Born 1950

Kim Arrow’s work as a dance videographer is nothing if not expansive. Swelling to contain narratives of aboriginal culture and its landscape and the characters of Victor Hugo in a digitized space of video and animation, Arrow conjoins creation myths and the last stirrings before some probable techno-apocalypse before we’ve even seen a recognizable dancer on screen. That dance, arguably among the most ancient means of communication, should be welded to video-and not just documentary video, with its false but implicit premise that truth trumps aesthetics-is an impressive achievement. Usually, one art form disappears before the other; dance gets lost in a haze of video effects, video tries as hard as it can to be an invisible reporter. But in Arrow’s work, dance and film twist and wind together forming an interdependent lattice.

Kim Arrow received his B.S. from Temple University in Philadelphia, and his M.F.A. from New York University. He has also studied with the Joffrey Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal, and the Pacific Ballet in San Francisco. He has performed internationally for the Silesian’s Dance Theatre’s International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Bytom, Poland, and III Encuentro de Danza Contemporánea and Concultura y Unidanza in El Salvador, as well as locally at Temple University and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. He has received Fulbright Fellowships for travel to El Salvador and Brazil. Arrow has also been honored with a grant from Dance Advance in Philadelphia and has been a guest artist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is currently assistant professor of dance at Swarthmore College.