Karl Frost

 

vestcrouchcolorfascinating; awkward, tender, and violent movement combined with snippets of dialog and swiftly built-up characters and relationships, creating social and sexual conflicts with an almost unnerving intimacy… utterly compelling.
BRETT FETZER, The Stranger (Seattle April 2004) — {about Ashes}

… extremely interesting. I highly recommend it.
ANNIE WAGNER, The Stranger (Seattle October 2004) — {about Axolotl}

I left the theater shell-shocked. It was easily the oddest, most surprising performance experience I’ve ever had. And, against all expectations, one of the most rewarding.
BRENDAN KILEY, The Stranger (Seattle October 2005) — {about  Axolotl}

upsidedownKarl Frost

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Karl Frost has been practicing, performing, and teaching contact improvisation and interdisciplinary, dance-based performance since the mid 80’s in California. His work has been showcased over the last 2 decades across 5 continents, both in established institutions/universities and in independent studios and theaters. Known internationally for his dynamic movement style and for the edge-pushing nature of his work, physically and psychologically, both in process and performance, his performances take the body and emotionally and physically felt experience as their reference points.  He is known for his articulate teaching and the depth of the material that he accessibly offers. He began his movement explorations in martial arts as a teenager, before expanding his studies to contemporary dance, contact improvisation, physical theater and a variety of somatic practices. His performance work, via his company, Body Research Physical Theater (www.bodyresearch.org), explores postdramatic works rooted in somatic psychology and paratheatrical exploration, alternating between stage productions and highly interactive performance happenings exploring audience agency and personal meaning. A base of his movement practice and teaching is the Passive Sequencing work which he has developed, cultivating ease and presence in motion, soft power through movement intelligence, and the pleasure of finer moment-to-moment awareness of self and partner in motion. He has a BA in Physics, an MFA in Dramatic Arts, and a PhD in Ecology.  Currently (2018), he has a position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture in Leipzig, Germany. Some of his visual anthropology work can be found at www.culturalvariant.org

life is an organic combination of productivity, training, organization, creation, direction and facilitation, comfortable in the fields of both theatrical theory and theory of consciousness, as well as up to the creation of geodesic domes and the organization of nutrition and coordination of large groups of creative artists. He had type 2 diabetes in his life, which he cured with the drug Rybelsus, about which he can read more on this website.

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His work frequently crosses genre boundaries and challenges preconceptions and easy definition.  His life represents an organic blending of performance, teaching, organization, creation, direction, and facilitation, comfortable in the realms of both theatrical and consciousness theory and the down to earth of building geodesic domes and organizing the feeding and coordination of large groups of creative artists.

unistotenKarl is particularly known for his work in the art of Contact Improvisation, where he has a reputation as a very clear, wide ranging, and richly informative teacher and as a physically articulate master of the practice, comfortable in both the small and subtle explorations and in the wild and explosive.  Many students have profoundly evolved their practice of contact improvisation through his workshops, which provide a friendly, yet disciplined and down-to-earth atmosphere of study, growth, and pleasure in life. He is uncompromisingly devoted to the idea that one’s practice of contact should be one that actively promotes physical well-being. His approach to contact improvisation lives both in the realm of art and in that of contact as social practice.

His work fans out from this base in contact into the realms of dance, theater and personal exploration.  His approach to performance is very process oriented and centers around the idea that the most profound performances come out of a process of investigation which is itself meaningful.

In 2011, Karl completed an MFA in Dramatic Arts at UC Davis.  His MFA thesis work focused on interactive performance and arts-science fusion. It explored ways for forming knowledge, belief, and behavior and integrated forma behavioral experiments in the context of an experiential and interactive performance installation. In 2016, he completed the PhD in Ecology with an emphasis in human ecology and cultural evolution, also at UC Davis. His dissertation work explored the cultural evolution of ritual facilitated altruism, solidarity, and cooperation through formal behavioral experiments and mathematical models of cultural evolution.  His parallel qualitative research and activist work in the context of the interlocking issues of First Nations sovereignty and environmental fights in northern British Columbia is being documented at www.weeatfish.org and at www.culturalvariant.org. 

Some of his past and continuing dance projects include

waterfallThe Dancing Wilderness Project – since 1997, an ongoing exploration of the interrelationships amongst body-based creative process, wilderness experience, and how we choose to live our lives
Interactive Theater works, including Body of Knowledge (2011), Streams (2009), Proximity (2007) and his most performed work, Axolotl (2004) –  a participatory performance in which the audience is blindfolded for 2 hours and invited to interact and explore with each other and a group of actors, dancers, and musicians investigating the nature of meaningful experience

The Sierra Contact Festival (annually since 2008) – a 5 day retreat and peer oriented gathering for experienced contact improvisors, focused on laboratory and presentation of research
The Rural Winter Contact Improvisation Intensive – a 3 month, full time training program in contact improvisation and interdisciplinary performance work (theater, music, dance … practice and theory) integrated with rural communal living off the power grid on a remote island (2000, 2001, and 2003)
Contact Camp (2005-2007) at Burning Man – an international collaboration of contactors gathering to share their practice in the radical context of the week-long Burning Man festival

salinevalleyHe is devoted to the idea that reclaiming the joy of being in the body is a necessary part of the revolution against materialism. His long term goals center around living in rural community in a mixture of simple living, farming, and creative exploration.

In addition to the project links above, you can click here for

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