MOLLY HELLER

As a hybrid artist, my research interests are multi-faceted and the threads interweave, enhance, and inform each other. My work addresses the relationship between emotion and physical expression, and the cultivation of connection—with one’s self, relationally with others, and how we locate within space. Specifically, a key component of my research is how to include movement as a healer in trauma-related therapies and wellness practices. With our rapidly shifting social, cultural, educational, political, medical, and economic climates, now is an opportunity to embrace change and to actively participate in change-making through the arts. My research approach mirrors this need for reflexivity by valuing improvisational practices, the generation of new knowledge through collaboration, creative resourcefulness, and people over product. The layers of my research create an exciting, complex web with infinite possibility for Becoming—a mutable, process-based approach and term that encompasses the quality in which I practice, create, and teach. It is a dynamic continuum of growth where value isn’t solely placed on an arrival or fixed point. Becoming is an inclusive practice in acceptance. It is also a challenge to follow desire rather than fear through investigating the hidden, stagnant, and suppressed energies within our whole self that inhibit evolution or guard us from believing in our potential. My research is conducted within choreography, directing a multi-disciplinary collective, performance, wellness practices, and teaching.