Matty Davis is an artist and choreographer engaged in embodied explorations of the tension between our fragility and our fortitude. His work frequently uses choreography as an instrument to activate high-stakes relationships—ranging from the interpersonal to the cosmic—around some of the most important aspects of our lives: trust, risk, love, empathy, commitment, and responsibility. Marked by full-throttle physicality and inventive movement vocabularies, his performances have been described as “balancing ecstatically on the edge of life and death” (Jesse Zaritt). Davis’s work has been presented both nationally and internationally, including upon the High Line, the Palais de Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and The Momentary, among others. He teaches at Columbia University.
While at MacDowell, Davis worked on a new performance, The Essence & The Choice, which explores fatherhood. He also worked on a “performance arranged for print” called My Summit Is Out of Reach, which uses photography, writing, and choreography to follow the performer as he searches numerous mountains in the United States for “the surface and the slope,” a concept that describes a set of conditions that allow a specific dance to occur.
Portrait by Mark Davis
