I began work on The Surveillance Solos in early 2007, after listening to NPR coverage of the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping. Responding to the illegal surveillance, one after the other, American citizens proffered, "Well, if you have nothing to hide…" Now, with the promise of CHANGE in Washington, American artists and citizens must remain vigilant about our civil rights. Even though President Obama has taken steps to shut down Guantanamo and limit CIA abuses, he continues to prosecute the "war on terror" in Afghanistan, relying on bills such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which he rushed back to Washington to sign during the presidential campaign) to surveil both foreign and American nationals. In the clamor for economic solutions, there has been no movement to repeal the Patriot Act, with its myriad infringements on our right to privacy. Simultaneously, more and more personal information about each one of us is easily accessible with a few strokes on the keyboard (or blackberry) as we conduct more of our lives in cyberspace. More than ever, we as citizens have less we can hide, and are thus left painfully vulnerable to our own government's infringements on our personal choices.

The Surveillance Solos are designed, through a combination of farce and stark honesty, to question, in a world where so much information is easily accessible, just what can be considered private or intimate, and how quickly small deviations from "normal" behavior become suspicious. To make these solos, I work one on one with the dancer. We start with conversations about these issues in general, following her life experiences to come up with a specific topic for that dancer to explore. The dancer then spends some time surveiling herself. This surveillance material becomes the text for the piece, read by an onstage narrator: an agent-bureaucrat presenting this case to the audience. Movement generation also comes from this initial process, and is tailored to each dancer. A profile sheet (based on the one in my grandmother's 1950s era FBI file) is projected onto the back wall. The dancer moves in front of and through this projection during the course of the solo, emphasizing and disappearing pieces of information about herself as she moves.

Surveillance Solos 1 and 2: Subjects Meg Batterson and Julie Festa, were performed at High Energy constructs on April 5, 2007. Meg Batterson's solo focused on marginal and conformist exercise practices. Julie Festa's solo tracked public displays of affection between her and girlfriend, using fleeting moments of intimacy as evidence of "gayness." Surveillance Solo No. 3: Subject Ally Voye, performed as part of the Winter 2008 Studio at REDCAT, focuses on Ally's driving habits, following a ring of ever narrowing concentric circles of observation: from the habits perceivable by traffic cameras, to an informant driving alongside her in LA traffic, to a camera installed in her car's ceiling light, and finally to an unknown source which inhabits and surveils her imaginary space as she drives. Surveillance Solo No. 4: Christine Suarez, currently in progress, imagines surveillance invading the innermost circle of privacy, positioning Christine's ex-husband as informant. As the husband-informant/agent-narrator reports on the mundane actions of Christine's morning routine, she moves in an ever-tightening spiral around him, performing folk-dance footwork and hand gestures at increasingly difficult speeds. She relies on the moments where she cannot be seen (in the bathroom, up the stairs, out of the house) to inhabit a broader range of movement punctuated by her own internal rhythms, taking advantage of the pauses in her tiresome/tiring existence to express teeming emotion.