Will Rawls is a choreographer working with dance, writing, voice, video and installation in his solo and collaborative practice. His projects center the physical body as an elusive concept and material that is shaped by the canons and conundrums of American identity, folklore and representation. With family roots in the American South and North, Rawls questions the stability of our personal narratives, and using choreography as a medium, interrogates our common clamour for narrative closure. His work cultivates and celebrates the schisms and failures of representation that occur when dance, literature and other media meet. He grows these schisms unto valleys of experimentation where embodiment, meaning and blackness are at play, and in practice. For Rawls, a breakdown between dance idioms and artistic mediums means that choreography is never a search for a single outcome; it is, instead, the vehicle for raising more questions than answers about what bodies mean, and how they can redefine our perceptions, and our relations to one another.

Photo: Kennis Hawkins