Katie Ailes

Image credit: Newsline Media

Katie is an experienced dancer, improviser, and choreographer working in a range of styles.

From age five she trained at a pre-professional level in classical ballet, and from nine trained in contemporary dance, predominantly Graham, Horton, and Cunningham technique. She hold an undergraduate dance degree from Bates College, which involved technical movement training, choreography mentoring and experience, and education in dance theory and history. In the 2012 and 2013 she completed the Bates Dance Festival Professional Training Program.

Katie is particularly interested in multidisciplinary work combining spoken word performance and movement. Her practice involves speaking aloud while dancing (witnessing the effect of speech on movement/breath) and using poetry (live or recorded) as the soundscape to live dance performance. “Polos,” her first foray into dance-poetry, has been produced as a cinepoem in collaboration with filmmaker Perry Jonsson and performed live at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Hidden Door Festival, and Prague Fringe. From 2015-16 she participated in the FLOW! project exploring the intersections of dance and poetry across Scotland.

In 2022 Katie created two new dance-poetry works reimagining maligned female figures from Scottish literature and mythology. Her piece “Cutty Sark,” commissioned by the Scottish Storytelling Centre and Edinburgh City of Literature, gave voice to the Nannie Dee character from Robert Burns’ “Tam O’Shanter” and earned critical acclaim for its innovative approach. Later that year her piece “Bean Nighe,” commissioned by Push the Boat Out Festival, reimagined the bean nighe of Scottish folklore for the post-Roe era in an unflinching eulogy for preventable miscarriage deaths and a manifesto for bodily autonomy. Read Katie’s Artist Statement for “Bean Nighe” here.

In addition to creating her own work, Katie also works as a choreographer and dance educator. In 2023 she created and facilitated workshops for DanceBase’s PRIME company on combining poetry and dance, and she provided choreographic mentorship for Paul Burrows on his dance-poetry piece “Ash Wednesday” for the 2024 Sacred Arts Festival. She served as Choreographer and Story Editor for director Sarah Grant‘s short documentary ‘Big Moves,’ which premiered at the 2023 Edinburgh International Film Festival and has been nominated for the 2024 Grierson Awards.

To contact Katie for performances, choreography, or workshops, please get in touch here or email directly via kathryn.a.ailes (at) gmail.com.

‘Dr Ailes [does] a tremendous feat in pairing spoken word with choreography, incorporating score to align with said movements. Precise, fusing a few traditional movements with a more elaborate and condensed ballet, with occasional harsh strokes of aggression in her movements, it’s a building recital, where the frustrations grow and eventually explode in a euphoric and freeing manner.’ —Corr Blimey, reviewing ‘Cutty Sark,’ 2022