USA Projects

Using any surface for it's 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 compositional choreography, in diverse ensembles and cross-cultural collaborations.  Keith is known internationally for dynamic projects that blur the line between music and dance.

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. Encouraged by an older generation of hoofers who remembered the vaudeville era, Keith developed a singular contemporary Body Music style, which he uses in myriad cross-cultural and cross-genre performance collaborations, as well as an educational methodology with many applications. Keith's influences range from Japanese Taiko, Balinese Gamelan and Jazz 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

Founding Executive Artistic Director of the Oakland, CA non-profit arts organization Crosspulse since 1979, Keith Terry first became 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, and New York's Dance Theater Workshop, to the American Center in Paris, the Bali Arts Festival, the Regency in Hong Kong, the Vienna Dance Festival, and the Paradiso van Slag World Drum Festival in Amsterdam.

Under Keith's direction, Crosspulse has produced scores of dance and music works ranging in size from solos and duos to ensembles of one hundred performers. In collaboration with a variety of artists and a broad spectrum of styles and forms, the work often involves multi-national, multi-cultural and multi-lingual communication. All of Keith's work involves the vital role that rhythm plays in performing arts throughout the world, and explores how this commonality of rhythm connects us in unexpected ways. Collaborations with artists include Charles "Honi" Coles, Turtle Island String Quartet, Jovino Santos Neto, Barbatuques, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Bill Irwin, Kenny Endo, Freddie Hubbard, Tex Williams, Robin Williams, Bobby McFerrin and many more.

Keith maintains a pool of players – diverse musicians who move – that comprise his ongoing ensembles and special projects – Slammin All-Body Band, Crosspulse Percussion Ensemble, Professor Terry's Circus Band Extraordináire and Free Dive. Keith solo and with his ensembles tour extensively internationally, where his performances, workshops, residencies and choreographic commissions are popular among professional performers and educators.

Keith's large-scale works include the Body Tjak Projects - an ongoing thirty-year US/Indonesian collaboration, that has won awards in both countries for performance and video. Premiering in 1990, and touring the US and Indonesia, Keith directed two more original Body Tjak projects in 1999 and 2002. A new work, Body Tjak 13, will add the Brazilian Body Music of Barbatuques to the mix of Keith's contemporary Body Music with Balinese Kecak that is the core of the Body Tjak Projects. A result of this long-term collaboration, Body Tjak itself has become a genre of contemporary performance in Bali, a culture that continues to adapt new information into traditional forms.

In 2008 Keith received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Body Music choreography, which helped launch the International Body Music Festival, a six-day event that has become the gathering place for traditional and contemporary practitioners of the artform.  The only festival of its kind, the IBMF has become a truly international festival as it is hosted outside the US every other year, by partners with whom Keith co-directs.  The 3^rd IBMF was held in São Paulo, Brazil, and the 5^th IBMF will be held in Istanbul, Turkey.

As a musician, producer and composer Keith Terry has released five albums and four videos including instructional DVDs on the Crosspulse Media Label. As a percussionist, Keith has recorded on EarthBeat!, Windham Hill Jazz, Inner City and Theresa Records as well as several soundtracks for film and television, including PBS's NOVA and the Betty Walberg film, "Bridge of Dreams" (in collaboration with Kazu Matsui and Yoko Ito Gates). As a featured performer he has appeared on PBS's Alive from Off Center ("Dancing Hands"); two PBS Lonesome Pine Specials ("Masters of Percussion" and "Turtle Island String Quartet/Keith Terry"); CBS News Nightwatch;  National Public Radio's Morning Edition and All Things Considered; and PRI's The World.

As an educator, Keith reaches children through professional performers and teachers - bringing ensembles to elementary schools, creating commissioned work for University Dance Departments, hosting Teacher Trainings, which use his Body Music methodology to teach many aspects of curricula, and more. 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, Austria. In 2010 Keith was on faculty at UC Berkeley's Dance Department and has taught at many institutions and festivals, including the Colorado Dance Festival, Florida Dance Festival, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Spain's Stage '98, American Orff-Schulwerk Association's National Conference, Summer Institute for Intercultural Communications, Juneau Alaska Arts Council, The School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, and STSI: The National Academy for the Arts in Denpasar, Bali and Yogyakarta, Java; and in music and dance programs at such institutions as UCLA, University of California at Berkeley, Ohio State University, Ohio University, California State University at Long Beach, Cal Arts, Manhattanville College, Denison University, University of California at Riverside, University of New Mexico, SUNY Purchase and others.  With Linda Akiyama, Keith is developing a complete teaching unit: Body Music and Math, which is in the pilot program stage.

Keith Terry's work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Asian Cultural Council, Meet the Composer's International Collaborations, The Rockefeller Foundation's MAP Fund, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, The Irvine Foundation, Arts International, CCI's Investing in Artists and the California Arts Council.