My whole purpose, my life is centered around freedom. I can’t say why, I don’t know why I was endowed this urge for freedom in me like this, but it did. I absolutely hate cages of any kind.

So I just kept doing performance, and kept doing dance, and kept evolving the expressions my body would make. Every dance comes a new layer of depth into my kaleidoscope of a soul I did not know what there before.

So all of this background informs my dancing and the pieces I create. This desire for complete freedom, thriving in having complete freedom, spaciousness, emotional and inner expression through movement.

I can’t not dance. It has become who I am. I think it was who I always was. Performance is the most livable art in that creates a completely different world for the audience to experience – and then, when they step into that world, that have to completely question everything they once thought was true, and they have to question who they are. The laws of physics changes to that world. Suddenly, you leave the performance thinking that in the world, you can act and live a different way. Because you have done it already, you have seen it been done, in the theatrical space. I think that in all of the arts – music, writing, culinary, visual – talented or really evolved musicians, writers, chefs, artists, can create a completely different world that engages all of the five senses, and also, two additional senses, the intuition and the cosmic spiritual senses. But I only managed to find a way to do that through performance. Every other art was not enough. Something was always missing. I couldn’t free myself with music the same way I free myself with dance. I think it has a lot to do with having to experience something completely difference – to create a different world for myself in order to transform my situation, and transform my reaction to it. The only way I could free myself was by performing myself free – creating a world with my body and transfiguring the space around me to become an open sky, versus the cage it used to be.

I also came to performance because it was the only art out of the many that I did that made me feel most alive. I had for many years suffered from the pain of feeling disembodied and disconnected from life, and from myself. I wanted to connect with the world, to say something and have it be received by the world. The only way I could do that was to fling my body open and say, “Take me, here I am!” By moving through my body, it forces me to connect what is inside me to what is outside me, and it also forces what is outside of me to receive what I am giving it. Dance is the only way to have a direct impact on the actual physical world, in a way that forces the physical world to respond quickly, suddenly back with an answer. That is what life is. It’s a wake up call. And I longed for twenty years to feel so complexly connected with life.

Before I discovered dance, I almost died. I almost died, and we as a society shy away from death. But I know what it feels like to be completely awake and in it, when you are that close to death. And suddenly, when you become so close, and you are fully there for all of it, like consciously awake and participating in the whole process of dying, you become fearless. There is nothing to be afraid of anymore, because you have already reached the one thing that could hurt you the most: yourself. And so, I took that pain and transformed it. It became my intense desire for both freedom and to live my life to the fullest – to feel, be and act completely alive. I started living like I had no tomorrow – because it felt like, I had nothing to lose anymore. And I did everything I could to feel alive and involved completely in the world around me. And the way I feel most alive is through my physical body. And so the way I am most alive is through dance.

In the last act of my senior thesis for my BFA, Yarrow, the main character comes to a cathartic moment – She realizes that she is alive. And this is the Great Realization, you know. This is it. The turning point, the crux, the peak. She realizes that in her journey, what she was searching for all along was the will inside herself to completely commit to living. Because living is hard, there is so much pain, hurt and suffering. There’s trauma and the worst imaginable violence. But all within that, there is consciousness – aliveness, awakeness. And it is through that awakeness, that we dedicate ourselves to accept both the suffering and the joy, and to continue on. To accept that life isn’t just one or the other, but it is always both. I completely based that character off my myself, as well as some mystical elements and archetypes mixed in. And really, it is through my passion, ambition and drive to live my life to the fullest, that I dance and create works. It is who I am. And that is why my pieces are so filled with life, explosion, sensation. But also, quietness, questioning, examining, and a sense of being lost or empty. Because life encompasses all these things. And the way I experience life, I am both utterly bold and impassioned, and silent as the bottom of the dark black sea at the same time.