Devotion is the home of my artistic practice. I am devoted to dance. I am devoted to my children. I am devoted to this planet. I use this devotion as fuel to explode and explore myths, practices, and ideas about western dance practice, motherhood, gender, race, and the natural world.
My work begins with my body; the systems that have created me as a person, and trained me as a dancer. In my work I analyze western dance training as repetition, ritual, and initiation into hetero-normative, anglo-centric expectations of the body. In my practice I disrupt myths about the relationship between humans and the natural world, and I explode motherhood as ritualized gender performance.
Duration, costume, and humor, are favorite tools. My work unfolds slowly, allowing viewers opportunities for multiple interpretations of a given image. I want audiences to question their own expectations as they watch my work. At the same time, I am in awe of danced virtuosity, and training as a form of worship. I bring the question of skill into the experience of the work itself.
Even as I dismantle and deconstruct, I return to devotion and the love that devotion requires. I want audiences to leave an experience of my work with a deeper love for dance, for the body, and for the natural world. Rather than offering them a prescription for how to behave, I want them to leave energized and thoughtful, ready to act in their own lives in a way that is loving and ethical.
Meghan Frederick is a dance artist and scholar based in Philadelphia, PA. Meghan’s work explores choreographies of devotion and has recently been presented by Small Plates Choreography Festival (NY), Philadelphia Fringe Festival (PA), See Chicago Dance (IL), Space Gallery (ME), Movement Research, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, Arts on Site, Center for Performance Research, and STUFFED Dinner and Dance (all NYC). Meghan frequently collaborates on duet dances with Kate Seethaler through which Meghan and Kate explore choreographies of devotion in the context of motherhood as embodied labor. Meghan and Kate’s collaborative work has been presented by The Cannonball Festival (PA), Loculus Studio (MA), The Engine (ME), VOX POPULI (PA), Leah Stein Studio (PA). Meghan was a member of the Brian Brooks Moving Company from 2008-2014 and has performed with Silvana Cardell, Terry Hempfling, Vanessa Anspaugh, Liz Lerman, Megan Bridge, and many others. Meghan teaches at Temple, Rowan, and Drexel Universities and completed her MFA at Temple University as a University Fellow and the recipient of the Katherine Dunham Award for Excellence in Creative Research. Meghan’s scholarship on labor in the dances of Sarah Michelson was shared at City College of New York in 2020, and her book ‘You Are My Lover Now’ and accompanying research into motherhood as a choreography of the erotic was presented at The University of Belfast in 2023. Her writing about Faye Driscoll’s ‘Weathering’ and the photography of A.L Steiner and Galdi Vinko as anti-colonial art works was shared through the Queer Dance HUB at the 2024 Dance Studies Association Conference in Buenos Aires and Meghan’s travel to Buenos Aires was supported by the Adjunct Faculty Opportunity Fund at Stockton University. Meghan’s chapter analyzing her dance film VENUS will be published in an anthology by Routledge in 2025. Meghan has two daughters who also love to dance.