kelly bond choreographer — director — performer
photo by Abbie Brandao
biography
Kelly Bond is a New Orleans-based choreographer, performer, teacher, and yogini whose most recent work, Dancing with Myself (2020), holds together the ideas and sensations of isolation and interconnectedness while on an electric-pink island with an 80’s playlist. Her 2019 piece, Escapade, was nominated for a Big Easy Classical Arts Award for Outstanding Choreography of a full-length work. One of life’s many joys is her work with Philadelphiabased theatre artist Mel Krodman with whom she created Jean & Terry: Your Guides Through Dark, Light, and Nebulous (2016); Colony (2012); and Elephant (2010). Kelly and Mel were 2015 Work Room visiting artists with The Lucky Penny and 2014 resident artists of The Breaking Ground Series at Theatre Emory, both in Atlanta, GA, as well as 2014-15 artists-inresidence with thefidget space in Philly. Kelly’s other dances include Splitting the Difference (2009) and Franko B killed me or An exercise in self-control (2007), among earlier works. Kelly earned an MFA in interdisciplinary dance performance from Tulane University in New Orleans where she is now an adjunct professor teaching modern dance technique and improvisation. She has also served as an adjunct professor of dance at George Washington University in Washington, DC, as well as at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She holds an MA in European dancetheatre practice from Laban (now Trinity Laban) in London which she attended as a Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholar. She has a BFA in dance performance and a BA in English from the University of Southern Mississippi. Kelly was a 2014-15 Artist Fellow with the TN Arts Commission; artist with Dance/Metro DC’s 2010 Forward Five; 2009 Young Emerging Artist of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities; and an artist with ex.e.r.ce08 at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier with Xavier Le Roy. Kelly studies and teaches vinyasa yoga in the Raja yoga tradition. She is the mother of three beautiful children, the partner of Ramon, and is originally from Mississippi. www.kelly-bond.com photo by Abbie Brandao
artist statement You have to feel it to believe it. That phrase has been stuck in my mind for many months, and it’s at the forefront of my thoughts as I try to put my interests and practice as a dance maker and performer into words. I crave feeling. I want to feel. In life, yes! as I watch my kids, practice yoga, or drive through New Orleans. In performance, that desire is directed and anticipating. As audience, I want to laugh at someone’s cleverness. I want the poignancy of this thing alongside that thing to make me cry. I want to feel a connection with a performer by looking in their eyes or witnessing the vulnerability, strength, struggle and flesh of the body. Even in the most abstract moments, I notice my longing for witnessing theirs. I lean into transformation, and although I know it’s no small ask, I want to be changed by what I witness or how I participate. How is this experience different or the same as my experience of life outside the space and time of this performance? How has my point of view on my experience in the world, or something as simple as the way I greet my neighbor, changed through this work? And so I make work that strives for these same things. My curiosity about how a work is crafted and the elements that make it so affecting lead me to consider specific tools and strategies that offer to move a person to and through a certain experience and to feel that that experience has been thoroughly thought through for them. The simple tools that have been present in my work from Escapade (2019) all the way back to Franko B killed me (2007) are looking others in the eye (potentially between and among all in the space), close proximity, and discomfort as an offering of self-examination, which might show up in many different ways such as through that eye contact or proximity, or maybe it’s through duration or the specific actions of the performers. I always want to be fully engaged with a work, whether my own or another’s. For me that means my attention is present in the performance and that I’m following the path of experience set in motion by the artist(s). I realize that my personal practice of presence stems from and shows up both in my experience of making and viewing performance, as well as through my yoga practice. My hope of full engagement in performance means that I am compelled, or can compel others, through thoughtful craft to move through an experience together. I want to offer and mingle my joy with the joy of that person, my pain with the pain of that person, my struggle with the struggle of that person. I want us to share the sensations, tastes, smells, sounds of the experience, because these are the things that life is made of. * Thank you, Faye Driscoll in Thank You For Coming: Space (2019).
DANCING WITH MYSELF (2020 and ongoing)
photo by Abbie Brandao
Dancing with Myself is a performance, a paper, and a pop song from the 80’s. While the latter is credited to Billy Idol, the former two are results of my research from 2019 until the present. The work is proposed as a triptych of performances that explore “future nostalgia” as an overarching concept. The first of the series was a solo that premiered in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic and is an investigation of reactions to and sensations of isolation on a spectrum of interconnectedness, while the written research examines the dramaturgy of that work and brings forward discussions of phenomenology and the im/possibilities of being oneself in contemporary performance. The second work in the series is in development.
