Kate Speer

Get Curious!

Philly Contact Collective performs their latest improvisation score!
January Studio Series
Saturday, January 23rd at 8pm

Studio 34
4522 Baltimore Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19143

artist's statement

I like to shake my hips and twist my spine. I enjoy the exhilaration that keeps the body tense with anticipation. I savor the final release of completion when the arms fully extend and the feet breathe into the earth. I like huge landscapes that crescendo into mountains and dissolve into streams. I enjoy the delicate gestures of lovers, quiet hands that gently touch. And I relish a good beat that sends the sweaty, exhausted body into motion.

biography

Kate Speer’s work ranges from performance and choreography to research scholarship. She holds a BA in dance and biology from Swarthmore College and has studied with such artists as David Dorfman, Michael Foley, Robert Een, Odile Duboc, Leah Stein, and Lisa Kraus.

Kate has studied abroad in Madagascar where she learned the intricacies of the social dance the Mangaliba from her host sister Pela Larissa Octavie Rasoloarisoa in the port town, Fort Dauphin. Additionally, she interned with Centre Chorégraphique National (CCN) in Belfort, France where she became familiar with the choreographic style of French choreographer Odile Duboc, then director of the CCN.

Speer is a 2009-2010 New Edge Mix Artist and an artist-in-residence at Mascher Space Co-op. Currently, she is dancing with Anne Marie Mulgrew and Dancers and Philly Contact Collective. In Philadelphia, she has performed in the 2009 Philly Fringe, Please Touch Museum’s Dancing Days, the first annual GLBT Arts Festival, and Willi Dorner’s bodies in urban spaces in the 2008 Live Arts Festival.

Speer also supports the Philly dance community administratively as General Manager for Leah Stein Dance Company and as an intern for Headlong Dance Theater, the nEW Festival, Group Motion, and Here[begin] Dance. Speer’s newest research project which examines the choreographies of David Dorfman, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and Jérôme Bel was presented in 2009 at Dance Under Construction XI Conference at UCLA.

Her own choreography has been presented at ETC Performance Series and React/Dance’s South Philly Solon.

For more video, please visit my Youtube and Vimeo websites.

The Walrus and the Camel (2009)

to see more photos CLICK HERE

past works

• 2009 The Walrus and the Camel
• 2009 Flushed Spade collaboration with Lee Fogel
• 2008 Salakao with original music composed and performed by Ben Bradlow (harmonica), Anna Grant (voice and percussion), Diego Garcia-Montufar (guitar), Harrison Russin (accordion), and Bill Welsh (percussion)
• 2007 Never Before
• 2006 Corporeal Crosstalk with original music composed and performed by Mark Loria
• 2005 “Ecstatic and dissociated behavior, visions and voices, appear throughout…” co-choreographed with Janice Im
• 2005 Daily Rituals with original music by Mark Loria composed for piano, cello, and viola
• 2005 Here’s looking at you kid
• 2004 Hair Quintet with original music by Alyssa Van Thoen composed for a viola and cello
• 2004 Untitled

links

Friends

• Philly Contact Collective
• Mascher Space Co-op

Mentors

• Headlong Dance Theater
• David Dorfman Dance
• Faustin Linyekula

Institutions

• Swarthmore College Dance Program
• Bates Dance Festival
• Centre Chorégraphique National
• Centre de la Danse National
• Tanzfabrik