Commissioned graphic response to four hours of oral history interviews conducted by Seika Boye with dancer and choreographer Ashley Perez about her dancing life. This large format digital drawing (4 x 8 feet) emerged through an iterative process, in constant dialogue with Ashley Perez to incorporate her reflections, insights, feedback, and expanded details to the stories she had shared, thus ensuring the drawing accurately reflected the spirit and essence of her artistic journey.

This work is part of Look at these Oral Histories!: Graphic Recording and Visual Data in Dance Research a knowledge exchange between two dance historical research projects, It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 and Now (IAT) and Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments: Dance-Based Approaches to Data. It was exhibited in Edmonton at the Mitchell Art Gallery (2020), and in Vancouver at the SFU Gallery (2022).

Learn more: Graphic Recordings, Oral Histories, and Dance Data: Seika Boye, Harmony Bench, and Kate Elswit in Conversation.