The First Work: Making Process

Every company has an official starting point. For Emotions Physical Theatre, that moment came in 2013 when we created and presented our first full production.

But the deeper origin of the company came from something much more personal.

At the time, my wife was going through one of the most difficult periods of her life. She had already survived cancer once, and then it returned. She was facing surgeries, chemotherapy, and the uncertainty of what her body would be capable of afterward. There were moments when doctors were unsure whether she would even be able to dance again.

In the middle of all of that, we started talking about making a piece together.

I told her that if she couldn’t return to the kind of dancing she had done before, we would build work around her body as it was. We would make dances that fit the reality she was living in, not the version of dance that people expected.

Out of those conversations, we created a piece called Process.

From the beginning, we knew we didn’t want to create a show about victory or heroism. At the time, a lot of public narratives around illness were framed in terms of strength and triumph. While those stories are important for many people, that wasn’t the experience she was living through.

What she felt was more complicated than that.

There were moments of hope and determination, but there were also days of exhaustion, fear, paperwork, medical uncertainty, and the emotional weight of carrying other people’s expectations. People around her wanted to see her as a symbol of strength, but being human meant having days where strength wasn’t the dominant feeling.

We wanted the work to reflect that full range.

Process became an exploration of what it actually feels like to move through something life-altering—not just the dramatic moments, but the quieter, more complicated ones. We worked with a small group of friends and collaborators, building the piece around real conversations, physical experimentation, and the emotional texture of what she was experiencing.

It was less about telling a story and more about creating a space where the experience could exist honestly.

When the piece premiered at the Houston Fringe Festival, we didn’t know what to expect. It was the first time we had taken this kind of work into a public space under the name Emotions Physical Theatre.

The response surprised us.

People connected with it deeply. The piece ended up receiving the award for Best Production at the festival, which gave us a sense that this approach—humanizing experience instead of simplifying it—was something audiences were ready to engage with.

More importantly, it showed us that the company could exist.

What began as a personal conversation between two people had become the first step in building a body of work. After Process, more pieces followed. New ideas emerged. The questions that started the company continued to evolve.

Looking back now, that first production feels less like a debut and more like a declaration.

The work would not be about spectacle or perfection. It would be about the complicated reality of being human—and the ways movement and storytelling can help us understand that reality a little more clearly.

That commitment still shapes the company today.