Christy Funsch

Christy Funsch and I first crossed paths more than 15 years ago, when we were both based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was an established artist in the independent dance scenes in New York and San Francisco, and I was trying to become a better journalist by attempting to wrap my classical-ballet brain around postmodern dance. I found her work compelling in part because I sensed harmony within the abstraction, and in part because she’s such a kind person that she made me feel welcome in what seemed like a forbidding region of the dance world.

Where her muse leads, Christy follows, and that creative integrity is inspiring. Resolutely un-precious, she is a devotee of improvisation and of Susan Rethorst’s Wrecking, and she delights in the dismantling of her own assumptions. Her choreography is steeped in intellect, intuition, and distilled movement, and she rarely does the same thing twice. Sometimes it is anchored in history, like 2018’s Mother, Sister, Daughter, Marvel. At times it is cerebral and inchoate, as with 2025’s SetList. Other times, as in her performances with frequent collaborator Nol Simonse, it is suffused with vulnerability. Along with the original work she presents via Funsch Dance Experience, Christy’s résumé includes a Dance Magazine “25 to Watch” in 2014, a 2019 Fulbright Scholarship, and numerous festivals and residencies. She teaches internationally and is on the faculty of the Laban Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies.

In the past few years, Christy relocated from San Francisco to Queens, and then back to upstate New York to be closer to her parents. Relocation necessarily changed her dance and performance practice, but it also revealed more clearly the essence of her art.

Claudia Bauer: I looked up the DanceTabs article I wrote about the Wrecking you did in San Francisco, and it was in 2015—forever ago. That was a pivotal experience for me—it gave me so much insight into dance as more than something with a prescribed form, but as something that we have every right to claim ownership of. That point of view is at the core of your art. So fast-forward 11 years—where are you at in your art practice today?

Christy Funsch: I think that friends and colleagues can be a wonderful way to sort of refract what those interests have been. I was just talking with Julie Mayo yesterday; I’ve known her, I guess, 30 years now, and our work has always been in conversation with each other. And I was thinking about the people that I’ve worked with for a long time, and what that makes possible. Having those people, there’s these signposts of history. These very long and very intimate relationships have allowed me a lot of experimentation and to take risks, and to ask questions about what’s next and what could be possible. I always felt this way when I was in the Bay Area. I could locate what I was interested in based on what Hope [Mohr] was up to, and what Aura [Fischbeck] was up to, and Keith Hennessy and Nol Simonse.

I love and adore Stephen Pelton [Christy danced in his company for 10 years], and I feel like his work is very much about a deepening of a thing that he knows very well. For me, it was never about that. For me, it was always about what’s a different venue, what’s a different format, how to dislodge myself from what I think I know, experimenting with structures, experimenting with trying to lay bare a process, make it transparent.

And in relocating [to upstate New York], there’s such a freeing permission to put whatever you want out there, right? Because you’re not beholden to any kind of history, nor expectation from people that, hey, you’re the person that does this. You should be doing this. I think it’s an ongoing question for me. Does dance exist without an audience? Why does this choreographic interest need to be performed? What’s the best way for it to reside in movement? And how to keep performer agency at the center of it throughout the whole process.

CB: “Dislodge myself from what I think I know”—that phrase captures one of the things that I admire most about you, which is being centered on what interests you, in a world where so many artists want to find the gimmick, or find the thing they do really well already and replicate it. That paradigm has value, but you have privileged the freedom of your own agency. You’ve also said that “I define home as my body and my movement signature.” Tell me about that.

CF: Well, it’s been the way that I figured out who I was and affirmed that I was a living being. When I was a child, I was left alone a lot to play with the vacuum cleaner or the furniture, and I was super physical as a child. The door is open, go outside and play, don’t come back until I call you, six hours later after running around through the woods. Some kind of physical movement manifestation was a way that I came to meaning. And, certainly developmentally, a lot of self-soothing along with it.

That’s extremely comforting when you’re moving around a lot and there isn’t stability with work or housing, financial security, no relationship security over those years [of my career]. And some things were really breaking down, like my parents’ health. Things that seemed very stable were no longer there. I was very conscious of the fact that I was going to lose funding from San Francisco because I wasn’t really there anymore [after moving back to New York]. I didn’t really know what was in the future. I didn’t necessarily know what I was moving towards. [I felt] the need for reaffirming, okay, I’m still moving. I’m still able to move. The practice-based experience was something, and is something, that continues to hold the most meaning for me.

I try to talk in words that make sense, and I try to write in such a way that evokes meaning. But those things aren’t my deepest or most satisfying modes of finding meaning. Movement is, and the way that consciousness rides in the moving moment. I think it’s why I love running so much. [She recently ran a half-marathon.] In San Francisco I used to go out and walk to find ideas, or just process. And I find that with running—I never run with any kind of music. It’s just, like, this unspooling of consciousness. I can’t think of anything more satisfying than letting the letting human consciousness unspool itself in that way.

CB: You told me that your primary outlet is solo moving time without an agenda. What does that mean?

CF: Carving out the time and making a commitment to not making anything, not moving with a choreographic mind, not moving with an eye on design. Not even moving with much intention, aside from just doing it. As John Cage used to say, life is great if you can just get your desire out of the way. So to do it and trust that it is its own reward. I’m starting to create a little bit more in a formal studio space.

CB: You use the word trust. It takes a lot of trust to not bring an agenda into the studio. Do you typically start with an idea, and then look for a venue to present something? Or do you typically have a contract to perform something, and then work backwards to creation?

