The body holds a knowledge all its own. It is in intimate relationship with all that surrounds it as it ingests, breaths, spills, in and out of the land and the water. My body is an extension of the earth, and therefore the earth is always a research partner. Through performance-influenced projects, texts, teaching, and experimentation, I use embodiment to connect with this living planet.
Tyler is fiscally sponsored through New York Live Arts. Support her work with a tax deductible donation.
Tyler Rai is a dance artist, writer, ritualist, and producer who works across live performance, narrative essays, and experimental sound works. Her works investigate biological and cultural inheritance, spaces of ruin, and ecological change. Through performance and movement improvisation, her research questions how we embody kinship with the more-than-human-world. Her approach to performance and research is shaped by the work of multiple teachers including Anna Halprin, K.J. Holmes, Mina Nishimura, Emily Johnson and Suprapto Suryodarmo, among others.
Rai’s performance work has been presented at Governors Island, ARC Pasadena, Judson Church, SPACE Gallery, and The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought. She has received support from the American Geophysical Union, Northampton Arts Council, South Hadley Cultural Council, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She has been an artist-in-residence at Bennington College, UMASS Amherst, Earthdance, The Sable Project, and Works on Water on Governors Island. Lectures about her work in the arts and sciences have been given to students at The Governor’s Institute of the Arts, UMASS Amherst, and the Land Arts of the American West program at University of New Mexico.
Her writing has been published by Arts, Letters, & Numbers, Contact Quarterly, John Hopkins Center for Humanities and Social Medicine magazine, Culturebot, MA Bibliotheque, and LOAM .
She is a co-founder of the curatorial collective, ERRATICS, with Nina Elder and Hannah Perrine Mode, and instigator of transdisciplinary collective, Hungry Mothers.
Rai is passionate about supporting other artists through her work as an independent producer and is a certified Tamalpa Life/Art practitioner. She is based on the traditional lands of the Nipmuc, Pocumtuc, and Agawan nations, currently known as western Massachusetts.