Phyllis Akinyi
Phyllis Akinyi (she/her) is a Danish-Kenyan dancer, choreographer, performance artist, and dance researcher. Akinyi started studying flamenco in 2004 in her native Copenhagen, before moving to Madrid to further her studies at the prestigious flamenco academy Amor de Dios in 2007. She has since become a sought after flamenco performer, speaker and teacher, and divides her time between Northern Europe and Spain.
Akinyi has taught at Amor de Dios, Cullberg Balletten (SE), the BA in Dance and Choreography at UniArts Stockholm, Dansehallerne (DK), Conde Duque (Madrid), and more, focusing her teachings on investigation, exploration and grounding through her Flamenco Lab Sessions.
She works with traditional and experimental flamenco and has spent the last five years developing artistic works that highlight African and Diasporan expressions within flamenco. Her general artistic practice investigates the ‘betwixt and between’, or more specifically; the entanglements of movement, culture, and identity, from an anthropological lens of bodies caught in cultural ‘in-betweens’. Akinyi is the founder and artistic director of Compañía Afromenco, under which she developed the works ’Sonar Siguiriya’ (2017), ‘FlamencÁfrica, (2018) ‘Nyar Kakan - I Contain Multitudes’ (2019) and ‘GASP’ (2020) together with percussionist Stephan Jarl (SE).
Her latest piece G.R.I.E.F. is a durational exploration of emotional release and spiritual trance through flamenco rhythms, which premiered at Yellow Fish Festival in New York in May 2021. G.R.I.E.F. will continue to explore unusual places internally and externally in Europe and the US in 2023/24. Currently Akinyi is choreographing ‘Havets Skum’ for KORA in collaboration with Dansehallerne (spring 2022), as well as AL.I.CE; a solo piece commissioned by choreographer and curator Julienne Doko for the performance installation JOURNEYS. She will also be presenting two durational performance works this summer, one in collaboration with multi-disciplinary artists Vala T. Foltyn and Sall Lam Toro in Nuremberg, Germany, and the other a solo work commissioned by Metropolis - Copenhagen International Theatre.
She has been featured on several panels, amongst others at the 2021 Flamenco Festival Albuquerque History and Research Symposium, and will travel to Chicago in October 2022 to talk at the Women in Dance Leadership Conference, as well as featured in several articles, the latest being published in Dance Magazine (USA) in May 2022, written by legendary dance theorist Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild.