I am a dance artist, based in Victoria, B.C. (Coast Salish), and from Nova Scotia (Mi’kmak’i). My choreographic approach is very much performance-art oriented in its practices and aesthetic; I like long-range processes, value sacrifice as a fundamental ordering-device of the performative act, and regularly interrogate, through my practices and thinking, the audience/performer relation. In creating dance-based performances, I like to work with courageous and boundary pushing dance artists whose individual vision I value and seek to nourish. I often collaborate with thinkers working in academic environments (where I can be found when not in the studio or outside dancing) to theorize the body as an agent for knowledge-making. I also teach public workshops as a central part of my dance practice, to both adults and children; these introduce improvised dance as a way of thinking-with the world, as and through the body. My practices, both performative and pedagogical, investigate the ways that adherence to a narrow range of cultural mythologies cause bodies to perform themselves along certain, quite normalized and limited lines. I seek to disrupt this process of normalization by creating choreographic spaces where bodies let themselves be inhabited by new and multiple mythologies—and in the process, become agents for the telling of stories that offer a bit more freedom, a bit more levity, a bit more beauty, and a bit more room to imagine the future along happier, more expansive lines. 

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Kristen Lewis, JD. Dance Artist

www.kristenlewis.org

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photo: Kate Plyley