A percussionist/rhythm-dancer/educator

SHORT MEDIA BIO

KEITH TERRY is a percussionist/rhythm-dancer/educator whose artistic vision has straddled the line between music and dance for more than four decades. As a soloist he has appeared in such settings as Lincoln Center, Bumbershoot, NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition, PRI’s The World, the Vienna International Dance Festival, and the Paradiso van Slag World Drum Festival in Amsterdam. His groups Corposonic, Slammin All-Body Band, Crosspulse Percussion Ensemble, Crosspulse Duo with Evie Ladin, Professor Terry’s Circus Band Extraordinaire, and Body Tjak (with I Wayan Dibia) have performed in a variety of venues, including Joe’s Pub, WNYC, and Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors (NYC), Grand Performances, LACMA Jazz, the Roxy, and the Skirball Center (LA), SFJazz, Vancouver Island MusicFest, Woodford Festival in Australia, and the Bali Arts Festival. In addition, Keith has performed with a wide range of artists including Charles “Honi” Coles, Turtle Island Quartet, Bill Irwin, Jovino Santos Neto, Barbatuques, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Kenny Endo, Freddie Hubbard, Tex Williams, Robin Williams, and Bobby McFerrin. As a producer he has created 5 CDs and 4 DVDs for Crosspulse Media.

From 1998 to 2005 Keith was on the faculty at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures, where he designed and taught a dozen courses on the relationship of music and dance; deep listening; synchronicity, time, and timing; and intercultural communication in the arts. In 2006 he conceived and directed the first International Body Music Performance Project for the Orff Institute in Salzburg. Keith tours extensively in the Americas, Asia, and Europe, where his Body Music performances, workshops, residencies and choreographic commissions are popular among professional performers and educators. Keith Terry is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow and the Founding Director of Crosspulse, a 32-year old Oakland, California-based arts organization dedicated to rhythm-based intercultural music and dance. Keith is also the Founding/Artistic Director of the Crosspulse project, the International Body Music Festival (IBMF), an annual 6-day Festival which explores the language of body music from culture to culture. Now in its sixth year, IBMF has been produced in San Francisco/Oakland, US; São Paulo, Brazil; and Istanbul, Turkey.

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A UNIQUE MASTER OF PERCUSSIVE MOTION — SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Using any surface for its rhythmic possibilities, Keith Terry “claps his hands, rubs his palms, finger-pops, stamps his feet, brushes his soles, slaps his butt and belly, pops his cheek, whomps his chest, skips and slides, sings and babbles and coughs, building his music out of a surprisingly varied register of sounds and clever rhythmic variations.” — Village Voice

Keith Terry is a percussionist/rhythm dancer whose work encompasses a number of allied performance disciplines — music, dance, theater, performance art — which he brings together to create an artistic vision that defies easy categorization. As a self-defined “Body Musician,” Keith uses the oldest musical instrument in the world — the human body (his own) — as the basis for exploring, blending and bending traditional and contemporary rhythmic, percussive and movement possibilities.

Trained as a percussionist, Keith was the drummer for the original Jazz Tap Ensemble when he found his drum patterns becoming hand claps and foot steps. Soon percussion became dance, his body his instrument, and his own style of body music emerged. Keith’s influences range from Japanese Taiko and Balinese Gamelan to North American rhythm tap and Ethiopian armpit music.

…a crossing of cultures, a blurring of boundaries at its most sensitive, most humanistic, and most magical. — National Public Radio

Keith Terry is probably best known for his solo works, which toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Asia — from the Serious Fun Festival at Lincoln Center, the Bumbershoot Festival at the Seattle Opera House, the Colorado Dance Festival, New York’s Dance Theater Workshop and Wolftrap to the American Center in Paris, the Bali Arts Festival, the Regency in Hong Kong, the Vienna Dance Festival, the Budapest Spring Festival and the Paradiso van Slag World Drum Festival in Amsterdam.

QUOTES
“Sophisticated and up-to-the-minute in its intellectual appeal, in its multicultural inspirations and in its blending of boundaries between art forms.” — The Washington Post

“Keith Terry’s unique “body percussion” performance was like a great vintage wine, so smooth and tangy were his rhythms and sounds, so slyly intoxicating.” — Sali Ann Kreigsman, Dance View Times

“A virtuoso invertebrate, bending, bouncing, flopping and popping (literally) in our midst but rarely seeming to come down to earth.” — Dance Magazine

“Terry lifts you to a philosophical plane of exquisite lucidity usually reached only by means of controlled substances.” — The Village Voice

“This guy is a one-man band machine. I expected flames to come out of his head by the time he was through.” — The New York Press