Meg Foley

Meg Foley makes performance projects in pursuit of radical self-determination, crafting body-based explorations of identity, belonging, and time from a queer perspective. Drawing on choreographic formalism but continually questioning what constitutes dance performance, her research asks how identity is occupied: an all-the-time, ever-shifting self, a sacred site, a portal, a prism. She often invites audiences to engage with concepts through their own bodily experiences, using movement, design, and choreographic thinking to create containers for bodily engagement and reflection on a somatic present, on the power and location of the body itself as participant. Since 2019, she has been working with fabric, foam, and textile materials to extend performer embodiment through interactive objects and installations, affording somatic life to objects and “feeling back” on and through the body, reflecting on one’s FORM and the body’s collective interiority, shape and architecture. She lives on traditional Lenape land, in southern Lenapehoking and what is commonly known as Philadelphia, where she co-runs The Whole Shebang, a home for experiment performance in Philly, with her partner, visual artist Carmichael Jones, and is a queerdo homeschooling mama in a trans family with two kids and an elderly pit bull. Raised by a single mom in the DC area, she was a creative movement kid who found her choreographic identity on the club dance floor, in phenomenological texts, and in experiential visual art.