Artist Bio
Kat Fackler is a dancer + choreographer living in Omaha, and the co-director of tbd. dance collective. She has been studying movement in a variety of styles for almost 25 years while attending studios, masterclasses, and workshops across the country. Originally from Hastings, NE, she relocated to Omaha in 2010 and began working with various dance and performance groups. In 2012, she joined a contemporary dance company under the direction of Maya Taylor and performed in several productions and choreographic works throughout Omaha.
In 2014, Kat became a founding member of tbd. dance collective. The group formed organically based on a need for more choreographic and performance opportunities for movement artists in Nebraska. Since its inception, Kat has choreographed 12 original works, 22 excerpts, and co-produced 10 evening length performances for tbd. in collaboration with various artists and organizations throughout the community.
More recently, she has co-produced and created choreography for The Movement Series at KANEKO, as well as several short dance films and music videos including Waiting For Reality (2018) + One Day, One Month, One Year (2016) which premiered at KANEKO alongside live performance, and ESP (2016), a music video for The Faint. In January of 2018, she was commissioned by The Union for Contemporary Art to create a choreographic work in conversation with Chicago based artist Caroline Kent during her exhibition: Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World. In the Fall of 2017, Kat was commissioned by Omaha Performing Arts to choreograph the finale for Nebraska in Motion – a community wide celebration of movement.
Creative Prompt
Locate a space, or piece of furniture within your home that you interact with daily. Examples: coffee table, chair, kitchen countertop, a tree in your backyard, hallway, doorway, your front porch, or the floor in your living room. Through movement, explore how you can interact with that piece of furniture, or space, in a different way than you normally do. Find some music to play while you explore. This might help guide your movement, or give you a length of time to work within.
Some things to try:
- Can you stand on it (safely!), lean on it, hang on it, or crawl underneath it? Can you move freely with big movements, or are you slightly confined and therefore need to do smaller movements?
- Move your body around the space/piece of furniture, but keep your head, elbow, foot, or back connected to something within, or on it the entire time.
- Find an action, or gesture that you would normally do in that space or with the piece of furniture and expand upon it through repetition, speed, size, and direction change. Example 1: If you are in a doorway that you walk through often, try walking through it backwards or sideways moving quickly, or as slow as you possibly can. Example 2: If you are at a countertop where you normally pour coffee, repeat that motion over and over again, and see how it begins to change each time you doing it. Try doing the action bigger each time you repeat it. Pick out what you liked doing during this exercise, and string those movements together into one long phrase, or sequence. Try doing it to different music. OR just have fun exploring your space and home furniture in this new way – Feel free to move to another room and do the same thing!
Reinvent your daily space through movement.
If you have any questions, or want to share any of your explorations, please share them with me. I would love to hear from you!