Larissa Velez-Jackson

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel: Larissa, we met through The Creative Center, a program that I am so fond of. You also participated in a writing workshop that I facilitated and I took a movement-based workshop that you taught. I feel happy to be having this conversation with you since this is a time when I am daring to embrace dance and movement beyond an intuitive level. You, on the other hand, have been on this path for decades. I welcome your thoughts on all of this.

Larissa Velez-Jackson: Hello Nicolás. What a nice opportunity to talk about The Creative Center, where we met, and Dance—two life lines for me. I want to highlight TCC because I discovered a pathway for artistic and career connection in the most unlikely of places—my hospital room fighting for my life! In 2023, I was a cancer patient hospitalized for a combined total of 61 days at Mount Sinai Hospital in Spanish Harlem, NYC. Twice a week an incredible artist in residence, Sascha Mallon, came to our hospital rooms to initiate visual art or craft projects of our choosing. With Sascha, I started to embroider insights from my healing journey. Furthermore, I was introduced to The Creative Center as a place where I could continue my personal healing and wellness beyond the hospital setting. I took your online letter writing workshop, later attended TCC’s training institute, and now it is place where I teach.  As an artist and educator who now identifies with a disability due to my illness, these pathways for connection are vital for my quality of life and for my continued artistic inquiry. Now that you and I have met, I am aware of  all kinds of connections we have, like places we’ve both performed (The Point CDC) and artists we know. I am so happy to know you and understand your work as forging a path in my lineage of NYC performance and community building.

And yes… Dance!

After training as a dancer since childhood and obtaining a Dance Education BFA at University of the Arts (1999), I started making improvisation-based dance-theater between 2004-2006 in NYC. As an improviser, I am most interested to awaken the forms of movement we dancers have encountered; whether it be from sports, cultural forms, social dance, formal training; including the movement memory of our physical labor and lived experience. My job as a choreographer is to nurture and activate these expressions and challenge whatever is not serving the dancer’s access or agency. I want most importantly to be liberated as a dancer. So, for me, embracing failure and anti-climax—and using my voice, spoken and melodic, to fill in the gaps of meaning and expression where dance athleticism and virtuosity fails—is my way of feeling complete as a dancer. I eventually added song, storytelling and speaking to all of my dance work (by self-narrating the dancer’s moment to moment experience) and now include aspects of the healing ritual onstage. I call this practice the Star Pû Method.

NDEREOM: The class that I took with you through The Creative Center focused on healing, as so much of their programs do. You guided us through explorations of our bodies beyond the physical, and into the realms of auras (although I don’t think you used this term) and energy fields. How have these elements come about in your dance and movement work?

LVJ: Yes, we did an aura-body exploration in that class! My artistic career was greatly shaped by my practice and teaching of yoga, Pilates and fitness sciences. I came to practice these in search of a meaningful career that would subsidize my performance life and to personally tend to the physical pain and injury that followed me throughout my entire performance career. In turn, dance artistry helped me, as it has many before me, to unapologetically experiment with different forms of consciousness-based, mindfulness and movement based practices. These tools and technologies also became essential to my warmups that would prepare my body and my collaborators to improvise.

I first learned how to encounter the aura during multiple workshops on sound meditation in the yoga tradition. In one workshop the hands were used to hover and sense into the auric field (also referred as the biofield) while meditating on the chakra energy centers. For me, these meditations became the most powerful when accompanied by simple vocal vibrational sound—humming or simple mantras. Mantras and yoga that included sound gave me my first experience of breath control and the capacity to sing. The sound yoga of my teacher Ketul Arnold (linked above) was my first training in voice, aside from karaoke nights in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan in the early 2000’s.

Where aura exploration really took off for me relates to my cancer journey. To paint a clear picture of it for you: I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma cancer in 2019 where doctors discovered a tumor that encompassed the entirety of one of my spinal vertebra. The vertebra then fractured. Many other bones would fracture through the years while treating this disease, including multiple ribs, my right upper arm bone and parts of my pelvis. In these times where I was constantly healing from serious injuries, all of the scripts from my teaching of how to breath and relax had to be re-written because they all involved searing uncomfortable pain. Yet, I refused for my body to become completely foreign to me, a place from which I could no longer draw a sense of safety and wholeness—the gift that yogic and body-based practice provided me.

