Our Mission
Seattle-based Karin Stevens Dance (KSD) extends the breadth, height, and depth of the moving human experience through the creation of imaginative and visionary performance works. Collaborating with music, theater, film, poetry, and visual artists, KSD investigates the complex layers of our cultural moment, spiritual ecologies, and the environments in which we move. KSD celebrates the power of movement to transform, evolve, heal, and re/connect us more deeply to our bodily-selves, each other, and the Earth.
Our Vision
KSD aims to be a national leader and fixture in the Seattle arts community, creating world-class dance that transfigures the relevant issues, pains, and environmental depravity of our time. KSD envisions a city where there is a new space for the creation of interdisciplinary dance, live music and immersive audience experiences that open up new channels of engagement, inter-spiritual dialogue and allow us to make new movements for a sustainable and just future.
Our Community
Through performance works and community events, KSD creates space for building connections. As a radical and vital art, dance can act as a key to our future sustainability. We commune, collaborate and converse through dance to remember that to be fully human we must move and create.
Founded in 2009, Seattle-based Karin Stevens Dance has produced over twenty-five concerts, toured inter/nationally and collaborated with award winning composers and music groups. KSD captures the breadth of the moving human experience through the creation of diverse performance works. Collaborating with music, theater and visual artists, KSD investigates the complex layers of our cultural spaces, time, and relationship to Earth and the spiritual. Striving to make beauty out of the human transformational process, KSD celebrates the power of movement to help us evolve, love, and re/connect more deeply to ourselves, each other, and to the inner/outer landscapes of our interdependent existence.
Prioritizing live and original sound, KSD has collaborated with Kin of the Moon, Sam Boshnack Quintet, Michael Owcharuk, Crystal Beth, Common Tone Arts, Glacier Symphony and Chorale, String Orchestra of the Rockies, Northwest Symphony Orchestra, Simple Measures, UW Chamber Singers, Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble and many more Seattle composers, visual artists and designers.
KSD has received support from the Office of Arts and Culture | Seattle, 4Culture, ArtsFund, Earth Creative, ArtsWA|NEA, Artist Trust, Seattle International Dance Festival | James Ray Residency, WA Commerce Covid recovery, Glenn H. Kawasaki Foundation, Abundant Blessing Foundation, Case van Rij, and through Velocity’s Creative Residency Program.
Artist Statement
As a dance artist, I am driven by the fundamental belief that all of life is movement, and movement helps us connect more deeply to ourselves, each other, the Earth and the spiritual. I am inspired by the work of dancer/philosopher Kimerer LaMothe who articulates that we must move into a ‘rhythm of bodily becoming’ for the well-being of ourselves, others, and the Earth. This understanding informs my movement practice, collaborations with fellow artists, and invigorates my effort to make works of moving art capturing the breadth of the human experience.
If it were not for the art and practice of movement, I could not return to a sense of internal and external peace, joy, and love in my everyday life. The art and practice of movement is my greatest source of hope in the midst of environmental, political, and cultural degradation: human induced crises having evolved from harmful and neglectful patterns of movement toward the interconnected earth and each other. These egregious patterns stem from centuries of minds separated from bodies; bodies separated from each other, the land, and waters; and humans who gained power from the imbalances and chaos of these separations.
Through the art and practice of movement I have transfigured pain and obstacles in my own life, delving deep into the roots of my personal lineage. I explore creative work through dance and writing that examines life’s concerns and the eco-spiritual, with the hope of speaking in movement and words that call us to examine past mistakes and patterns residing in and reverberating throughout our collective earth-body. I am a loudspeaker for the resonate pain which screams at us to cultivate new patterns of movement for our greater well-being, and the transformation of the wrongs we are acutely experiencing at this critical point in history.
As a mother and movement artist I have dedicated my life to the work of raising consciousness for a better world. I continue offering my work through the belief that movement is the source of our becoming, overcoming, healing, knowing, and connecting. Thanks to the support of my community, I have endured, creating and independently producing multiple large-scale works, writings surrounding this work, and facilitations in somatic and spiritual healing through The Art and Practice of Movement for others. Knowing that this work is vital for our time, I remain ever committed to my personal and artistic calling: recreating and renewing movement practices further awakening our collective human-earth-body at the interchange of art and embodied science, eco-philosophy and spiritual ecology, contemplative practice, and on-the-ground action. And with each new project, I seek to create an imaginative, immersive, multimedia experience serving as a catalyst for dialogue, exchange, and further research. Looking ahead, I believe my commitment to art and spiritual ecology will continue to impact collaborators, audiences and communities, connecting us all back to our bodies and shared ecosystems, with the hope that healing and well-being begins within us all.