Dani Robbins
Dani Robbins (they/them) is a choreographer/performer living and working on unceded Wabanaki territory in what is currently known as Maine, United States. Dani uses a multimedia creative practice to develop dance work. They grew up dancing and acting in the Boston area as an apprentice to Urbanity Dance Company and in the work of Jaclyn Waguespack. While completing their undergraduate studies at Bennington College, they had the opportunity to work with the faculty and MFA fellows at the college, including Dana Reitz, Elena Demyanenko, Susan Sgorbati, Terry Creach, Rebecca Brooks, Stuart Shugg, Sam Wentz, and Yanan Yu. Dani has been hosted as an artist in residence at Lake Studios, Berlin (2017, 2018), by Elena Demyanenko at Bennington College and Middlebury College (2019, 2020) and by Acadia National Park (2019). They have performed collaborative and solo works in Berlin, Bennington, Boston, and New York City. Dani currently teaches as adjunct faculty at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine where they offer classes in contemporary dance technique, video dance, and somatics. In addition to their personal creative practice, Dani facilitates dance experiences for various community members on Mount Desert Island and has worked as the co-director of the Acadia Dance Festival.
Statement:
I find myself constantly developing dance work that is rooted in collectivity. Via intimate relationships with my collaborators or through the cultivation of meaningful group experiences, I work to blur the line between self and other, or sometimes to illuminate difference through the reflective properties of relation. My dance practice works to engage diverse groups of people in varied settings: creative spaces with other professional performers, public schools, community theaters, and college classrooms. In all of these places I am energized by the potential for shared experience and companionship. My multimedia creative practice, which follows me differently to each unique setting in which I work, includes improvisational movement, mark-making, writing, and choreographic video editing. These practices are fed by and feed my relationship to the other and the particular inquiries or politics of that meeting. It is through these relationships and the peculiarities of worlding alongside others that I am working, imperfectly, to listen to and interrogate this body that I have—its whiteness, its queerness, its assumptions, its sensuality, and its capacity for radical joy and care. Dancing is relation in action, relation bringing us closer to self.
Statement:
I find myself constantly developing dance work that is rooted in collectivity. Via intimate relationships with my collaborators or through the cultivation of meaningful group experiences, I work to blur the line between self and other, or sometimes to illuminate difference through the reflective properties of relation. My dance practice works to engage diverse groups of people in varied settings: creative spaces with other professional performers, public schools, community theaters, and college classrooms. In all of these places I am energized by the potential for shared experience and companionship. My multimedia creative practice, which follows me differently to each unique setting in which I work, includes improvisational movement, mark-making, writing, and choreographic video editing. These practices are fed by and feed my relationship to the other and the particular inquiries or politics of that meeting. It is through these relationships and the peculiarities of worlding alongside others that I am working, imperfectly, to listen to and interrogate this body that I have—its whiteness, its queerness, its assumptions, its sensuality, and its capacity for radical joy and care. Dancing is relation in action, relation bringing us closer to self.
