HARD/FEMME DANCES
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Hard/Femme Dances was founded by Kelsey Rondeau and Hunter Sturgis in late 2018.
We are a Brooklyn-based dance theater company excited by anything outlandish, outré, and operatic in scale.
Their work draws on diverse elements of pop culture and uses found objects to collage, blend, and distill these artifacts into fantastic narratives. With a camp and queer sensibility, the company laughs at its inner demons and practices empathy with its audiences.
Coming from a wide-ranging background of concert dance, immersive theater, film, burlesque, and drag, Hard/Femme Dances makes work that honors these disciplines to explore its conceptions of self/hood which are unique to its authentic voice Acclaimed as a 'beautiful mess,' 'virtuosic,' and 'desperate for attention,' the company continues to work towards their goal of world domination, one killer lip-synch at a time.
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Hailed as "Vivid," "Incendiary," "A Beautiful Mess," and "Desperate for Attention," Hard/Femme Dances was founded by Kelsey Rondeau and Hunter Sturgis in late 2018. They are a Brooklyn-based dance theater company focused on storytelling, queer themes, and the transformative power of glitter. As a company, they are excited by anything that is outlandish, outré, and operatic in scale. Coming from a wide-ranging background of concert dance, immersive theater, burlesque, and drag, their work honors these disciplines as its framing sensibilities. Through the lens of camp, my work draws on diverse elements of pop culture and uses found objects to collage, blend, and distill these artifacts into darkly humorous, anarchic, fantastic narratives. Since the founding of the company, they have created short works for venues across New York, including Spoke the Hub, Triskelion Arts, House of Yes in Brooklyn, Gibney Dance Center, and Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. You can follow them across social media…
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Kelsey Rondeau
(Founder/Artistic Director)
Kelsey (they/them) is a dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, writer, drag performer and an International Good-Time-Gracie. They spent their childhood moving around the country, finally settling down in Redding, California. It was there at age 13 they discovered their love for theater and dance, and they haven’t stopped hamming it up since then.They went on to study Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, receiving their BFA in 2014. During their time at UT, they performed in works by Ohad Naharin, Robert Battle, Paul Taylor, Mark Morris, Merce Cunningham, as well as works by faculty members Charles O. Anderson, Holly Williams and Lyn Wiltshire. Following graduation, they moved to Berlin, Germany, to partake in the yearlong Dance Intensive at Tanzfabrik. It was during this time that they made their first dance piece, Avalanche of Beauty.
Following their year and a half long party, they packed their bags and moved to NYC in early 2016. In addition to forming Hard/Femme Dances, they have worked with Gibney Dance Center, AnA Collaborations, The Movement Playground, Sinking Ship Creations, Rock Dance Collective, BodyStories: Teresa Fellion Dance, The House of Yes and Johannes Wieland.
Hunter Sturgis
(Co-Founder)
Hunter Sturgis (he/him) is a queer dance artist, filmmaker, and Pilates teacher from south Texas based in Brooklyn. Hunter graduated with a BFA in Dance from University of Texas at Austin (2017).He has had the honor & privilege of working with choreographers such as Charles O. Anderson, Erica Gionfriddo, Kate Watson-Wallace, Gregory Dolbashian, Sidra Bell, Luciana Achugar & Manuel Vignoulle. Hunter creates to subvert and challenge oppressive power structures that have taken root systemically, historically, and thusly, corporeally. He uses the power of disruption to open up new spaces where there is deep, uncharted territory of the heart.@mercury___007