When Art and Mental Health Entered the Work

For many years, I didn’t think of my choreography as being about mental health.

I thought I was simply making work about human experiences—relationships, identity, conflict, vulnerability. But over time, I started noticing a pattern. Many of the pieces I was creating were circling the same questions: how people struggle, how they heal, and how they try to grow through difficult periods of their lives.

Eventually, I realized that wellness had been quietly present in the work all along.

One of the turning points came when I created a piece called Clinically Happy. At the time, I was beginning to experience something that I didn’t yet have language for. My energy, my focus, and my emotional state were shifting in ways I couldn’t fully explain. I was approaching the edge of what would later become a deeper understanding of my own mental health.

Creating that piece forced me to confront something I hadn’t fully admitted to myself: dance had always been tied to my well-being.

Some of my deepest wounds had happened inside the dance world. Like many artists, I had experienced environments that were intense, competitive, and emotionally difficult. At the same time, dance had also been one of the most healing forces in my life. It gave me structure, focus, and a way to process experiences that didn’t have clear language yet.

In that sense, dance had always been part of my mental health practice, even before I thought of it that way.

Clinically Happy became an attempt to explore that relationship more directly. Instead of avoiding the topic, I wanted to look at how people try to maintain stability while navigating the complicated realities of their internal lives.

The piece wasn’t meant to diagnose anything or offer solutions. It was an exploration of how people move through moments when their understanding of themselves begins to shift.

Looking back now, that work marked an important transition.

It made me more conscious of the role art could play in wellness. Not as therapy in a clinical sense, but as a space where difficult experiences could be expressed, witnessed, and processed through movement and storytelling.

That awareness began to influence how I approached the company’s work moving forward.

I started thinking more intentionally about how choreography could function as a catalyst for empathy and connection. How a performance might allow someone in the audience to recognize something about themselves. How the act of creating work could help artists understand their own experiences more clearly.

Over time, these ideas became part of the deeper philosophy behind Emotions Physical Theatre.

The work was never only about creating performances. It was also about building spaces where people could explore emotional complexity without needing to resolve it immediately. Spaces where movement, narrative, and human experience could meet.

That shift eventually led to new projects and initiatives beyond the stage.

But at the time, it began with a simple realization: the stories I was drawn to were often about healing, growth, and the long process of becoming more fully human.

Once I saw that pattern, it became impossible to ignore.