Julie Phelps is a dancer, performer, curator and creative producer living and working in San Francisco. She intentionally translates herself across multiple public roles because she values hybridity as a solve for dogmatics, maintaining mutable specialization in her creative work. Across all her work, Julie consistently uses the economy (as structure, system, and notion) as a lens for examining, understanding and taking action in life. Julie’s formal stage work began in competitive one-act theater and speech when she was 14, though she had worked for popsicles dancing for neighbors for most of her youth. Dance became the cornerstone of her practice in 2008 when she began studying with Sara Shelton Mann in San Francisco. Julie’s stage work is framed within improvised dance, state-based work, and improvised spoken word/storytelling. She has been part of multiple devised/collaborative contemporary live art projects. Notably, two evening length performances with Jesse Hewit, and partnering with Keith Hennessy to co-instigate Turbulence (a dance about the economy) which toured the US and Europe 2012 to 2017. Additionally, Phelps has performed with Meg Stuart, is collaborating with Marc Kate on an improvisation stage work at the intersection of experimental music and experimental dance (CounterPulse 2020), and hosting regular all night music/dance events with T.V.O.D. All of this is woven together currently to craft a life-as-art world made of people, place, and time through her work as artistic & executive director of CounterPulse. Beyond her own creative work, serving to develop the program and community of CounterPulse is integral to her creative practice and personal activism.
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