Artist Statement
I am a genderqueer, interdisciplinary artist. The performances I make center queer body politics by layering bombastic, postmodern-influenced choreography with erotic imagery, text and sound. Most of my work has an element of humor because I believe laughter generates trust between performers and the audience, laying the groundwork for both provocation and pleasure. Humor allows me to build bridges between public and personal, casual and erotic, banal and profoundly psychological.
My hyper-physical approach to generating movement is regularly juxtaposed with original text, ranging from hyperbolic prose to choral chants and casual conversation. The use of dialogue in my performances is meant to heighten the performers’ presence and create a meta-acknowledgment of the performance itself. The performers onstage are often addressed by their real names and maintain their authentic voices, movements, and speaking methods. My collaborators and I develop our performance range and invite a performative identity that ranges from casual, almost pedestrian, to unabashedly dramatic. In the creative process, we devise these traits together and work to constantly draw from the performers’ personal experiences. The form, theatricality, eroticism, and opacity embedded in my creative practice point to a critical intersection of queer kinship and performance, through which I critique politics of exclusion, rigidity, and social power dynamics. Through my work and the worlds and communities I build within it, I seek to imagine more idealistic, less coercive futures.
Brendan Drake (all pronouns) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and currently, the Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at The Corcoran School of Arts and Design at George Washington University. Their work uses disparate movement forms, text, and sound manipulation to interrogate notions of vanity, rage, gender and queer power dynamics. Brendan was a 2017-2018 Fresh Tracks Artist at New York Live Arts and has been awarded grants and residencies through the Brooklyn Arts Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, CUNY Dance Initiative, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, Monira Foundation, The Tank, and Chez Bushwick. Their recent work has been presented In New York at Kestrels, Danspace Project (Draftwork), Movement Research, The Brick, La MaMa, PAGEANT, Joes Pub, The Wild Project, and AUNTS, and at JrHigh (Los Angeles, CA), Fowler Museum (Los Angeles, CA) and The Dance Complex (Boston, MA). In addition to their work for the stage, Brendan choreographed the fall 2014 “Equality = Love'' campaign for Adidas Originals/Pharrell Williams. They were the movement coordinator for editorial shoots with Vogue, Porter, V, and Elle Magazines (photographers: Liz Collins, Ryan McGinley, Collier Schorr). In May 2023, they presented their graduate research on tracking queer sociality in contemporary dance and performance at the UCLA National Queer Graduate Conference, and in June 2025, will present their research at the Dance Studies Association National Conference at GWU. Brendan has guest taught at UCLA, Columbia University, the University of Massachusetts, Muhlenberg College, DeSales University, Ball State University, Skewl, Peridance, SCDT, Loculus, and the New York Film Academy. As a dancer and performer, they have worked with Nattie + Hollis, Kayla Hamilton/Circle O, JChen Project, and Emily Barasch. Brendan holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MFA in Choreographic Inquiry from UCLA.