Your identity and the body that carries that identity is a statement that we learn to articulate over time. Becoming comfortable in one’s own skin is something that we often strive to achieve. Finding themselves more comfortable than they have ever been, Karley Wasaff is a multifaceted maven of movement who has embraced the journey of excavating who they are.
They have dedicated their lives to inspiring and assisting others who wish to do the same. Aforementioned alliteration aside, Wasaff is a movement artist and educator who found their niche and splintered into a sub-niche. They describes their success as “a path forged by failure.”
Wasaff started dancing at the spry age of two years old. They took ballet and fell in love with the art form. By the time Wasaff was in high school they decided dance was going to be their career and life’s focus. However, Wasaff desired to grow beyond the traditional creative paradigms. The interdisciplinary artist was even awarded a scholarship for dance at University of Southern Mississippi. Then at Hollins University Wasaff found their proclivity for standing up for others and what they believed in. This was an era in their lives where they honed their knack for activism and added yet another layer to their identity and their intent. It is safe to say that it would become the engine of Wasaff’s artistry.
Enters Kinetics with Karley, a non-profit founded by Wasaff that encompasses the many aspects of their mission. Wasaff isn’t just a dancer. Wasaff is a healer, a producer and a communal conduit whom we are all able to move through and find our inner rhythm. Kinetics with Karley starts with offering classes in which people can not only reform their bodies but their minds as well. But Kinetics with Karley’s duty towards reformation doesn’t stop there. The non-profit is sincerely entrenched in its effort to transform the community through movement.
Wasaff leaves no existential stone unturned, even becoming a crusader for–and active participant in–creating queer spaces. While they were developing their love for movement and their affinity for advocacy, Wasaff had also been learning and observing the nuances of their sexuality and the politics that came along with it. Yet another loving and living layer that they carry with such grace, intensity and vulnerability.
Currently on the threshold of debuting her latest body of work titled The Weight of Worth, Wasaff is staging a righteous return to her roots. Wassaf teamed up with photographer and curator Josh Sauceda to bring us a captivating group exhibition and interactive ballet that confronts the practice of perfect, the burden of self and “the radical act of showing up.”
“The Weight of Worth feels like a mirror for where I am in my career right now — standing between everything ballet & contemporary dance demanded of me and everything my body, my politics, and my artistry have grown toward.
After years of shaping community, producing immersive work, and teaching dancers and nightlife performers to trust the intelligence of their bodies, this piece lets me return to ballet with new eyes. Not as an institution that defines my value, but as a language and home practice I can finally subvert. This work collapses perfectionism, pressure, and self-doubt into something communal and intimate. The dancers interact with the audience like embodied fortune tellers — inviting people to speak, name, and claim what the dancers themselves cannot voice.
In doing so, the piece confronts one of my deepest questions: Why must I share my practice as spectacle in order for its worth to be seen? And what happens when the audience is asked to hold that weight with us? At this point in my career, The Weight of Worth is not just a performance. It’s a threshold — a reclamation of a form that once told me, and my performers, to shrink, now used to expand what possibility and value can look like on any body… or anybody.”
– Karley Wassaf on The Weight of Worth
The British philosopher Alan Watts once compared prioritizing accomplishments and goals to the act of chasing a “will-o-the-wisp.” Your inherent value isn’t based on what you amassed but by what you already have–your person, YOURSELF. Wasaff wants us to leave behind maddening pace of the rat race and stop seconding guess what we mean to this world and how the very state of just being YOU is more than enough.
Akeem is our founder. A writer, poet, curator and profuse sweater, he is responsible for the curatorial direction and overall voice of Quiet Lunch. The Bronx native has read at venues such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, KGB Bar, Lovecraft and SHAG–with works published in Palabra Luminosas and LiVE MAG13. He has also curated solo and group exhibitions at numerous galleries in Chelsea, Harlem, Bushwick and Lower Manhattan.