Keyierra Collins
Keyierra Collins is a Chicago-based dancer, teaching artist, choreographer, and 2020 3Arts Walder Foundation awardee. Collins graduated from Columbia College Chicago earning a BA in Dance where she studied various dance forms including West African, modern, jazz, ballet, hip-hop, and improvisation.
Watch Keyierra Collins’ Performance
Keyierra Collins is a Chicago-based dancer, teaching artist, choreographer, and 2020 3Arts Walder Foundation awardee. Collins graduated from Columbia College Chicago earning a BA in Dance where she studied various dance forms including West African, modern, jazz, ballet, hip-hop, and improvisation. Collin’s work explores dance and movement as tools to heal the collective and individual trauma experienced by people of the African diaspora. Collins’s work creates a platform for people of color; historically traumatized and oppressed, to voice their expectation for change, liberation, as well as healing. Her process is kinesthetically driven and often inspired by conversations between friends, or an abstract thought or feeling related to socio-political issues. Having toured and worked with artists in Haiti and Nigeria, Collins desires to continue her travels collaborating with artists around the world.
About the Performance
This piece is inspired by a solo from the 1938 film "Swing" danced by Consuela Harris. An actress and swing dancer, Harris was considered the best hot, shake, swinging dancer of the 1930s. As a movement artist, it had been difficult to stay connected to my technique during the pandemic. I am rediscovering how dance and movement exist in my body both now and in the future. My process of rediscovery begins with my feet--my base and source of movement. This work, influenced by the relationship between Harris' feet and torso, uses West African dance, swing, and jazz as an explorative approach to finding my feet.
Above photo courtesy of Keyierra Collins
Orel Chollette, Clara Lucille: in crossing, collaborative durational performance by Keyierra Collins and Jovan Landry
Learn More About the Artist
~connecticons