Courtney Henry
 

Courtney Henry

MOTHER-CREATOR-PERFORMER-WRITER-EDUCATOR-MENTOR

Ten toes down and heart soaring to the heavens. I gracefully stand on the shoulders that came before me, conjuring new worlds with every idea I embody.

Blurring the lines of classical and contemporary, my art is liberatory in the alchemical way of transforming a grain of sand into stardust.  

 
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Born—West Palm Beach, FL

Ailey/Fordham B.F.A.—New York, NY

Alonzo King LINES Ballet—San Francisco, CA

Ballet of Difference—Munich & Köln, Germany

DIY Magazine Writer & Foreign Correspondent—Berlin, Germany

University of the Arts M.F.A.— Philadelphia, PA

University of the Arts, Artist-In-Residence — Philadelphia, PA

Internationally Renowned Performer, Educator, & Mentor

 
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When I tap into my power of the divine I subconsciously give others the power to do the same.Power and permission to unravel the two-dimensional approach to the ballet form, the written word, and how a black woman should take up space in the world.

It is my responsibility to critically push forward the narrative of Afro-futurism and forever chase this obsession with growth and spiraling out. 

There is supreme pleasure of conscious refusal within the colonized technologies of time, the body, sound, and dimensions of space. A rubbing up against the limitations previously set and turning them inside out. Flipping the script.  

If not now, when? If not a collective I, then who? 


I’m no longer interested in the obsession of the “line” of the body but rather, how can I revolutionize what is inside the line? My quest is a non-linear indigenous approach.


the interdisciplinary code of spiral.


A spiral that queers Western definition of what performance and practice are. Spiral feels like the power in which the exterior execution of movement can initiate from. It is everlasting, leaving an opening where a circle closes off or a line can be considered one-directional.


Alchemizing routes back to roots.

Finding new pathways in old dances.

So that every performance ritual, every class taught, every mentoring moment is a strategic act to crumble dated systems of limitations, and oppression.  


 
May my art serve as a loosening of the floorboards that will eventually buckle and give way to profound remembrance that is intersectionally expressive and infinitely abundant.

 
 
 

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