Bio

Artist bio

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 centers 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. 

This work entails both solo performances and collaborations, the latest ones being: G.R.I.E.F., a durational exploration of emotional release and spiritual trance through flamenco rhythms, which premiered at Yellow Fish Festival (New York, May 2021); Queer_Magick_Intervention, a durational performance in Nuremberg, Germany where she alongside Vala T. Foltyn, Wojtek Blecharz and Sall Lam Toro inhabited Hitler’s unfinished Colosseum, honoring the forgotten queer voices in the resistance fight, commissioned by the festival Musik Installationen Nürnberg (July 2022); Anadyomene, a durational performance during full moon in Aquarius, departing from The Little Mermaid while channeling Yemaya and ending with a performance by Brorsons Kirke, a church that housed rejected Iraqi asylum seekers until the police brutally evicted them on that same night in 2009. The perfomance was commissioned by Metropolis Copenhagen International Theater (Copenhagen, August 2022); S/PACE, a 40 minute explorational flamenco solo in which she creates a realm of juxtapositions; silence and noice, individuality and community, past and future, anxiety and peace using a loop station and her flamenco shoes. This piece premiered during Venice Biennale at the opening of Oscar Murillo’s exhibition in collaboration with Savvy Contemporary (September 2022); Flamencura, an ongoing flamenco exploration in shape of an installation-performance, in which she examines clichéd contradictions, freedom in the in-between, ‘invisiblized’ African flamenco roots, folkloric futurism, communities and solitude, and an eternal struggle to claim space and oneself. Flamencura premiered at Close Encounters - Embodied Journeys at Den Frie Contemporary Art Space in Copenhagen (June 2023); and I Come As a Woman, Dark and Open, a site specific flamenco performance, honoring marginalized women in different liberation fights, creating a live soundscape, looping a poem by Audré Lorde alongside flamenco lyrics, and making digital sounds through movement be the help of movement sensors. This piece was commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, August 2023) for their festival Bwa Kayiman: Congressing at the Heart of Liberation.

Akinyi is founder and artistic director of Diasporic Dimensions, an interdisciplinary performance company located in Copenhagen, and is currently developing the big scale performance piece Correlations - Meetings in the Multiverse, set to premiere in September 2024 at Dansehallerne in Copenhagen, followed by a European tour. Another new piece is CompasCompositionConversation with is a semi-improvised performance with two other flamenco artists, Jossette Reilly (dance) and Afra Rubino (guitar), touring Sweden in Autumn 2023. And Hang up your Castanets, Carmen, a full length performance by Swaantje Gieskes premiering in Hamburg, Germany, in November 2023. Akinyi is also currently touring schools in Denmark with her ongoing piece Ocean Foam, which is a 90 minute interactive performance for middle school children that deals with loss, grief, and joy, as well as being a meeting point for different cultures in which Senegalese Sabar dance, Flamenco, and Western Contemporary dance co-exist and where polyrhythms, meditation and Yemaya are introduced to the children.

When she isn’t developing new work or touring, she is often to be found teaching flamenco workshops throughout Europe, working with larger and smaller institutions in sharing her experimental and Africanist approach to flamenco through Lab sessions, introducing dancers of all genres to the art form.