Kareem Alexander

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

-Toni Morrison

I am a genius and I am made of maajik. I was born a dancer. There’s video footage of me dancing in my crib as my father belts out Michael Jackson. I am convinced that movement materializes from conception to death, and even beyond this earhtly plane. I was born in Roosevelt, NY and rep both Long Island and NYC as my stomping grounds. Both my parents immigrated from Belize in Central America. My Caribbean/Central-American/African-American identities all hold exponential value to me. I hold my undergraduate degree in Dance with minors in Africana/Puerto-Rican/Latinx studies from Hunter College in New York. There, I studied Hip-Hop, West African, Contemporary, Modern, and Folk forms of dance. I worked with choreographers such as Marjani Forte, Doug Varone, Jodi Melnick, Vicky Shick, Patricia Hauffbauer, Julian Barnett. I went on to choreograph works at Gibney Dance’s Work Up 3.0, DanceSpace at St. Marks Church, and at LaMama Experimental Theatre. My choreographic work includes: No More Water The Fire Next Time, Boys Like Us, I Only Stop When I Am Full and uN-radical bodies.

My movement work confronts the horrors, grim imaginations, and joyful practices of history. I affirm memory as a form of resistance. I use themes of slavery, colonization, coolness, Blackness, anti-Blackness, ableism, queerphobia, transphobia, migration, sexuality, pleasure and time. I view my audience as active participants, community members, friends, enemies and oppressors of me and my work. I pull from my complex natural, ancestral, communal, familial, and “formal” dance techniques, I make work that forces the audience to confront me and my experiences, but most importantly, confront themselves.