The Funsch Dance Experience is under the artistic direction of Christy Funsch, an East Coast native currently based in San Francisco. The mission of the company is to celebrate people as performers and performers as people, highlighting all that is vulnerable yet indefatigable in us through movement that is casually exact, emotionally fluid, and musically precise.
Funsch has presented her work in New York City at Context Studios, at Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles, at the DeCompression Gallery in Phoenix, at the Mill Avenue Theater in Tempe, at the Toronto Fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists, at the Santa Cruz Dance Gallery, and throughout the Bay Area.
Christy is currently a member of Stephen Pelton Dance Theater and a collaborative partner of Nol Simonse and Sue Roginski. She has also worked with Katie Faulkner, Maxine Moerman Dancetheatre, Dandelion Dancetheater, Leslie Seiters, Mary Armentrout, Paige Sorvillo, Julie Mayo, Megan Nicely, Cid Pearlman’s Nesting Dolls, and Stephanie Schaaf. She is a certified Pilates instructor, serves as a facilitator for The Field SF, and recently completed her Laban Movement Analysis Certification through New York’s Laban Institute for Integrated Movement Studies.
Funsch received her BA in Dance and English from Hamilton College, New York, in 1989 where she was the recipient of the Theater and Dance Award, and the first student in Hamilton College history to be awarded a Senior Fellowship in Dance. The resulting full-length work Waves (based on Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves) premiered at Hamilton’s Minor Theater in April 1989. Christy later earned an MFA in Performance and Choreography from Arizona State University in 1994 where she received the Outstanding Graduate Student Award. While in Arizona, she co-founded, choreographed, and performed for the ESTRUS WORKS performance group in Phoenix, Arizona, producing four full-length concerts between 1992-94.
Funsch has received funding from Theatre Bay Area, Dancers’ Group, and the Zellerbach Family Foundation. She has received three nominations from the Isadora Duncan Dance Award Committee for Performance, and has been awarded residencies at ODC Theater, the Djerassi Ranch, CounterPULSE Theater, and the U Cross Foundation.