Alishanee Chafe-Hearmon is a dancer and artist based between Berlin and New York. She holds a BA from CUNY Hunter college with a self-designed degree in dance, theology, and psychology. Versed in classical, contemporary and modern forms including Horton, Nikolai and Graham techniques, she also trains and performs in the traditional art form of flamenco. Most recently, she performed at the Joyce Theater and Jacob’s Pillow with Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca. She has also recently premiered evening length works at Hośek Contemporary and the Pfefferberg Theater with her dance project Symbolic Movement Choir. Her work researches the relational language between musician and dancer, specifically in transposing the traditional structures of flamenco into different tools and forms. The song and dance establish a pattern, destroy it, repeat it, synchronize, desynchronize searching for the infinite spaces between harmony and disharmony. She embodies the theatricality of a “character dance” interviewing the illusory, passionate, highly feminized trope. Curious to learn where she tender, what does she wait for on the bridge, what prayers might she utter at Sunday mass? Who would she bleed for? The poetry of flamenco lyrics and Federico Garcia Lorca’s poems build the world where she lives. Alishanee seeks to bring this character to life through stylized choreography, working in constant oppositions and paradoxes, gracefulness opposing forcefulness, ethereality opposing earthliness. Objects falling out of disheveled hair, her expressive hands reach for the sky, while her feet root her into the soil, the secret she hides under her long skirt is that the dancer is the axis mundi.