RANDY REYES

Princess Grace Award
Choreography Fellowship, 2019
CounterPulse

 

Randy Reyes is a queer-AfroGuatemalan brujx, choreographer, performance artist, and healer born in NJ. They currently make love and art in Oakland / San Francisco Bay Area after oscillating between the Bay, LA, Berlin, and NYC. randy is interested in choreography as a process of excavation, task as meditation, psychosomatic state work, Chinese Energetics, grief/joy, structures of intimacy + the erotic, and getting messy by conjuring contemporary rituals within quotidian/natural landscapes.

Most recently in the Bay, Randy was a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) Creative Dissent Fellow (working closely with Tania Bruguera) and premiered a collaborative work titled Lxs Desaparecidxs through the Performing Diaspora residency at CounterPulse. Currently, randy is a 2019 Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME) mentee with lead mentor, Margaret Jenkins, a Shawl Anderson Emerging Artist in Residence, and a danceWEB | Impulstanz scholarship programme recipient with mentors Anne Juren and Annie Dorsen in dialogue with Mette Ingvartsen. randy was recently awarded a National Association for Latino Arts & Cultures (NALAC) Artist Grant to travel to Guatemala this fall to begin research around the intersection of their family’s lineage and queer/AfroLatinx identities, a New Roots Foundation Artist Residency (also taking place in Guatemala in 2020) , and a Dancers’ Group CA$H Grant to further excavate a work titled opaQUE premiering Fall 2019.

Randy has instigated two collective performance initiatives in the Bay called Lxs Dxs and the Bay Area BIQTPOC Performing Artist Hive. The Hive envisions and ignites a multi-modal/multi-dimensional thriving ecosystem of BIQTPOC artists where we gather to rest, move, and nurture relationships by weaving together our dreams/visions; we allow the gathering to guide what wants to happen next as we set the infrastructure to keep the project running long-term in order to address arts/cultural inequity. This project will be supported with funding from the California Arts Council and support through Hope Mohr Dance’s Community Engagement Residency (Sept. 2019 – Sept. 2020).