Tushrik Fredericks is a Johannesburg-born multidisciplinary artist and 2026 TED Fellow whose practice bridges choreography, performance, and embodied research. Rooted in blending South African rhythms, creative movement, and contemporary dance training, his work explores emotional memory, physical rupture, and the body as a site of transformation and resistance.
He is a recipient of the Princess Grace Award (Chris Hellman Dance Honor), nominated by Shamel Pitts and TRIBE. Fredericks graduated from the Peridance Certificate Program in New York City in 2015 and has since collaborated with leading contemporary dance artists and companies including ate9 Dance Company, Sidra Bell Dance New York, and TRIBE/Shamel Pitts. He performed in the duet Touch of RED, which received a Bessie Awards nomination.
From 2016–2018, he served as assistant lecturer to Sidra Bell at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. In 2021, Fredericks received 3rd Prize for Dance at the Solo-Tanz-Theater Festival for the first iteration of his choreographed solo (territory) of the heart. In 2023, he presented the completed work at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in New York. That same year, he received the Baryshnikov Arts Center Open Residency Award for a co-choreographed duet with Rebecca Margolick. In 2024, he was awarded the Princess Grace Special Projects Grant for his choreographic quartet 'til infiniti'.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Tushrik Fredericks is a Johannesburg-born multidisciplinary artist working across choreography, performance, sound, and embodied research. Rooted in South African rhythms, creative movement, and contemporary dance training, his practice explores the body as a site of memory, transformation, and resistance.
A visceral memory that continues to shape his artistic language is growing up in Johannesburg and witnessing the charged energy of South African social dance cultures within clubs and communal spaces. These environments revealed movement not simply as entertainment, but as ritual — a physical language capable of carrying history, grief, multiplicity, and liberation. As a multiracial person who identifies as South African Coloured, Fredericks approaches movement as a living archive through which identity, ancestry, and hybridity can be continuously reimagined.
His work often blends polyrhythmic textures with contemporary performance practices, creating immersive physical states that oscillate between vulnerability, rupture, and collective release. Through choreography, sound collage, repetition, and embodied presence, he investigates how movement can function as both personal expression and social resistance within an increasingly fragmented and disembodied world.
Fredericks is particularly interested in the relationship between the live body and institutional space. By bringing movement into theaters, galleries, and museums, he seeks to disrupt passive spectatorship and reintroduce immediacy, ritual, and human presence into contemporary cultural environments.
His practice asks how performance can create spaces for emotional transformation, collective witnessing, and deeper connection.
At the core of his work is a belief that dance is not separate from life, but deeply intertwined with how we remember, survive, gather, and imagine new futures together.
40 - 60 MIN PERFORMANCES
(territory) of the heart
choreography and performance by Tushrik Fredericks
soundscape by TT Britt
physicalizes the experience of the human heart; grappling with identity, vulnerability and expressing the inner potential that lies within humanity to soar, challenge and find serenity.
to begin with no end
co-choreographed with Rebecca Margolick Lighting by Connor Sale
using spirituality as a vessel for connection and a common denominator between two distinct yet interconnected religions. Empathy, trust, and intimacy are shared within the multitudes of relationships we embody with each other. Grounded in the performers’ religious backgrounds—Muslim and Jewish—they navigate the complexities of their identities to give access to be with each other and see from the other side.
til infiniti
choreography by Tushrik Fredericks
performers: Claude Johnson, Nouhoum Koita, Channce Williams and Tushrik Fredericks Soundscape by TT Britt
Clothing by Dauan Jacari
Lighting by Connor Sale
a dreamlike work that explores the variety of black and brown fantasies and utopias through diverse and multi-dimensional physical expressions of becoming, flourishing, shedding, and primal unity.