While recovering, I delved deeply into meditation on the sensation of my aura body, because my physical body hurt too much. Meditating on the aura body became a well from which I could drink every morning and whenever I needed in a day. When movement was too hard to execute, healing from various bone fractures, I moved gently with the dance of my aura body, for example during our family dog walks or in the kitchen. It was light, refreshing and also helped me maintain some semblance of nimbleness that I would build upon in my healing. This “aura dancing” and other of my games/proposals like “sneak dancing” in the hospital or super market, or “lazy rolling around on many cushions for pleasure” were my accessible movement meditations. These were ways I could still be in daily practice as a dancer without focusing on “a show.”

NDEREOM: Thank you for these insights about how you modified some of your previous learning to continue dancing in and with the world given your physical challenges at the time.

My areas of studies have been theater (as a young person), the visual arts (as an adult), and different healing modalities (as an older person). Dance and movement have strangely been present for me throughout my life, yet I never thought to study these art forms formally until now when I am entering elderhood. Unlike me, you have been professionally involved in dance/movement for a considerable number of years, and have allowed life and the day-to-day to dialogue with this discipline. For example, you have dealt with cancer and this has come to inform some of your creative work. I would like to hear you talk about this, if possible.

LVJ: During illness, I had the honor of experiencing all the tools I used to perform (and to prepare for performance) to rise up and support me to exist in the world and heal. It was like I was in a never-ending dance where I helped myself be…with a sense of pleasure, fortitude and safety. Mind you, I wasn’t 100% successful everyday, but who is?! I can say that some of my most meaningful dancing (and meditations) happened in my most ill state.

Most recently, in the presence of disability community, I have come to understand that how I encountered my creativity and resilience during illness is my part of the collective wisdom of so many other disabled survivors. The acceptance I gave myself in my most wounded state was the first time I experienced a perfect union with my spirit that had alluded me before. At first I was flabbergasted that I had to do my one-hour dance warmup just to walk around in a day and be okay-enough during multiple myeloma treatment. Now I am really into how these experiments with my body and real life became inseparable. In the end, I think Dance and consciousness work taught me how to be interested in the dance of life at all times. I have a new perspective now, and I am not sure what will be made from it, though I think it is already being made:)

NDEREOM: I enjoy how people like you are reclaiming cultures and helping to dismantle rigid molds regarding belonging withing the framework of the Euro-American United States. You are doing this in some cases through the most simple gestures. While your name is spelled Larissa, you invite us to say this with a beautiful Spanish accent: Lareessa. It took me so long to master the pronunciation of the freaking i in English. Thank you for this linguistic liberation. My friend Priscilla Marrero, another amazing dancer, pronounces her name Prisceella! And I am Dumit (Dumeet)! How do you bring this synergy into dance? I am curious.

LVJ: I am one of the many Puerto Ricans, born here in the states and Spanish was my second language, spoken before I was in school and then mainly in highschool. ‘Til this day I try to speak Spanish clumsily, yet my Latinidad flows mainly through music and dance. I need salsa, merengue, cumbia and dance music on a regular basis. I need to be at the DJ table making beats for parties or tailored electronic loops for dance improvisation. Hip hop music has been a big way I’ve connected to my Boricua-Italian Newark, NJ, roots. I teach every older adult fitness class with the songs of our great elders: Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaría and Celia Cruz. Latin social dance motifs flow freely in my movement improvisation. The twerk next to the glide, then fall, then shuffle and cha-cha clap ugly up off the floor then ba ba ba! The salsero, the old chubby uncle, the hips swaying morena, all show up to the party. Mi gente resides in dance, music and sound for me. So does my play and flow with genders now that I think about it.

NDEREOM: Where I come from, The Dominican Republic, music is a call to move, not just something one listens to. Who is Dr. Absurd Joy?

