Darcy Lyons

Darcy Lyons starting dancing at the age of seven and has not stopped. She was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received a B.F.A in dance from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2010 and has since been living, working, performing, and creating dance work in Philadelphia. Darcy has choreographed many dance works for the stage, dance films, and dance installations. She has produced and shown work in the following shows: ASKEW June 2017, Bricolage March 2017, Patchworks May 2016, WALLS: A multimedia dance installation Fringe Festival 2015,  and MAEI MAEI AEIM January 2013. She has shown her work in several performance series in Philadelphia and New York, including Performance Garage Open House, Group Motion’s Spiel Uhr series, SHARE at The Iron Factory, and WAX Works in Brooklyn. She has been a guest artist with Group Motion Dance Company, and has been a consistent participant of the Group Motion Monday Night Improv Lab since 2010. From 2010-2014, she was a company member of Sutie Madison’s Band of Artists. She has also worked with choreographers Lora Allen and Lacy James. She is a certified and practicing Pilates and GYROTONIC® instructor in the Philadelphia area.

Artist Statement:

I value honesty. I create work from a place that is real to me and I won’t offer any candy coating. I am interested in creating work that is physical, emotional, and thought provoking. Some of my work tells a clear story, and a lot of my work is abstract. I take good care of the work that I make and the collaborating dancers and artists. In a world that is full of hate and meanness, I strive to live and make work with compassion for myself and others. Humor is a necessity. While it doesn’t consistently show up in obvious ways in my work, the rehearsal process always contains laughter. It’s important to have fun and work hard. I make room for both to happen in my rehearsals. I practice kindness. I value rest and exertion. I’m not afraid to be strange or bold. I view making art as a constant chance to experience, communicate, make mistakes, fail, succeed and grow. I am often driven by pain, joy, recklessness, and calmness. I value simplicity and complexity; I want to see a dancer walk and I want to see a dancer use every muscle in their body. I take artistic risks for better or worse. I am devoted to my work and to my physical and mental health. There is room for silence and noise, and there is always room for collaboration. I persevere despite all odds. 

I am a choreographer, improviser, and performer who is persistently looking to expand my creative practice. My work usually begins with a concept and sometimes with music or a prop and then the movement and additional collaborative content (if applicable) are created. I value concept and physicality equally. I value both simplicity and complexity in my practice, humor and grief, the benign and the bizarre. I do not have a standard way of creating. I create based on what the piece demands; sometimes the piece demands just movement and music, but more often I am interested in meshing movement and music with artistic forms such as spoken or recorded text, props, sets, visual art, film and still projection, or any number of these in combination with each other. In creating, I ask myself, “how can the concept(s) be expressed richly and fully and what artistic practices will it take for this to happen?” When using elements besides the dancing body and mind, I ask myself how can one element or another be part of the greater whole, so that each artistic element of a piece has its own presence and states a message that is not the same, but adds a layer to what the other elements provide the piece.

I choreograph work for the stage, performance installations, and dance films. I revel in crossing those fabricated lines that often restrict dance making. I enjoy experimenting and taking risks. My work pushes the edges of discomfort, crawls into the risky places that make our hairs stand on end, make our hearts softly open to the world, or pull us into one of the many places in between.

Contact Info

darcy@lyonsandtigers.org