My name is Charly. I am a multidisciplinary artist obsessed with the overlaps I perceive across the mediums I work in and love. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Rutgers University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Bennington College. My work has been shown in Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and the United States, as well as at many international film festivals. My writing has been published in several dance publications and a few literary magazines.
My work is driven by translation, not as metaphor, but as method. With dance as my primary target language, I ingest my sources and metabolize them through a growing set of methodologies, giving them form through the body. Though I'm aware that I can only ever approach my sources asymptotically, I strive to embody them as completely as possible. In doing so, I breathe new life into words, sounds, and ideas, inevitably revealing dimensions of them that were previously obscured.
In recent years, I have been particularly preoccupied with the relationship between text and the dancing body. What does it mean to read a text with the body? What does it mean to read a body that is overflowing with text? One of my primary approaches to addressing these questions is creating performances rooted in Movenglish, a full-bodied sign language in development with word-for-word correspondence to English. This practice allows me to test the ways the richness of the body enriches what it seeks to symbolize, and to ask what else might be communicated once language is no longer confined to the page or the mouth.
Translation across mediums not only blurs artistic lines, but breaks down assumptions about what belongs where. Though my work can't undo entrenched hierarchies alone, I do believe that small acts of boundary crossing, in art and beyond, add up to something. I want my work, however modestly, to be part of a wider unraveling of the borders we mistake for the natural order of things.