Amanda Rattigan is an emerging Philly-based movement and performance artist. Her work and movement is alchemised through themes of womanhood, metaphysicality, and surrealism. In 2021, she moved to Philadelphia to pursue her BFA in Dance at University of the Arts under the direction of Donna Faye Burchfield. Following the school’s closure, she completed her degree at Burchfield’s BFA Dance Lab at Bennington College in December, 2024. Her practice moves through improvisation, working through states of exhaustion, through both body and materials, to uncover images and scenes of absurdity.
Photo by Shosh Isaacs
As a freelancer, Amanda has worked with various artists and collectives in Philadelphia, moving through the context of performance. Notably with OmenThrice Company/Sydney Donovan, Opera Philadelphia, Curt Haworth, Sharedelusion, Eichterling, Rece Kormorn, Ally Wilson, and Ella Martin. She has also served as an assistant for BARNA ARTS, a Barcelona-Based study abroad hub under the direction by co-founders Katie Vickers and Albert Quesada.
Her practice explores language as a way to dissect understanding with acknowledgment or legibility. Coming from her Polish Heritage, language allows us to excavate sound, how it disrupts our process for understanding or legibility.
Through performance studies, her philosophy centers around sensation, how the body feels, the vibrations, the feeling of cells jumping. “I aim to stretch; to find movement that wakes up the body energetically and allows me to discover more of what I hold inside of me.” This is done through improvisation and authentic movement practices.
Photo by Rece Kormorn
my ribs are breaking open, gifting my heart to the sun.
my flesh & bones keep toppling over only to stack back up.
The clouds feather up overhead, then one drop of rain seems to make me puddle until I’m only an idea.
Exploring paradoxes, absurdity & normality, performance & reality.
How far can they go until they become united? Flesh and bones, and spirit and imagination.
By becoming, by unrest, by opacity.
She has studied dance internationally, participating in P.A.R.T.S/Rosas Summer Studies (BE), B12 with Jos Baker and Alexandros El Greco(DE), BARNA ARTS with Federica Porello, Leo Castro, Renan Martins, Clementine Telesfort (ES), Flockworks with Alice Klock and Florian Lochner (DE), MELT with Jonathan Gonzalez (US), Cie Kane with Maaky (CH), BigKids with Mark Caserta, Kayla Farrish, Mikey Morado (US), American Ballet Theatre Collegiate Summer Intensive (US), Philadanco Field Study with Kim Bears-Bailey (US)
“When the Light Hits the Puddle”, Videography by Ian “Seven” Tackes
Photo by Shosh Isaacs