Phyllis Akinyi (she/her) is a Danish-Kenyan dancer, choreographer, performance artist, and dance researcher based between Madrid and Copenhagen. She works within the realm of flamenco and has spent many years researching and highlighting its African and diasporic expressions. Her artistic practice centres a continuous investigation of the ‘betwixt and between’ – researching entanglements of movement, culture, and identity, from an anthropological lens of bodies caught in cultural ‘in-betweens’.
Akinyi plays with stretching the (imagined) limitations of flamenco, both in time, space, sound and movement, often taking flamenco on a journey away from the traditional stage and into a site-specific and/or durational performance frame - a frame she calls Spatial Listening, where flamenco meets performance art, Africanist Spirituality, and sonic movement. In her recent work she examines clichéd contradictions, freedom in the in-between, ‘invisiblised’ African flamenco roots, folkloric futurism, communities and solitude, and an eternal struggle to claim space and oneself.
