Lois Alexander (United States) is a choreographer and dancer. She graduated from The Juilliard School with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance in 2014 and since then has worked in companies and in the independent scene. She currently lives in Berlin and is pursuing her MA in Art in Context at udK.
Lois understands choreography as a way to shift cultural codes and rewrite narratives through the materiality of the body. Her research is rooted in memory, origin, and gender, and focuses on enacting the conditions for multidisciplinary work to emerge. Lois is inspired by what Tina Campt describes as ‘textured identities’ and hopes to use the embodied nature of dance and performance to articulate an in-between, migratory state from black feminist perspectives.
In 2020, she presented her first solo, Neptune, which tours internationally through the Aerowaves 2021 network. Neptune is supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and is a co-production of ICK Artist Space (NL) and Sophiensäle Berlin (DE). Through the intersection of dance, visual art and sound, Neptune creates a universe that triggers the imagination to form new modes of existence. Water with its three states and its transformational qualities are the points of departure.
In 2021, Lois began experimenting with film with the work, Black Venus. The 8 minute video investigates Afro-Diasporic spirituality, motherhood and reckoning with an absence of kin. During the research, she explored intergenerational trauma and healing practices to reclaim ancestral and embodied knowledge.
Yeye is both a film (2021) and a dance performance (2022), supported by the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe and in co-production with Sophiensaele. The work explores the afterlife of slavery and the reverberations on our present. Yeye had its filmpremiere in Hackesche Höfe Kino Berlin in 2021. After being selected by Rote Fabrik Zurich, Lois translated the work to stage as part of her three month residency. The live premiere of Yeye was celebrated in October 2022 in Sophiensaele to a sold out audience.
In 2022, Lois received a cultural exchange grant from the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe and the Fonds Daku stipendium, Take Heart. With this, she conceptualized and carried out the dance film, Bodies of Water in Lagos, Nigeria in collaboration with the Future of Dance company.
