The Artist
The Practice
Shayla Taylor is a Baton Rouge, Louisiana native has been grounded and rooted in her movement from an early age. Early in her dance career, she had the opportunity to be featured in several dance films under the direction of Robin Gee, performing in New York in conjunction with NYU for a showing of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Company’s “Freedom of Information: Act III” under the direction of Janet Lily and Duane Cyrus, as well as assisting artists such as Liz Emperio, Clarice Young, and Maurice Watson. In 2020 she received her BFA at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a concentration in dance and choreography. After college, she began her professional career and performed with Helen Simoneau Danse Company at the 30th Anniversary of the North Carolina Dance Festival, and was accepted into the Camille A. Brown and Dancers Mentorship program, and choreographed work for North Carolina State University’s Dance program as an Emerging Artist. In 2022 Shayla was invited to become a New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow as an apprentice for Urban Bush Women. With Urban Bush Women, she toured across the country to perform and help lecture several dance programs in the secondary and collegiate platforms as a BOLD Facilitator. In 2022 She was an honored Alumni at her university for her accomplishments within the dance field. As a choreographer, she has been able to set works on a collegiate stage, several music videos for artists in North Carolina and New York, studios along the east coast, and a dance film “La Danseuse Vieillissante”.
Shayla is a southern creole dancer and choreographer who provokes the audience's reception of dance and charges the space with movements curated from personal history and culture. She brings a source of enlightenment within the dance community by using her choreographic and performative eye to show athletic bodies in the space and push the boundaries and narratives of the southern female lens. This artist acts as a visionary artist by using their unique qualities to spark conversation and collaboration within the community for the community and uses her skills to be a creative mind, and her body to be an eager canvas.
Within this artist practice, she studies a multitude of dance genres. Having been competitively trained in several styles, this choreographer leans into contemporary movements intertwined with the cadence of new school hip hop, theatrical shapes and ideas of Fosse, and a spirit of social dance and footwork across the ages. In her work, she often navigates how she can push the definition of contemporary while adding in cultural and social elements of dance. Shayla centers her works on ancestral threads, cultural engagements, African aesthetics, and movement embodiment. She finds inspiration in oral storytelling traditions and want to explore the symbiotic relationship it shares with dance.
As an instructor, Shayla has focused on teaching contemporary as a flexible medium. She gives her students a wide range of modern techniques and styles so that they become more well-rounded and have a broader hat to pull from when creating their own work or exploring improvisation. This artist values calling on our native movement and early memories as a motive for movement. Shayla often use a method of exploration called "Mother Tongue," which came from her time with Jawole Zo Willa Jo Zollar in Urban Bush Women. She also encourages using an ethnographic lens on life as a source of research for movement studies. She believes that we use our senses to witness, unquestioningly is stored in our bodies and a tool for our role as communicators and physical historians.