Karen Christopher

Karen Christopher is a collaborative performance maker, performer and teacher. Her company, Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, is engaged in creating a series of duet performances, each jointly made, directed and performed by Karen and another artist. She was a member of Chicago-based Goat Island performance group for 20 years until the group disbanded in 2009. She now lives in the UK, working to refine a practice which continues in a collaborative mode. Her focus is on artistic negotiation in the making process and finding non-traditional structures for working and composing live performance works. She is listening for the unnoticed, the almost invisible, and the very quiet. She is paying attention as a practice of social cooperation.

Karen has 30 years experience leading performance composition workshops at numerous art centres and universities in the US, UK, and Europe, including extended performance devising workshops at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow); the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; in the Context Choreography program at the Inter-University Center for Dance (HZT) Berlin; de Theaterschool, Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (AHK); Dartington College of Art; University of Aberystwyth; Pomona College (USA); Plymouth University; University of Sussex; Kampnagel (Hamburg); Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance; and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). From 2010 to 2013 Karen taught on the MA in Advanced Theatre Practice course at Central School of Speech & Drama (now Royal Central School of Speech & Drama).

Her essays on performance and related topics have appeared in ‘TDR’, ‘Frakcija’, ‘Theatre, Dance, and Performance Training’, ‘Green Letters’, and in Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island (Routledge); DIY and DIY too (University of Chichester), Imagined Theatres: Writing for a theoretical stage (Routledge); The Creative Critic: Writing as/about practice (Routledge) and The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy (Routledge). Forthcoming, co-edited with Mary Paterson, Entanglements of Two: A Series of Duets is a book of essays extending ideas from Haranczak/Navarre’s performance duets focused on the form and practice of working in pairs.

Karen is an Honorary Fellow of Falmouth University and Artist Research Fellow in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. In the recent past she was Visiting Artist at University of Roehampton; Associate Research Fellow at the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London; and a member of Chisenhale Dance Space.