Victoria Bradford Styrbicki
she/her
Victoria Bradford Styrbicki | Sponsors Artist Program 2015 | Photo courtesy of Wils Glasspegel
Victoria Bradford Styrbicki creates time-intensive, research-driven performance installations that involve acts of listening, relationship development, and advocacy. This engagement work can also lead to structured choreographies that invite improvisational variations by collaborating dancers. Most often staged in public spaces, these performances make bold visual statements through costume and the body’s relationship to architecture. Their movement vocabulary mines gestures of the everyday, sport, labor, and humor.
Her work has explored other mediums as dancing. Running as dance has taken shape within a three-hour dance piece and a four-month migrating durational performance. She explores writing as dance by creating text-drawings to prompt reperformance as well as full-length narratives that also tell the story of interactions she considers dances. Her weavings have become a choreography of the hands. These body-like forms are mesh vessels that catch some things yet let others pass through and embody hundreds of hours of tying knots through crochet, macramé and net-weaving.
These acts of “social choreography” explore the fundamental role of embodiment in things like family narrative and climate change. At its core, her work is a plea for greater empathy and civil discourse across individuals and communities.
Photo courtesy of the artist
The Project
HCL supported the development of Neighborhood Dances.
Through this project, Victoria Bradford choreographs dances in public spaces in accordance with a specific set of prompts and parameters that she has developed. These performances are meticulously documented in still- and moving images, and then catalogued and archived. Victoria invites the public to participate in this project with their contributions acting as source material.
Photo courtesy of Kevin Veselka, featuring dancers: Ione Sanders and Lisa Leszczewicz
About the Artist
Victoria Bradford Styrbicki is a choreographer who uses dance, social practice, and visual art to conduct research and archival practices through the body. This work has led to noted projects including ‘Neighborhood Dances’ and ‘Skirts,’ both focusing on partnerships with museums and galleries while rooted in the use of public space. Collaborative relationships are at the core of Victoria’s practice with the Museum of Contemporary Art, the City of Chicago, the Prairie Island Indian Community, and the Water Institute of the Gulf among the organizations and agencies that have been instrumental in the public engagement and impact of Victoria’s work.
In addition to these institutional alliances, Victoria’s projects thrive through collaboration with artists, individual citizens, and communities at large. A constant thread in Victoria’s work is a sense of place. Committed to stewardship of the land and place in which she creates, her Lab Artist Award project Relay of Voices connected her two homes—Minnesota and Louisiana. She has a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked extensively in the art community of Chicago for ten years. Victoria now lives and works in Stillwater, MN.
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