Learn more about DANCING WITH MYSELF.
ESCAPADE
photo by Abbie Brandao
(2019)
I felt as though I had just belly laughed while sobbing for an hour straight… —Dan Miller, audience reviewer
Escapade is freestyle, naked-in-your-bedroom dancing as an entryway into explorations of the body as self/source/holder of histories. What do we share with others, and what do we keep for ourselves? For what? The performers encounter the work along with you, their audience–connecting you, your memories, your sensations of embodiedness. Between you is continuous active presence, moving in and out of stories that unfold through the desire of real-time connection. Moving through glimpses of historical female beauty and popular music from the late 80s, Escapade exposes the body in time–a body whose history writes its present and whose future and end are constantly approaching. At once personable and distant, private and public, vulnerable and powerful, Escapade draws a line, crosses and moves it, attempting to offer an experience of self that is both struggle and necessary desire.
Learn more about ESCAPADE here.
JEAN & TERRY
Your Guides Through Dark, Light, and Nebulous (2016)
It’s an upbeat-mysticpop-sensation…
photo by Kate Raines/Plate 3
—thINKingDANCE
When the mundanity of everyday life crashes into psychic phenomena, it helps to have a guide. Jean & Terry are a housewife and her spirit guide. They are alter egos for a neuroic choreographer and her zen-ed out collaborator, a pair of mountains, and a team of gods who smile from above. They are me and they are you. In their experimental play and self-described form of psychic acivism, choreographers and performing arists Mel Krodman and Kelly Bond peer with a curious and open third eye into ideas of the Universal Con- sciousness. The performers stage their atempts at seeking one-ness, achieving telepathy, elevaing our collecive vibraional frequencies, and acknowledging the impossibility of it all. Set against a journey across the astral plane, Jean & Terry asks us to consider what we are made of and what, if anything, separates us. Featuring performer-creators Mark McCloughan and Jaime Maseda, along with Ilan Bachrach’s video design and music composiion by Greg Sviil and Chris Sannino.
Find out more about JEAN & TERRY. See the JEAN & TERRY trailer.
COLONY (2012) “It comes from another planet. It's like staring into thespinning blade of a chainsaw until you scare yourselfwondering what it would be like to touch it. Was it conceived by hornets or humans? One thing is forsure. When you arrive, it will be waiting for you. It has always been waiting for you…” —Scott Sheppard, Founding Co-Director, Lightning Rod Special
Find out more about COLONY. Photo by John Muse
Mesmerizing and hypnotic. Mechanical and incessant. Colony considers both the human and the herd. Through a concentrated and athletic commitment to uniformity, the work is a choreographic investigation of repetition, duration and synchronization where differing states of awareness and being emerge. Implicating the audience as critical to the creation of the performative event, this intense meditation disorients our experience of seeing and being seen in a shared space. Distance, proximity, power and vulnerability are at play while your role as watcher is balanced by the tension of being watched. Colony, created and performed by Kelly Bond and Mel Krodman, is a bass-driven exercise in calculation, compulsion and connection.
ELEPHANT (2010)
Find out more about ELEPHANT.
We won't ignore you. We have a relationship. We are powerful. Sentimental. We transgress, practicing and perceiving aggression. We are you, and we are alien with all the potential to connect. Patient and pliable. Cryptic, valuable, subtle. We are elephants, huge and hidden. Elephant aims to extend the performative body beyond the individual to examine the relationship between spectator and performer. It challenges the traditionally passive role of the viewer while addressing both the subtle and aggressive qualities—as well as the possibilities—of the group, herd and collective conscious.
Photo by Paul Gillis
SPLITTING THE (2009)
The body is like a sentence that invites us to reimagine it, so that its real meaning becomes clear through an endless series of anagrams. –Hans Bellmer
DIFFERENCE
Splitting the Difference explores ideas of self and subject by presenting a history of the body through the lens of spectacle and image. This choreographic solo work proposes an alien body, a trained body, an historical body–all with an acute awareness of the subject within. Using physical sensation and text to connect to its spectator empathetically, an opening is created through which the viewer can ask: What would an anagram of my own body look like?
This work was funded in part by the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Find out more about SPLITTING THE DIFFERENCE here.
www.kelly-bond.com
photo by Nathan Jurgenson
kelly@kelly-bond.com