ARTIST STATEMENT & BIO
I am a multidisciplinary artist, obsessed with embodiment, community, and reinvention. Trained as a dancer and choreographer, I also work with video, text, and installation. I am nonbinary, queer, Jewish, a former sex-worker, a person with PTSD, living in Lenapehoking/Philadelphia. As a child I wanted to be an elephant when I grew up. You could call this my plan B.
I work in spiral time, revisiting themes of gender, animality, Jewish Diasporism, sexuality, trauma, and collectivity from new contexts and with new collaborators. I get off on moments of agency and imaginative possibility. Some works depend upon the interaction of audience and performer. A circus about revolution with multiple endings, whose course is determined by audience choices. Tactile dances in which a single blind-folded audience member is led through experiences of weight sharing, sound, texture, and touch, collaborating with the dancers who guide the performance.
My work is danced creative nonfiction, which is to say: I want to facilitate real experiences. In Sex Werque I investigated the complexities of power, gender performance, and labor conditions in the strip clubs by interviewing my former coworkers and playing back those conversations over close-ups of our jiggling flesh as we twerked and grinded. In Everything After I abstracted improvisational and choreographic movement scores from PTSD therapies to uplift the labor of trauma survivors.
My process is sparked by curiosity, fueled by collaboration, research, and humor, and refined by vulnerability and specificity. The result are works that speak directly to communities that rarely see their experiences reflected in a nuanced and embodied way. Queer, Jewish was a night of storytelling and dance reflecting the experiences of LGBTQ+ Jews and honoring the way we read between the lines of our sacred texts and reinvent our tradition – the ultimate intergenerational art project.
Ultimately, I want to understand who we are, how we got here, how we’re thinking and feeling about all that, and where we want to go next.
Bio:
An artmaker, educator and bodyworker, they combine rigorous academic research with lived experience, words with dance, brain with body, living in the tension between ways of knowing and methods of being. Over the past decade Mason has created 9 evening-length performance works and a number of installations, video pieces, and short movement works. They have been granted residencies at Future Tenant Gallery (PGH) and Pearlarts Studios (PGH), and their works have been presented at the New Hazlett Theater (PGH), Kelly-Strayhorn Theater (PGH), vox populi (PHL), wild project (NYC), WOW Café Theater (NYC), and BAAD! (NYC). Mason has received grants from the Heinz Endowments, PA Council on the Arts, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater. As an MFA candidate at Temple University they received the competitive Thesis Completion Grant, the Vice Provost Student Research & Creativity Grant, and the Dance Department Film Award. Mason is currently an instructor at Temple University where they have taught composition, improvisation, and dance science and somatics.
I work in spiral time, revisiting themes of gender, animality, Jewish Diasporism, sexuality, trauma, and collectivity from new contexts and with new collaborators. I get off on moments of agency and imaginative possibility. Some works depend upon the interaction of audience and performer. A circus about revolution with multiple endings, whose course is determined by audience choices. Tactile dances in which a single blind-folded audience member is led through experiences of weight sharing, sound, texture, and touch, collaborating with the dancers who guide the performance.
My work is danced creative nonfiction, which is to say: I want to facilitate real experiences. In Sex Werque I investigated the complexities of power, gender performance, and labor conditions in the strip clubs by interviewing my former coworkers and playing back those conversations over close-ups of our jiggling flesh as we twerked and grinded. In Everything After I abstracted improvisational and choreographic movement scores from PTSD therapies to uplift the labor of trauma survivors.
My process is sparked by curiosity, fueled by collaboration, research, and humor, and refined by vulnerability and specificity. The result are works that speak directly to communities that rarely see their experiences reflected in a nuanced and embodied way. Queer, Jewish was a night of storytelling and dance reflecting the experiences of LGBTQ+ Jews and honoring the way we read between the lines of our sacred texts and reinvent our tradition – the ultimate intergenerational art project.
Ultimately, I want to understand who we are, how we got here, how we’re thinking and feeling about all that, and where we want to go next.
Bio:
An artmaker, educator and bodyworker, they combine rigorous academic research with lived experience, words with dance, brain with body, living in the tension between ways of knowing and methods of being. Over the past decade Mason has created 9 evening-length performance works and a number of installations, video pieces, and short movement works. They have been granted residencies at Future Tenant Gallery (PGH) and Pearlarts Studios (PGH), and their works have been presented at the New Hazlett Theater (PGH), Kelly-Strayhorn Theater (PGH), vox populi (PHL), wild project (NYC), WOW Café Theater (NYC), and BAAD! (NYC). Mason has received grants from the Heinz Endowments, PA Council on the Arts, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater. As an MFA candidate at Temple University they received the competitive Thesis Completion Grant, the Vice Provost Student Research & Creativity Grant, and the Dance Department Film Award. Mason is currently an instructor at Temple University where they have taught composition, improvisation, and dance science and somatics.