LVJ: Ha! Dr. Absurd Joy was a comforting figment of my imagination while I was hospitalized. I listened to nightly durational ASMR on Twitch to stay asleep, amidst the beeping machines and medical staff interruptions. Dr. Absurd Joy was the doctor in a lab coat who I longed for, that made simple body contact with you, held your hand, brushed your hair or whispered coos of comfort and safety. Joy was a true caregiver and healer—in a lab coat. I was determined that I would beat my cancer, leave the hospital and be that person, maybe prescribing dance games/proposals for a “patient” who needed it, maybe whispering with long nails into an ASMR microphone to help one fall asleep. When I achieved full remission, Dr. Absurd Joy ASMR became a YouTube channel I started in 2024 to fulfill all of these choreo-audio-healing concerns. They are not so unlike the teaching I do now, as I offer sound vibrational meditation sessions and sound baths as part of my client services. But as Art would prove, I am freer and more able to take risks and be absurd as a “healer” as Dr. Absurd Joy. They have yet to perform onstage, though free public sessions on the massage table with Dr. Absurd Joy is a dream for the future.

NDEREOM: You collaborate with your husband Jon Velez-Jackson, and the two of you have given shape to Yackez. What is at the core of this creative partnership and what are some of its artistic manifestations? 

LVJ: Speaking of the Latin-American synergy; Yackez is the combination of my last name Velez and Jackson–my husband’s family name–with a play on the “y” pronunciation as “j” in the Puerto Rican dialect: Yackez or Jackez. Yackez is the creation of songs (beats and lyrics) and encompasses the theatrical ways we deliver these songs. Yackez is a ridiculously costumed part of my family life with my husband. Something very important for me throughout my career has been to not be beholden to curators, institutions and presenters to define me as an artist. I am an artist because it’s imperative that I make things, not because I have been invited or selected to make things. So both Dr. Absurd Joy and Yackez are both projects that are a daily homemade reality. I can continue to work on these projects in a daily way in our home studio. My elder fitness students have shared the stage spotlight with us; both manifestations of real life and real people/relationships being the community that occupies the “professional” stage with me. Yackez is a drag performance for me, for sure. Yackez is our alternative to marriage counseling and we have large sculptural friends in the project that are kind of like our babies, as my husband and I do not have children.

On a more serious note, Jon suffered a severe medical emergency in 2018, and I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma nine months later. So, we’ve seen each other through life-and-death situations. We’ve been each other’s caregivers on a level many 40-something-year-old couples don’t get to experience until much later in life. Our musical sound and storytelling, which is also very improvisational, reflects all that we’ve learned through our life challenges. I also think our music is very anti-capitalist because it refuses to land on an understandable or packageable genre, sometimes even within one song.

NDEREOM: I am fascinated by worlds that the visual art industry cannot easily colonize. There was a year when dance was the in thing in performance art. LOL. Another time it was theater and bringing actors into museums. LOL again. In the 1990s, when I was getting my MFA in ceramics, clay was weird thing that people who read Ceramics Monthly, Contact, and Studio Potter did. Now ceramics has been accepted by the establishment. The latest development is healing. COL (crying out loud). In my effort to avoid creative domestication, I have gravitated toward all of these realms. You bring dance, movement, props, the theatrical, and healing together through your productions. I feel like I have no questions for you, so just chime in.

LVJ:  I love that you are talking about this Nicolás. It reminds me of a something loosely related that I can share, which is that for many years I did not call myself a dancer. I always called myself a choreographer first. When I strongly identified as a choreographer, it felt to me like dancers were those that honed their craft in very formal way; taking regular classes as training; dancing for many different people; or at worst buying into a system that believes an authority deems that they are a dancer; and I was not that! Ironically, when I became the most ill and loosing physical abilities and I was doing my never-ending dance of healing; it was the first time I identified absolutely as a dancer. It took me barely dancing to discover and say proudly that I am a dancer. Talk about internal categorization of things!

Now I have a new term that I am absolutely very fearful to use and that is a healer, though my work and my life are completely devoted to healing. The work of my theater projects is to test whether or not the healing aspects of performance improvisation are attainable while being viewed by the all-judging-audience. I challenge that healing is still possible in the theatrical setting and being open to failure, I am very ready to fail at this proposition and still be successful. But as I was afraid to call myself a dancer before, I am now very afraid to call myself a healer and for many good reasons one can imagine. But this all makes me wonder these strange ways we can close ourselves out of experience based on these categories society agrees upon.

