a bit about me

multidisciplinary arts, Choreography, and exploration

Choreographer, multidiciplinary artist, dancer, pedagogue, and movement and body nerd. Fascinated with how we understand art, dance, motion, and the psychology of performance and training. Focuses on self-knowledge, questioning, and exploration as a central tenet of learning.

Chris Harris has been choreographing and dancing in Denver for over three decades. She is a choreographer, artistic director, visual artist, dancer, pedagogue, and teacher with interests in math, science, data visualization, and has a fascination with how we understand art, dance, motion, and the psychology of performance. Chris holds a BFA in Dance and Choreography from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College.

Continually returning to Colorado during her training, she has been part of the Colorado dance scene for over 30 years. While working at various dance studios she was on faculty, program advisor for Modern, Jazz, Contemporary and Composition programs, and project manager/director for many teen and adult performances. She has loved the role of festival creative director, choreographed for local theaters and dance companies, been a guest lecturer at The Arts Institute of Colorado and CSU, and been adjunct faculty at and choreographed for the University of Denver and the University of Colorado.

Previously she was artist in residence for the Denver School of the Arts for 17 years, Co-Director of the Boulder Jazz Dance Workshop, and Assistant Artistic Director of Interweave Dance Theatre. In 2005, she founded and became Artistic Director/Choreographer for Louder Than Words Dancetheater & the Colorado Youth Dance Theater. Both projects performed until 2018 in Denver. After completing graduate school in 2019, Chris has been privileged to share her multi-disciplinary artworks and lectures with so many amazing students on the Front Range. She is a co-creator/founder of a brand new (Aug 2023) business called the Colorado Movement Lab. Currently located in Westminster Colorado, CML brings Chris’ love for dance, Colorado, and exploration full circle. She plans to continually ask all the complicated and wonderful questions about creativity, health, grounding in self, and performativity that have guided her love of dance as an art form for all of her life.

Artist Statement

As a dancer and choreographer I have always struggled with our limited ability to record and notate live performance. I have been fascinated with the idea that it may be possible to encode and translate a three-dimensional, temporal, energetic, and emotional experience into another media. Could it be done in such a way that it can be extracted in another time and space? Can we actually notate movement? In a world of technical advances, we still have little ability to share one of the most basic human expressions.  Is it even possible to catch all aspects of motion in time, or hold it long enough to share its information? Should it be? Or does that remove an indescribable “nowness” and dilute the meaning and power of the original? These questions, and my visual/kinestetic synesthesia, have driven me to more thoroughly examine my fascination with and response to color, pattern and texture. Is it possible to share with others the colors that appear in my vision when I watch motion?

My practice includes movement meditation, choreography, and experimentation with painting, sculpture and many forms of digital media. I am drawn to photograph in abstract form in an attempt to visually convey movement dynamics. I sculpt traces of the pathways of the body, and paint choreographic relationships in time. I look to the elements for physical inspiration and movement definition. I am inspired to create because of a desire to share the things I know and notice in the world, and to express beauty. I have an interest in finding a deeper connection to nature and my place in it. I realize there are new untold, more universal stories. I paint to translate things I see and sense. I dance to go into self, to deepen and feel my soul. I choreograph to paint with energy, to create pattern with time, to make bodies into more universal, less socially constructed objects. At its core, my art represents a love of discovery, of layered pattern and color, and of a recognition of the importance of a fully embodied truth.