Halie Bahr (she/hers) is an active choreographer, performer, educator, and scholar who researches the socio-political implications of trauma in the creative process. She creates both performances and educational communities that are playful, sincere, candy-colored-bright, visceral, over-the-top-spectacles that pull at your heartstrings and make us re-think our world.
I makes performances that look and feel like puzzles.
With equal parts sincerity and spectacle, I create fragmented, high-contrast dances that hone in on experiences of trauma and recovery..
There is a tongue-and-cheek-ness to my creative work — bright colors, grungy aesthetics, glitter, and peculiarly illegible scenes. There is a cringe-worthy-ness, a moving towards with tenacity, a crass spectacle that toggles with sincerity.
“You may not remember much of what happened; you may not remember any of the characters; you may not even be left with an image. If your experience resembles mine, you’ll be left with something far more amorphous – a kind of vibrating memory of the unnerving psychic state the work induced, or captured, or invented… Art that affects you in the moment, but which you find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. If offers images or ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do”
——Maggie Nelson, “The Art of Cruelty”
I create work at the intersection of experimental choreography, digital media, and somatic investigation. I love reexamining choreographic structures. The stories and structures we create often follow the Aristotelian logic of white male authors. Knowing how to makes sense of the world -- only through this logic -- often has destructive, prescriptive, and limiting impacts on the imagination. I love challenging the way we communally understand and make sense of our stories.