KRISSY HARRIS​

I am fascinated by the moving body’s capacity for resilience, fluidity, and expansiveness. I wonder: What do we source from? How can our internal world energize us to move fully through the space? How does our human experience show up in process and performance? I find that my movement is highly driven by the motivation to both understand and harness responses to these questions. 

 

Anchored in dance research, writing, and gender studies, my work explores the ways in which the body’s interior environment takes charge and boldly participates in the exterior space. Through movement, I work with femininity as a complex entity and qualitative force, that remains shifting and fluid. Utilizing choreographic structures and scores, how can my work reveal a complex relationship of the internal/external body’s energetic and expressive potential? 

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Recent projects have grappled with questions of identity, Queer wonder, femininity, 1980s MTV, and rock and roll history. As methodologies for generating choreography, I work with physics concepts, structured improvisation scores, storytelling, and stark interruption. These methodologies are informed by a training history in classical, contemporary, and postmodern dance traditions. My dances are episodic in choreographic structure, and progress with a non-linear narrative. They are highly physical, challenging endurance and ways to play with dance ‘technique’. From a deep sense of grounding through the floor, we will run, jump, and bound through the dance space. With a generous sense of weight shift and momentum, we will spiral off our axis and play with gravity. The group forms of my work access non-hierarchical unison movement and exchanges of leadership. 

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My research is driven by an excitement for cultivating community and inciting joy. I continually seek out ways to keep my process responsive to the shifting sociocultural frameworks that surround us. In the spaces that I create within, I activate my awareness for the ways in which power dynamics function in group spaces. I reflect on and grapple with the various forms of power I inherently hold coming into any dance space. I continually practice ways of decentering myself and centering the dancers/collaborators that I lead. I enjoy highlighting the amalgamation of movement histories each person brings into the room. 

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I value commitment, heart, and authenticity within the dance form. From a place of accountability to our work, dedication to process, and an openness to different voices – we can discover, generate, practice, and perform to our fullest extent.