Kennedy Alexandria Ward

About the Project

This project was created in the afterbirth of returning to the United States from a two-week long dance exchange at the Centre National de la Danse in Patin, France. Its practice and performance is centered around embodying the cryptic overlaying of commodification and the idea of following a script in relation to romantic philosophies of “the West”. So inherently, the piece involves a great deal of violence, novelty, isolation, and repression internally as well as externally. The dancers Alejandro Daniel Mena and Katie Welko, the set, the sound, and the choreography are all meaningless and meaningful; all elements are symbiotic on a scale indeterminable to anyone.

On the basis of this work, I once wrote: “Whatever this is, it’s not fair storytelling by all means. This is not a coming of age story. The elements of Americana are a language lost many centuries ago, but the whisper of feelings is still vaguely floating around. This feels like an amalgamation of potential. It is clear. These are your Americans. Free of weight and guilt and fear that is not cosmic. They are nameless and ageless. Ineffable. They have taste and quality.”

To me, this piece is tugging at something that is alluringly chthonic. It’s hungry and cumbersome and probably best paired with a bone chilling walk in a Chicago winter.

About Kennedy Alexandria Ward

Kennedy Alexandria is a Columbia College Chicago senior with their Bachelors of Fine Arts focus in Dance History and minor in Art History. She is a Chicago native with 3 years of community based practices in dance on the South and West Sides of Chicago, centering on communal healing, natural world connection, and non-linear dance teaching as the foundation of her practices to incite consistent pleasure-informed ways of thought and habit building.

Citing the respective works of Emily Johnson’s And Then A Cunning Voice And The Night We Spent Gazing At The Stars, Kimberly Bartosik’s I hunger for you, and COCo Dance Theater’s Virago-Man Dem with the technical practices of Germain Acogny, Volmir Cordeiro, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Kennedy experiments with conversation to and from the body as a means of archive, research, facilitator, and ever-present library.

A local and international choreographer, she centers work around communal enthusiasm and storytelling, as seen in her most recent project "Long Song" which will be performed at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago in the Spring of 2021. With Hip-Hop, Africanist, and social dance influences, she incorporates the conduction of the body as a lithe, actualized, multidisciplinary measure with vitality and effort that accomplishes the mundane and aesthetic artfully.

Works such as Lacrime, Under My Roof, and Aa are featured choreographic studies also put to stage at Columbia College Chicago within their repertoire, not excluding the duet crafted with contemporary choreographer and fellow Columbia College Chicago senior, Katie Welko for the marathon des ecoles of Le Centre National de la Danse in Patin, France. With a background of various athletic team sports, Kennedy works to invigorate the process of dancing through body awareness and embodied muscularity with both active and passive presence. They can be sometimes found on Instagram under the handle @growkenalx.