I was four or five the first time I danced. My hair was cut short and I was wearing stockings and a pink silk dress with flowers on it. I was in New Mexico. I’d practice pirouettes along the corners of the red rug we had in the living room.

On the weekends, when the sun blazed, I’d blast Sinéad O’Connor and drag my twin-sized bed to the back yard and jump on it for hours, screaming “FIRE ON BABYLON!!!” I loved it.

Dance is an emotional rollercoaster. It’s also methodical. Dance is a place where I live with myself—it is where I listen, express, and experience my relationship with the internal and external world. Your body is wiser than you—way wiser than you. Your body runs the show. My soul lives somewhere in between where my nervous system wraps itself around my muscles and where my connective tissue grips and slides around my bones and tendons. The more in touch I am with my soul, the better my body moves. I am it, and it is me.