CHARIS TAPLIN (UK)

Charis Taplin is a dance theatre maker and performer from the UK.

She studied Contemporary dance at Art Factory International, Bologna. She then received a degree in literature from the University of Cambridge, specialising in the relationship between poetry and performance score. During her studies, she cofounded ‘Wringing Metamorphosis’, an interdisciplinary company with a focus on devising through ‘ancestral dreamscape’, often accompanied by live Arabic and Sephardic music. Here she choreographed and performed in venues throughout the UK, including an original work, ‘OMPHALOS’, at Theatre Peckham. In 2022 the company collaborated with and performed alongside poet Bhanu Kapil in an interpretation of the text Humanimal, as part of ‘Queer Earth and Liquid Matters’, in association with the Serpentine Gallery.

Since graduating she has studied extensively in Butoh, with teachers including Yumiko Yoshioka, Uiko Wantanabe and Yuko Kaseki. In 2023 she made her professional Butoh performance debut at Amsterdam Butoh Festival with Ix-Butoh Ritual Dance and Theatre, under the direction of Coco Villarreal. She has gone on to perform both solo and ensemble pieces with the company in Spain and Germany, and  performs regularly in London with London Butoh Dance Company. She is currently a student of the New Butoh School in Ruvo, Italy, under the direction of dancer and choreographer and Tai Chi and Qigong master Sayoko Onishi.

Her work and training also incorporate mime, clown, Noguchi Taiso, contact improvisation, voicework and, in particular, puppetry, with a focus on object manipulation. She also writes and directs for the stage and has performed and devised with interdisciplinary collaborators including fashion designers, video artists and sound artists.

Having begun dancing at a young age in an intergenerational and mixed ability dance environments, led by Cecilia Macfarlane, the principle of movement and performance as a non hierarchical and communal space remains central to her practise. Her work explores the interstices between the domestic, ritualistic, mythological, between the sacred, personal and historical, returning always to the body as a threshold where the polarities we hold to outside of the stage collapse.