Ginger Krebs

BA (1993), The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA; BFA (1998), School of the Art Institute of Chicago; MFA (2004), The University of Illinois at Chicago. Performances and Exhibitions: The Chicago Cultural Center; Steppenwolf Theater; The Dance Center of Columbia College; Loyola University; The Arts Club of Chicago; The Chicago Artists Coalition. Awards: Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award, Creative Catalyst and Individual Artist Support grants; Nina Frenkel Award for Faculty Excellence; MAP Fund; Chicago Dancemakers Forum. Residencies: Dance Studio Residency (Chicago Cultural Center); Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, California); The Bogliasco Foundation (Genoa, Italy); the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) (Florida State University-Tallahassee); MacDowell; Ucross; Ragdale; Djerassi.

I make objects and performances that investigate how bodies cope with power. My research spans subjects as diverse as derivatives markets, football, Amazon Turk, the self-help genre, and “meat analogues.” Described as “inherently funny without having a clear joke to ‘get’,” my work celebrates people’s creative responses to constraints, and marvels at the everyday heroism of human beings who speak truth to power.

I build my choreography from vernacular movement that non-dancers can relate to. Humble source material, like a personal pattern of procrastination, for example, is given the “formalist treatment” to become complex, densely layered choreography.

I am preoccupied with power, and haunted by the way it hides behind capitalist ideology while enforcing visibility on other bodies, so my performances regularly feature radically unequal divisions of labor, mirages and scams. Lately I’m investigating how the ease we associate with the movement of onscreen bodies might reinforce confusions about socio-economic class—especially the idea that effort is low-status, while ease “comes naturally” to the elite.

In my role as a teacher, I like to listen. I want to help each artist recognize and be curious about their particular tendencies and interests. I have had to expand my own capacity to tolerate the feeling, while making, that I “don’t know what I’m doing.” This usually feels scary, but when I can allow myself to follow—usually it’s the ideas that seem either “dumb” or “unjustified”—that’s when my best thinking happens, and when what I make surprises me. I aim to facilitate students’ experimentation and creative research by striking a balance, in my classes, between intuitive response and thoughtful analysis.

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