PROGRAMME
Dani Brown is a practising choreographer and performing artist with over 20 years of experience. At the heart of her practice is the representation of the queer femme body and the incessant, male-dominated, yet collective, effort to categorise and ascribe meaning to the very essence of the femme – a place we all come from, a source of life, a bleeding elasticity, a constant flux, ever morphing and ungraspable. Dani’s work rises and flexes with the provocation of the gaze, while simultaneously defying categorisation as she slips beyond the grasp of any claim of ownership, pinning down, or possessing control over the femme body. An encounter that always eludes the totality of sameness, an encounter that is always a space of otherness.
Dani was born in 1980 and raised in Rochester (New York), a small city on Lake Ontario, with a vast divide between the rich and poor, and a high rate of violent crime. She completed her freshman and sophomore years at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Dance and Choreography. When Bush was elected for his first term, Dani thought, "I gotta get outta here."
After various, shall we say, cultural exchanges, Dani finished her BDA with a specialisation in Dance Making at the ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, NL (formerly the European Dance Development Centre) in 2005. She received the danceWEB scholarship in 2009. After living in Hamburg and producing work in co-production with Kampnagel for five years (THE INVITATION, BODY SWAP, IT’S GONNA BLOW, HOW DO YOU IMAGINE THE DEVIL?, HOME), Dani made Berlin her home in 2012. Her stage works have been presented internationally in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Dani’s most recent works, THE PRESSING and CUNTED, premiered in 2022 at Radial System, Berlin, and online.
When she isn’t busy with her own productions, research, or teaching, Dani performs both nationally and internationally for Ligia Lewis (USA/DE), Vincent Riebeek (NL), Dragana Bulut (RS/DE), Alexandra Waierstall (DE), Antje Pfundtner (DE), Heinrich Horwitz, and the Japanese clothing label COSMIC WONDER Light Source.
In August 2024, she completed the first phase of her Intimacy Coordination studies with Principal Intimacy Professionals and is excited about moving into this field, continuing to empower performers and create compelling film and television. She had her first job in early September 2024, coordinating for the short film Protagonist by Nathalie Seidl, due for release in Spring 2025.
2025
