Artist Statement

Movement is everywhere.

I find my work by inhabiting an experience of extreme states to create movement meditations that evolve into a poetic form. Inquiry unfolds visually, the body finding again and again where it is today at this moment in its various states of becoming- distorted, elongated, impassioned, powerful, sexual, political, vibrational, communal.

My work responds to and refines the shape-shifting world around us by revealing and illuminating humanity. Shape, form, politics. I match the extreme emotional states with states of extreme physical attention. 

By engaging with the device of stilts, I embrace the inherent interactivity of risk in my viewers and their embrace of the possibility of human potential. Stilts reach past where humans think they can go, pushing perceptions of weight, time, balance, and physical limitations.

The physical impossibility of the work invites the viewer to viscerally interact, engage and ultimately expose the world within by creating complex and organic structures that are alive with kinetic possibilities.  

Our most recent work, And The Spirit Moved Me, is a multi-media piece in response to legacy, nature and spirituality in the body inspired by modern dance master Sybil Shearer and further explorations in the natural world.  The addition of stilts allows us to further the artistic legacy of a traditional African dance form, used as a means of connecting the natural world to the physical and spiritual world.

Kristina Isabelle Dance has been engaging audiences nationally and internationally for 16 years.  We are in the creation phase of Land Mass: A Triptych and currently in the process of cultivating a major performance and residency platform in the Midwest at Tryon Farm in Michigan City, Indiana.