Tristan Koepke (he/him) is a dancer, choreographer, and educator based in Portland, ME. His creative works, collected as Big Boy Dance, have been presented by SPACE Gallery, CANDYBOX Dance Festival, Patrick’s Cabaret, Bryant Lake Bowl, Bates College, Bates Dance Festival, The Wooden Floor, Point Dance Ensemble, The 1419 Collective, and The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. He has performed in contemporary and experimental dance works by Chris Schlichting, Vanessa Anspaugh, luciana achugar, Cally Spooner, Doug Varone, Mathew Janczewski, Kendra Portier, Heidi Henderson, Matthew Cumbie, Annie Kloppenberg, and was a member of Zenon Dance Company from 2011-2015 and 2017-2019. He holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently Assistant Professor at Bates College and Associate Director of the Young Dancers Intensive at the Bates Dance Festival.
I am a contemporary dance artist. Choreography, improvisation, dramaturgy, and performance are all integral to my creative research. My dance works, including short choreographies, dance film experiments, and large-scale theatrical performance works, are dynamic negotiations of creative instinct, desire, somatic historicity, intuition, and intervention.
I knit lacy patterns of ritual that unfold and rupture into chaotic, effervescent celebrations of catharsis and release. I am interested in cycles of contemplation, exertion, endurance, and destruction: sinewy threads of movement enacted and exacted until they fall apart. My dances contain an air of vivacious mystery, engaging spatial design, and subtle embodiments of context and story while exploring non-narrative constructions and theatrical arcs that embolden poetic sensibility and ephemeral movement architecture.
My current research explores speculative masculinities, contemporary gay phenomena, thirst trap fabulation, athletic training techniques, tenderness, relationship anarchy, and gentle camp. Tracing artistic lineage lived and inherited, I weave wandering strands of silver memory that dissolve into emergent movement tapestries. Ultimately, these poetic explorations culminate in new dance works that are viscerally compelling, athletic, complex, and spatially-driven, and encourage audiences to engage their own curiosity and ability to interpret meaning from movement, sound, and design.