Keith Corprew

United States of America

MFA Creative Practice: Transdisciplinary

When Keith Corprew discovered contemporary dance, it was the fluidity and ambiguity in its performance style that drew him in. When he entered the MFA Creative Practice: Transdisciplinary programme at Trinity Laban, he wondered how he could take his own performance to the next level of artistry.

“A transdisciplinary solo performance work; it combines movement, voice, speech, song, body percussion, film-making, and letter-writing,” he says. “I was really interested in how I could just bring all of my experiences as an artist together and what it would look like to hold all of those different roles together in the same space and piece.”

The opportunity for Corprew to attend Trinity Laban came at just the right time. He was pondering how he’d be able to enhance his dance practice, especially in a global context. That’s when he discovered the Fulbright Trinity Laban Award, a scholarship that covers the first year of any master’s programme across music, dance, musical theatre, and the artist diploma in music.

“I found that the Fulbright scholarship has really helped me to see myself a lot more, to understand myself from a place of the research space that was offered, to really dive into my practice,” Corprew says. “It was a chance for me to not only be able to go inward, but to go outward as well — to see that this is where my practice is and where it can go in the future.”

At Trinity Laban, he brought his storytelling to life, especially through his master’s thesis performance “To Quell a Storm.” He took his audience into his world on stage through immersive techniques, and crowd participation. He’d drawn out an intricate and honest story centering on his experience navigating race in his home country, the US.

“I also wanted it to connect with a lot of the unrest and issues that are happening in the current world, so that people could see on a micro level [that] this is the way someone is wrestling with this idea of a storm, and collectively, these are ways that we can start to think about how we are all impacted by the storms in our [lives],” he says.

It goes without saying that a talent like Corprew, who has such a deep understanding of his own creative abilities, has been thriving throughout his career. Before he started attending Trinity Laban, he worked in higher education as a programme director, and coordinated several flagship academic programmes and initiatives. 

He’s been able to perform across the globe, with one of those opportunities taking place during the summer of his first year at Trinity Laban. As part of the “Diaspora Africa Training” programme at Ecole des Sables in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal, he lived and worked with dancers and movements from around the world who identified as Black for two months.