Louisa Keohane graduated from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance (NSCD) with first class honours back in 2005 and went on to work as the last apprentice dancer with Phoenix Dance Theatre under Darshan Singh Bhuller. She toured the USA, performed at Holland Dance Festival and toured the UK with Phoenix Dance Theatre’s triple bill including Forest (under Bob Cohen) and Bhuller’s Planted Seeds. Louisa has also had the privilege to have worked with artists such as Jan de Schinkel, Liv Lorent, Arthur Pita and Kiera Martin. She has worked with Phoenix Dance Company founder Donald Edwards, dancing in community performances and helping to support boys in dance. More recently she has been part of KPM, performing in a full length theatre work.
Alongside her performance career Louisa teaches at both high school and primary school levels, and has qualified teacher status. She has 4 young people’s groups set up at the local Leeds school she works in, Carr Manor Community School, including mixed gender elite performance groups, an all-inclusive dance group and now two (a junior and senior) bespoke boys dance groups that perform in school and community city wide events. Louisa is passionate about raising the profile of boys dance, and has partnered with Phoenix Dance Theatre and the Northern School of Contemporary Dance to aid local young males to have the opportunity to access high quality dance training and dance opportunities.
As well as her work in schools, she additionally teaches the adult Improvers Contemporary Class at NSCD and for the Junior Academy students at Phoenix Dance Theatre on a regular basis. Louisa also continues to be self-employed, performing and choreographing, teaching and delivering workshops whenever available. She loves fusing contemporary, theatre, hip hop, afrobeats, ballet, breakdance and acrobatics. Her love of Salsa and Bachata is also an influence on her sequences.
After an extensive time out of performing professionally, Louisa is currently working on a one hour solo work with director Jamie Fletcher, to be toured later in the year. Louisa has written and choreographed this one hour work based on a dancer’s relationship with food and exercise.
As well as dancing and teaching, Louisa enjoys travelling, having visited over 65 countries to date, and she enjoys writing, and keeps a blog: lousponderings.wordpress.com.
