Softboarding was a dance, performance, textile, and sound project I worked on from 2016 through 2019. It began as a series of practices to queer and soften the cultural and physical framing of skateboarding, and to offer alternative approaches to skateboarding in order to address gatekeeping, ableism, and the often rampant misogyny present in the larger skateboarding world. The softboard objects were created in order to bring skateboarding into dance spaces with wooden floors, to be able to play around on a board in an apartment without causing too much damage, and most importantly to provide a way for injured and disabled skaters to still spend time on the board. Once I'd made the first softboard and brought it into a dance studio, it became apparent that there was a lot that could be done with it that couldn't be done with a regular skateboard. It was soft and comfortable, a place to be, an environment, an approachable domestic object, and a great surface for working at a standing desk. This opened up multiple avenues of research into queer and feminist histories of skateboarding, considerations of physics and symmetry and the work of Emmy Noether, as well as musical ideas born of the physical investigations as well as queer iterations of typical punk and metal music that often dominates skateparks.

The performances below reflect the work in different iterations:

Solo @ Danspace Project - 2018

Duet with Nicola Zimmer @ AUNTS at La Mama - 2018

Large Group with Syd Island, Lily Dirks-Goodman, Nadia Tykulsker, Eddie Gutierrez, Liz Charky, Kirsten Michelle Schnittker, Lydia Mokdessi, and Lucie Vítková  @ Roulette Intermedium 2019