Ayan Felix

Ayan Felix (NC Based) is a Gulf Coast-bred movement artist, dreamy storyteller, and cultural organizer. They perform Southern Black American cultures of excess, slowness, and dirt indoors and under dusky skies. Independently, they have birthed live performances for Barnstorm Dance Festival (Houston; 2018, 2019, 2022), Kuumba Dance Fest (Houston; 2021), and Houston Fringe Festival (2021). Their site-responsive and collaborative practice with spirit, co-conspirators, and the environment has produced screen dances shown at the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance (2022), freeskewl (NYC), and the Black Endurance Community Series at The Movement Lab ATL (2021). Their MFA thesis production How to avoid gas stations and other shit I want to do at night (2021) is also documented in a paper we, present in space: Queer Performance Cultures of Transience and Care based in Black Feminisms as the culmination ofthe MFA experience through the Duke Dance Program. Ayan has joined the dance legacies of SUCHU Dance/Jennifer Wood, Pilot Dance Project, Andrea E Woods-Valdez, and Dance Afrikana. Collaborations ongoing and past include time with SLIPPAGE performance lab, jhon r. Stronks, Brittany J. Green, and Ivy Nicole-Jonet. They also co-host queer burlesque experiences with Les Bimbos in Raleigh, NC. Most of their mornings are spent trying to recall nighttime dreams, playing in the earth, and building bandwidth for a neurodiverse world.

North Carolina-based choreographer Ayan Felix brings their latest work, the queen has died… to the festival. The work is an apparatus to achieve distinct flavors of Black queer joy. Backed by a mix of Southern classics, it is a collaborative effort between three dancers and a DJ to stay afloat and avoid the news. Felix is a 2023 Black Artists Space to Create Resident Artist.

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