Kyla Ernst-Alper is a dancer, performer, choreographer, editor, and cross-media producer. Her creative work is driven by the human experience expressed through movement, and informed by her experience in the disparate worlds of dance, television/film production, new media & social media, and NYC nightlife. She is interested in creating work that engages the audience, asks them to contribute to the performance, and then reflects their contribution back to them.

 

Kyla began her dance career at the age of 16 dancing for Eliot Feld and since then has added martial arts, aerial, and contortion to her arsenal of physical skills. She has performed in England, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Mexico, and South Korea, and currently performs with several different companies while also performing her own work.

 

Kyla began her production career on independent film sets and marketing videos and currently works as a freelance producer and editor of television, internet, and commercial programming. She is currently producing a dance/video/internet project called "Under One: A Collection of Dances" highlighting professional dancers in a series of 1-minute or less dance videos, and is co-producing #TweetDance, a short-form dance improvisation series based on turning tweets into dances, with her collaborator Maxx Passion.

 

kylaernstalper.com

underonedances.com

 

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Maxx Passion -  My early training in Classical ballet impressed upon me the importance of technique and specificity, but also provided an important point of departure for my further investigations into the dance world. I see technique is an aesthetic and practical practice that once understood begs to be shaped and changed and altered to create movement that expresses what lies within the dancer.

 

As a dancer, I move to the fullest extent that space, time and music allow. The most basic terminology for dancers are verbs, to bend, to stretch, to rise and the list goes on. There are no stagnant moments. Even at rest, or during a pause, I am never completely still, there is breath and an active sense of where I am and who and what is around me. 

 

I love to bridge the gap between what is pedestrian and what is considered “dance”. What does it mean to stand still on stage, or to use gesture interspersed with large movement phrases? Is a dancer who speaks on stage an actor, or a dancer who speaks? What happens when dance is put into an unlikely performance venue? These questions motivate me to break conventional ideas of what an audience expects of a dancer, and what a dancer expects to do while in front of an audience.