To your point about the art market, lately I’m seeing clearly how the art market is extractive of the long-term, daily work that is being an artist. As presenting institutions chip away and take their little piece of you without replenishing nearly enough in return, I don’t know what to make of it. I also sympathize knowing that all institutions are surviving capitalism. My survival mechanism in the art-life (perhaps like you) has been to remain a chameleon, moving sneakily and rebelliously through different forms (like video, music and theater) where I’m not formally trained, creating projects that I can continually work on without anyone’s permission or approval, and not being caught up in one reality or system too long. I also have to say here how disabled artists are often left out of whatever “the conversation” of the day is simply because of the ableist frameworks of all of these systems. I have been completely obsessed with the topic of healing going on eight years now and have watched many curations on healing and performance come and go without a thought or invitation to me. I think part of the reason is as an immunocompromised person and someone tending to my disability-wellness first and foremost, I am not showing (my masked) face at events, putting  my body in front of curators to remember me or consider me. I have to recuperate and sleep at sundown, not go to shows or treat life as an endless network mixer even! Pues, this topic is getting my blood pressure up and clearly is a “hot topic” we’ve landed upon.

NDEREOM: I have seen ART (as in Art Industry or Art World) wreck some people’s health and relationships. This is not to mention how destructive competition is and how this has been exacerbated by social media. I keep to myself on this corner of the South Bronx watching the circus unfold. And the circus might be coming here soon. It was not my intention to get your blood pressure up. I am not interested in ART anymore and I am inspired by creativity, which is an encompassing and democratic concept, I think.

I would not want to close this conversation without talking about Puerto Rico. During a lifetime in New York City, I have been mentored and supported by a roster of people from this island of beauty. I talk about becoming Puerto Rican as a step further into my understanding and enfleshment (my neologism) of Bronxhood. How would you say Puerto Rico might show up in your work at a moment when we are entering a politically regressive phase in the United Sates?

LVJ: Ah, La Isla del Encanto! I had the great privilege and pleasure of going to Cabo Rojo, where my father was from, two years in a row recently. Cabo Rojo, for those who do not know,  is the utmost western southern coastal tip of the island—very rural and utterly beautiful. For some intuitive reason, I always tend to visit around Easter time. I next want to visit nearby Ponce during the Vejigante Carnival in February. Since Yackez dancers are now mainly masked and sculptural (our big green and orange friends Yacky and Zee), I yearn to locate the archetypal lineage of these bold entities from within my own culture. There is incredible UFO lore in the western southern region as well, and Yackez’s friends are said to be from outer space, so there is another connection that will be researched. My hands are very slender and beautiful (oddly so) and have strong healing and intuitive capacity, which I now have come to think of as possibly having alien ancestry via Puerto Rico. That might be a big stretch, but I know that I have the capacity to reach my imagination very far into distant realms and I believe the key is the indigenous wisdom of my Taíno ancestors. This propensity is surely not from the colonialist narrow limiting western civilization mindset that I also carry. In my lifestyle now, I connect to the land where I live in Hudson Valley, New York and connect to the land where I am from in PR as a way to center my intuitive strength and the earth-based wisdom of my ancestors. You know, there are so many Puerto Rican people in my town as well, it is sweet to see many Bronx-based Latinx folks migrate to where I live now for a quieter more spacious life. I see a connection to this place and our island home for sure. Now I just have to push myself to speak Spanish to people more!

NDEREOM: ¡Adelante! Thank you for this opportunity to continue to learn about dance, about you, and about spirit.

 LVJ: Thanks so much Nicolás! It has been great to be in dialogue with you during these unsettling times in our nation. I appreciate the chance to share my story on your generous platform and commend the work you do to keep hope, spirit and community connection so strong!

All images and videos courtesy of Larissa Velez-Jackson

Larissa Velez-Jackson’’s links: Website / YouTube / Writings / Contact

Larissa Velez-Jackson (LVJ) (they/she) is a NY-based choreographer, movement educator and creator of their original performance practice called Star Pû Method (f.k.a. Star Crap Method) and is a co-creator of the band Yackez with their husband Jon Velez-Jackson. Called “an adroit physical comedian” who “seems to be questioning entrenched conventions of contemporary performance” in The New York Times, as the artistic director of LVJ Performance Co., LVJ blends modalities of movement, sound, storytelling and intergenerational community practice. LVJ was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and was awarded the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grant to Artists, in 2016. They were a Caroline Hearst Choreographic Fellow at Princeton University from ’20-’21 and a choreographic fellow with the AXIS Dance Company in 2024. As an ongoing cancer survivor, LVJ is an advocate of the healing potential of art and body/mind practice.