taisha paggett
Day in the Life
"Art making develops a type of curiosity that, I think, makes it a radical practice. It is within that practice that we’re able to break open fixed narratives and structures and ask why anything has to be the way it is." –Taisha Paggett, M.F.A. ’08, Dance
When she was younger, taisha paggett wanted to be an architect. She found her passion for spatializing ideas at UCLA as a dancer and budding visual and performance artist. Dedicated to expanding the critical discourse—the languages and frames—of contemporary dance, her solo and collaborative works enliven stages, galleries and public spaces from Highways Performances Space in Santa Monica, to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, to the banks of the Los Angeles River, posing questions about the body, agency and the phenomenology of race and gender.
Words and images are fundamental to her creative process—she maps the conceptual framework systematically on three-by-five index cards—liberating ideas from conventional structure and hierarchy through drawings and nonlinear word maps that become storyboards for her choreography. Up next? Alongside a new journey in academia and a series of collaborations with visual and performing arts “allies” across the country, taisha is expanding her voice with the creation of a new dance company, one in which the collective will engage body-based practices in the process of marking art as a form of community making.
Learn more:
http://taishapaggett.net/Taisha_Paggett/home.html