Artist Statement
I am a genderqueer Choreographer, Writer, and Educator. The performances I make center on Gender and sexual body politics by layering bombastic and seemingly disparate movement forms 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.
ARTISTS
Flannery Houston
Brendan Drake (all pronouns) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, writer, and, currently, the Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at The Corcoran School of Arts and Design at George Washington University. Their work uses diverse movement forms, text, and sound manipulation to interrogate notions of vanity, rage, humiliation, and pleasure, as well as gender and sexual power dynamics. Critics have described their work as “a glorious exploration of the body at its extremes” (Brooklyn Rail) and “hilarious and sobering: a way to say the unutterable (Culturebot).” Brendan was a 2017-2018 Fresh Tracks Artist at New York Live Arts and, in fall 2025, became the inaugural recipient of the DC Dance Network Choreographers Commission. Additionally, they have been awarded grants and residencies through the Brooklyn Arts Fund, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the CUNY Dance Initiative, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, the Monira Foundation, The Tank, and Chez Bushwick. Brendan's recent work has been presented in New York at Kestrels, Danspace Project (Draftwork), The Exponential Festival, Movement Research, The Brick, La MaMa, PAGEANT, Joe's Pub, The Wild Project, and AUNTS, and at JrHigh (Los Angeles, CA), Fowler Museum (Los Angeles, CA), and The Dance Complex (Boston, MA). Their newest evening length performance work Ceremonials, which abstracts Trans and homoerotic subtexts within Catholic iconography will premiere at Dance Place DC in July 2026. In addition to their work on 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). Additionally, Brendan has enjoyed guest artist and teaching engagements 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. They are also a Certified Pliates Mat and Apparatus instructor through the Kane School for Core Integration.