About Kristen Lewis

Kristen’s dancing and teaching follows a twenty plus year commitment to creative practice as a tool for uncovering hidden aspects of the psyche/body - and for unleashing ranges of expressive capacity that surprise with their force, tenderness and creativity. Dance training is positioned as a vehicle for profound transformation - and for uncovering hidden reserves of wisdom, joy, and power.

Her classes and trainings present a methodology developed over her many years of practice and teaching to gently but firmly dismantle the habits of subjectivity inherited from restrictive family-of-origin conditioning, neoliberal efficiency protocols and the ways these mark bodies, as well as the increasingly sterilizing pressures of the hyper-technocratic age.

In the face of the increasing pressures the internet has brought to perform the self along highly normalized lines (a world where the appearance of difference as multiplied “identities” reveals itself as brain-washed response to un-interrogated algorithmic command), her practice and teaching seeks to unsettle the “naturalized” normalized modes of being in a body. That sounds fancy.

What it means is often simple - we walk a certain way and not another because of social conditioning. This makes life restrict itself - in us, around us, through us. We restrict ourselves, those around us do the same and we keep reinforcing this boring nonsense - until we don’t. It isn’t about some fake display of so-called freedom - like a release of undisciplined shaking at some random ecstatic dance event. It’s about a systematic, disciplined - yet loving and tender - inquiry into why we move how we do, and into how we might otice chances ot move otherwise, against the grain of unhelpful conditioning. It’s as much about discovering and following laws we forgot as it is about “breaking free, man” of laws altogether. This is discipline as a practice of freedom - not some idealized vision of “freedom” stuck in the infancy of a human teen-agehood that sees rules as shit and freedom as god. It’s about cultivation of something more expansive than the given.