Phyllis Akinyi

Flamencura

La locura y la cura. The madness and the cure. Supposed opposites, but for dancer and choreographer Phyllis Akinyi, flamenco contains precisely both, and her fascination of this phenomenon made her embark on a journey into the realm of flamenco, a journey that so far has lasted two decades.

Two decades of madness - from initial flamenco steps in Nørrebro to dusty and vibrant studios in Madrid, from anthropological flamenco fieldwork in Seville to durational spiritual experiments in an old warehouse in Brooklyn, and back again - and with an everlasting search for the cure, buried in the space in-between, in the meeting point of juxtapositions, where time, place and ego disappear, and the dimensions of the soul take over.

Flamencura is an installation and performance that challenges flamenco clichés; a vulnerable and personal exploration of contradictions and in-betweens, isolation and community, of overlooked voices and class struggle, of inherited intergenerational memory, frustrating invisibility, folkloric futurism, and a daring to take space. But most of all, Flamencura is a declaration of love, a multidimensional archive, and a space in which the past, present and future dance together.

Phyllis Akinyi (she/her) is a Danish-Kenyan dancer, choreographer, performance artist, and dance researcher based between Madrid and Copenhagen. She works within the realm of flamenco and has spent many years researching and highlighting its African and diasporic expressions. Her artistic practice centers a continuous investigation of the ‘betwixt and between’ - researching entanglements of movement, culture, and identity, from an anthropological lens of bodies caught in cultural ‘in-betweens’.

Akinyi plays with stretching the (imagined) limitations of flamenco, both in time, space, sound and movement, often taking flamenco on a journey away from the traditional stage and into a site-specific and/or durational performance frame - a frame she calls Spatial Listening, where flamenco meets performance art, Africanist Spirituality, and sonic movement.

Her unique approach to flamenco has made her a sought after artist, collaborator, teacher and thinker on both sides of the Atlantic, and she most recently found herself humbled by a feature on her work in Dance Magazine (US), written by legendary dance scholar Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild.