Social Impact can encompass a wide range of ideas and projects that positively affect the communities we live in.
We are delighted to showcase various Fulbright alumni working with art, music, science,
and public health projects that are contributing to a better world.

 

A series by Leslie Kutsenkow (Fulbright Intern, Summer 2023)

 

 

(Christy Funsch, Photograph by Erica MacLean)

 

American Fulbright alumna, Christy Funsch – MFA, CMA, RSME – has devoted her life to being a dancer, choreographer, director, producer, teacher, and entrepreneur in the expression and art of dance. In 2002, she founded the Funsch Dance Experience in the Bay Area, California, to “question representation, narrative, and conventional depictions of gender through deeply investigated, specific movement vocabularies”. With over 30 choreographic works in the last decade, she has solidified her role in society to produce emotionally driven performances that push boundaries in multiple arenas.

One of Christy’s students stated that she “has long matched an understated, anti-spectacular performance personality with breathtaking precision and subtle wit. These qualities bear out in her teaching as well… Like her performance persona, Christy balances her sharp intelligence with genuine humility. There is a fierceness that accompanies her shyness, which made me trust her in the vulnerable space of dance making.”.

Dance Magazine named Christy one of the top “25 dancers to watch” in 2014. While at graduate school at Arizona State University, Christy studied under Daniel Nagrin, a pioneer in dance that “brought modern dance to a wide audience in the 1950s and broke down the gates for (dancers)”. In a 2015 tribute to Nagrin’s legacy, Christy became the first woman to be permitted to learn and perform his groundbreaking 1965 solo, Path.

In 2021, instead of performing a retrospective to highlight her 20th anniversary of choreographing, Christy premiered a 12-hour installation performance, EPOCH, “designed to strip down capitalism… (by) critiquing choreographic power, rehearsal politics, and the white supremacist ideation of rugged individualism”. It is a testament to how Christy has mastered the non-verbal communication of dance movement to illustrate emotions like sadness experienced in personal loss and “(America’s) ongoing social, political, and racial injustices which demand atonement.”.

 

(Christy Funsch: “Errant Spells for Forgiveness”, Photograph by Noel Lewis)

 

For her most recent performance, Christy presented her 100 Days Score and performed her 2019 solo Errant Spells for Forgiveness in the 9th Annual Somatic Dance Conference and Performance Festivalx at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

 

“I can’t foresee not making dance. It’s the way I reorganize space, take power from constructs that are made without my permission; the way I investigate power, gender, momentum, physics, humanity” – Christy Funsch.

(In Dance, as cited by Sima Belmar, March 1, 2018)

 

We interviewed Christy about her Fulbright Scholar experience in Lisbon, Portugal, and her view on how dance can create societal impact anywhere:

  1. How has your experiences from your Fulbright fellowship in Portugal influenced your work since returning to the United States? I remain in awe and greatly appreciative of my time as a Fulbright Scholar in Portugal. My conversations with the students and faculty of the Escola Superior de Dança broadened the scope of my classroom aesthetics, and illuminated communication as my essential teaching goal. The choreographic work I made with the students challenged all of us to navigate its bold and compassionate structure. Living in Lisboa, especially speaking (a little) Portuguese with locals, was a dream come true for me—it pointed towards future possibilities that continue to inspire!
  2. What challenges do you think that American people face and how does your dance represent these struggles and/or people? There are many ongoing challenges for contemporary Americans, among them climate change and the lack of political will to address it, intolerance, and perpetuated income discrepancies that arise from rampant, unchecked capitalism. I think art in general and dance specifically can and should encourage receptivity. Receptivity in terms of beholding complexity and the myriad of individual ways one can make meaning. I try in my work to champion the body’s complexity and its effort as an empathetic inroad. I also champion experimentation as future building.
  3. If you could have one impact on American culture and society now or in the future, what would it be? In my work I recreate the world and relational systems. I intend for these systems to be non-oppressive and humane. I believe experimentation can model new, more-inclusive ways of perceiving, and I will always advocate for this.

 

(Christy Funsch choreographed for the students of Escola Superior de Dança in Lisboa, @funschdance. December 21, 2019)

 

Christy has Dance and English Bachelor’s in Arts degrees from Hamilton College (New York) and was the first student in the college’s history to be awarded a Senior Fellowship in Dance which led to the performance at Hamilton’s Minor Theater for the full-length work Waves (based on Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves). She also earned a Master’s in Fine Arts from Arizona State University where she studied with Daniel Nagrin; was the recipient of the Outstanding Graduate Student Award; and co-founded, choreographed, and performed for the ESTRUS WORKS performance group.

Christy is an educator at heart and has taught on the faculty of colleges and studios around the world – University of California at Berkeley, City College San Francisco, Santa Clara University, California State University – South Bay, Cabrillo College, Slippery Rock, Hamilton College, James Madison University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Virginia Commonwealth University, the San Francisco Dance Center, ImPulsTANZ, and Amsterdam’s New Dance Studios – in the subjects of kinesiology, functional anatomy, comparative somatics, dance technique and improvisation classes.

A participating member of CHIME Across Borders, the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s cross-national CHIME (Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange) program, Christy choreographed with her mentor Tere O’Connor in 2013 at ODC Theater Sandbox Series. In 2014, she was presented in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Bay Area Now 7 Festival.

 

Christy has been awarded residencies at the Djerassi Ranch in Woodside, at U Cross in Wyoming, the Yaddo Foundation, Subcircle in Maine and at Shawl Anderson, CounterPULSE and ODC Theaters in San Francisco. She has been nominated four times for Outstanding Performance Awards by the Isadora Duncan Dance Award Committee. Christy has choreographed for several theater productions, including Bootstrap’s Arctic Requiem and Word for Word’s Holiday Hijinx, Lucia Berlin Stories and Home.

 

Christy was a 2019-2020 Fulbright Scholar at the “Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa, School of Dance (ESD)“, Department of Dance, for her Fado performance gesture project “Empathetic Embodiment Through Somatic Dance Training” for her Movement Analysis Certification at New York’s Laban Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies, where she is now a Certification Faculty member in New York.

 

“ Try to get away from ‘answers’ and instead acknowledge the incredible thing that dance can do, which is make us find relational truths and reverberations that don’t lead to a single answer.” – Christy Funsch

(In Dance, September 19, 2022)

 

Find out more about Christy and Funsch Dance Experience through her videos, podcasts, LinkedIn, or Instagram.

Thank you, Christy, and continue the great work!

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Since you are here, read “My Fulbright Experience” too, a series focused on the Fulbrighters’ testimonies about their Fulbright programs in the US and in Portugal!

 

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