CF: I was just talking to Julie about this. I think that I still have burnout from the career I had in the Bay Area, which was just making work, performing it, then starting writing again the next day. I would always get the maximum amount of time in the theater, and I’d start a new piece during tech. It didn’t feel like I was overdoing it at the time, but boy, now it does. So, I just feel a lot less covetous about making the thing and performing the thing.

However, it’s really a mixture. I felt very strongly about producing with Julie Mayo last year at Kestrels in Brooklyn, and I did have some rehearsal. In the fall I applied to be a part of this production that happened out on a farm, and when I got it, I thought, okay, great, I’ll make something. I didn’t necessarily stress about it at all. It was site specific, and I chose a site, and I think probably within 10 hours I had something that I felt pretty grounded in. So yeah, I do think that it’s trust. I think that your body knows what’s going on and what’s present for you, and when you’re in that moving moment, it’s like a cataloging of what’s relevant. So if you have that practice ongoing, whether or not you want to make something or show something, at the very least it will be an accurate marker for what your real interests are and what’s relevant for you.

CB: How has your relationship with ambition changed?

CF: So much of it is context. Before, I was very hungry to be in the conversation with other dancemakers that I admired. I felt like I wanted to stay current and stay relational. And you get a certain amount of momentum. I was on the Grants for the Arts roster, so I had a certain amount of funding support that I am deeply grateful for. And then, you know, the curveballs of life happened and brought beautiful things my way, and a lot of difficulty too, and trying to set up a new life and find some peace have completely taken over as priorities. I think the prior priorities become much more fundamental, and I don’t know where ambition lives in it. I am interested in meeting people. And when I do meet people, I’m kind of doing the same thing—I’m like, we should do this, or I should go there, we should try to do this, or I’d like to participate in that. It’s just so different. Some of it is caretaking for my parents and how that’s really changed my priorities.

CB: We’ve spoken before about the financial challenges of being an independent artist, and you said, “Conditions are never ideal, but amid this truth, what is possible?” That makes me wonder what themes you are currently exploring, given what is possible for you right now.

CF: The body and unlikely places. Duration, bodies, landscape, cinematic contexts for the work. I don’t mean like making a movie—I mean, I find myself in this very different region, seeing large-scale landscapes and imagining bodies in the landscape. So, completely different containers for moving experiences. And simplicity—what is it? Maybe the things are simple, but the context or the environments are not.

The piece I made out at the [farm] site was up against the back of this barn, and I only gave myself, maybe, three feet away from the barn. And the challenges then became, okay, well, what’s possible in this constrained space? So it’s playing with formats and containers.

CB: You’re framing things as “Given the actual conditions, what is possible?” versus “I don’t have XYZ that I want or need or think I should have, so nothing is possible.” Art making is an internal state of being that is ultimately about our relationship to the immediate world, and is always available to us.

CF: Yeah, 100 percent. I’m very grateful to Wayne Hazzard and Dancers’ Group for bringing that into the foreground for me as a young dancemaker, very early on, when we would talk about fiscal sponsorship. He was like, you know, there are so many independent choreographers. You’re fracturing the tiny bit of resources—together, you could do more, right? I just appreciated the very frank talk about the paradigm. Like, “Oh, I didn’t get the money I wanted.” I just don’t think that’s a sustainable way to live your whole life—for a little bit of time, maybe, but I’m just not interested in that anymore.

CB: If we’re willing to detach from conventional ambitions and say, “Success is me creating things, full stop,” life still may not be easy, and our work may not be on many other people’s radar, yet it could be incredibly fulfilling. Is that something you’ve made peace with?

CF: Yeah, I was just thinking of the word peace. It’s peaceful, and it’s from a place of, okay, I did that. I know what it’s like being the other way, being in production growth and “I did a show at this theater, so now I’m going to try and grow my audience,” like the augmentation of the thing is somehow success. That, for me, given the nature of the work, was never an obtainable metric. So if you don’t find these other metrics, I don’t think you’ll find peace.

CB: What do you see as the major challenges for artists right now?

CF: I live in what some people might call the slower-paced environment of the Catskills. And I still see artists working three or four jobs, working side hustles, schlepping down in New York City to teach their workshops or doing Zoom rehearsals. The instability of income and the hustling for audience are still really big challenges here. Even though there may be this slower pace to life here, it’s not cheap to live here. You can’t escape what’s broken about the United States economy, I don’t care where you live. And when you’re an artist, of course, you’re in this ridiculous other economy that’s already fraught.

CB: Dance is such a small, unsupported world; we need each other more than we need to compete with each other.

CF: Absolutely. When I moved to San Francisco in the late ’90s, that was what I loved about it. I felt like, I’m not exactly a Contraband kind of person, but I got you. I’ll go to the show, and I’m going to be amazed and super supportive of it. And that’s being mature, right? That’s being an advocate, being an ally. I’m here, and I’m gonna witness it with my full heart.

One aspect of getting older and having history is that I’m at this age now where there are some younger dance people in my life, maybe they’ve worked with me, or they know me in some way, and how beautiful it is when they reach out. Sometimes it’s asking for advice, sometimes it’s to say thank you, or “You really mean something to me.” I’ve never had children. It makes me feel proud, like, thank you for picking up the phone and telling me that. Like, humanity is going to be okay, right? It’s surprised me, because sometimes it comes out of nowhere, and it’s just been so deeply meaningful for me. I’m really grateful for that.

CB: As an artist who has such a private practice, does that ripple effect surprise you?

CF: It does, yeah. I think it’s one of those moments when it’s like, okay, well, that’s success.