2021-2022 Boston Dancemakers Resident

Artist Statement

Kimberleigh A. Holman is an artist working inter-disciplinarily in dance, theatre and design, and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Luminarium Dance. Her work gravitates to the exploration of human social interaction and behavior, both real and fictitious, miniscule instances or broad patterns, through comedic, dark, sensory or abstract narrative.

As a mover and maker, one of her biggest considerations is authenticity; she hopes to enable those performing her work to find the ability to be present in the performance space and hopes to inspire viewers to react in genuinely felt ways of their own. Kim excitedly creates around these principles while making interdisciplinary work for stage, landscape, and atypical spaces that excite her.

Besides nearly 80 performances with Luminarium across New England, Kim has been invited to choreograph for commercials and film, dozens of theatrical productions across Boston, and to bring her work to stages ranging from public library basements, to the Museum of Fine Arts, to the globally renowned APAP conference in NYC. Since co-founding Luminarium in 2010, Kimberleigh has shown work at venues including the Boston Center for the Arts, mobius, Mount Holyoke College, OBERON, Museum of Fine Arts, Gibney Dance (NYC), and more, including Luminarium’s high profile commission to open TEDxCambridge at the Boston Opera House.

In the last two years, Kim was awarded The Boston Foundation’s LAB Fund, NEFA’s New England Dance Fund, and The Dance Complex’s CATALYSTS residency, all for her upcoming work Contradictions + Casual Self Loathing, and granted funding through the New England Grassroots Environment Fund for her work activating a contaminated stretch of water in her hometown. Kim is frequently hired as a guest artist at Boston-area universities, speaks on her career as an arts entrepreneur, and occasionally performs as a guest with karen Krolak’s Dictionary of Negative Space project. Kim earned her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts (Performance Creation) from Goddard College.

Project Description

Common Circus is a three-ring exploration of the mundane, in which common tasks and notions will be shown through a lens of performance and spectacle. As I spent a pandemic’s worth of time in my home I thought heavily about the tasks and motions I was repeating regularly, and to satiate my need for production value I fantasized on the idea of making them high performance. I thought about the site of utmost spectacle—circus—and what it would be like to throw such rote tasks as frying an egg into the three-ring environment. I hope to encourage audience members to think about what they see and how it relates to the mundane bits of their own lives, while having a visually-stimulating immersive evening amidst live performance.