Amy Campion

Amy “Catfox” Campion, artistic director Antics Performance. Speaking the language of Hip Hop, Campion crosses artistic and social boundaries to unite diverse audiences, daring concepts and dynamic performances.  Using street dance as a powerful voice, she leverages the expressive capacity of Hip Hop in her work by weaving stories and ideas with breaking, krumping, popping, Capoiera, mc’ing, dj’ing, poetry, film, beatboxing, and theater.  Frequently collaborating with artists from these varied genres, Campion manipulates the traditions of street dance to create moving visual metaphors that are a true urban hybrid of street dance styles.

 Campion’s work has been presented at the San Francisco Hip Hop Dance Fest, the J.U.i.C.E. Hip Hop Dance Festival, the B-Girl Be Festival in Minneapolis, the Ford Theatres in Hollywood, the REDCAT, the Music Center in Los Angeles, and the Esalen International Arts Festival, the Levitt Pavilion, the Skirball, the Los Angeles Theater Center, and the Bootleg Theater Dance Festival as well as on Ovation TV, Strife TV, PBS, KCET, and LA36.

 In 2011, Campion directed and produced Pursuit, a short dance film created for Dances Made To Order that was featured at the Dance on Camera Festival at the Lincoln Center in New York, the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, and at the Dance for Camera Festival at the Phoenix Center for the Arts.  In 2012, Campion was awarded a fellowship at the Sacatar Institute in Bahia Brazil where she produced and directed a dance film called Street Dance Orixás that will premiere at VIVADANÇA 2014 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.

 Campion has been b-girling (breakdancing) and training Capoeira for 14 years and also studies hip hop, house dance, locking, popping, and salsa.  She received an MFA in Choreography from UCLA in 2006 and since then she has taught dance and arts activism at Loyola Marymount University, Cal State Northridge, El Camino College, Cerritos College, the Boys and Girls Club, the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, and many others.  She has received awards from the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Durfee Foundation, and the Flourish Foundation, and participated in the Emerging Leaders Institute at APAP, in the LA Dance Advance initiative, and in Pentacle’s Help Desk.

 Currently, Campion is working on the creation of Sneaker Suites: collection of pieces that delve into the iconic importance of sneakers in Hip Hop culture and examine their spiritual necessity (sole/soul) as the trade tool of street dancers.  Sneaker Suites will premiere in the Spring of 2015.

 “Campion is an effective and thoughtful storyteller.” -Steven Woodruff, DancePlug.com

 Company website: www.anticsperformance.com

Dance History Project Articles

No articles at this time.

Categorized as: ARTIST, Artistic Director, Choreographer, Dancer, Teacher/Educator