about anna
Anna Barker is a choreographer and performer based in Durham, North Carolina. She attended Durham School of the Arts high school and spent many summers at the North Carolina School of the Arts and the American Dance Festival. After spending 10 years dancing in Philadelphia and New York City, Anna relocated back to her hometown and founded her dance theater company, real.live.people, with collaborator Leah Wilks.
The company premiered their debut, “it’s not me it’s you” in 2014 in Durham. After touring this work in the Northeast, and then across the state of North Carolina with the North Carolina Dance Festival, Anna premiered “Feature Presentation" at the Living Arts Collective in 2016. Two years later, Anna presented her larger group work about failure, “Again, but this time with feeling”, in 2018. After receiving a fellowship from the NC Arts Council, Anna produced her first feature-length dance film “Level Up”, which premiered in Durham, NC in September 2021 and was presented at the American Dance Festival in July 2022. Anna and Leah's latest duet, "Could Be Worse", premiered in Durham in March of 2024.
Anna has presented work as part of the American Dance Festival, Duke Performances, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, APAP NYC, The North Carolina Dance Festival, Carrboro Film Festival, Tobacco Road Dance Productions, WAXworks at Triskelion Arts, among others. She was awarded the NC Arts Council Artist Fellowship for 2018-2019, and an Emerging Artist Grant from the Durham Arts Council in 2019. Anna teaches Pilates locally in private practice at The Movement Studio at Radical Healing and is on summer faculty at the American Dance Festival
artist statement
I create movement rooted in my own lived experience, using idiosyncratic gesture to explore the human condition. My work draws from the experiences that make us most human and vulnerable — navigating relationships, seeking connection, negotiating identity, and moving through cycles of success and failure. These intimate, often unspoken dynamics unfold alongside broader forces like effort, value, and the pervasive pressures of capitalism, shaping how we understand ourselves and each other.
Humor is a central device in my practice. Humor draws audiences in, disarming and familiar, while quietly pointing toward something more uncomfortable beneath the surface. What begins as levity often reveals a darker undercurrent — something more tender, more painful, more difficult to name.
Through a blend of movement, music, text, and theatricality, I draw from common experiences to create an exchange around our social and interpersonal lives. I’m interested in the specificity of body language, and how it reveals both our individuality and our deep connection to one another. This exploration lives in nuance: small gestures, moments of awkwardness, vulnerability, and honesty.
Accessibility is core to my work. I aim to dissolve the barriers around dance as a formal medium, inviting audiences to see themselves reflected within it, not as passive observers but as participants in a shared experience. Ultimately, I seek to create work that lingers: movement that resonates beyond the performance, leaving audiences with a felt sense of recognition.
about leah
Leah Wilks is a dancer, teacher, and choreographer based out of Brooklyn, originally hailing from North Carolina. She has taught and shared her work in a variety of locations including the American Dance Festival, Elon University, University of Michigan, Ponderosa Tanzland Festival, Theater for the New City, and Northern Stage.
Leah holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where they received awards for teaching and choreography, and are currently an adjunct faculty member at Montclair State University. As a performer/collaborator, they have worked with a variety of dance, theater, musical, and interdisciplinary artists, including Fifi Zhang, Okwui Okpokwasili, Alexis Blake, Kendra Portier, Tatyana Tennenbaum, Xin Liu, Beth Graczyk Productions, and Tommy DeFrantz/SLIPPAGE.
Leah has been an artist-in-residence at MOtiVE Brooklyn, Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Bergen Dansesenter, and MacDowell. She has been joyously collaborating and performing with Anna Barker/Real.Live.People since 2014, and cannot imagine what her life would be like if Anna had never moved back to Durham and asked her to come play in the studio.
Photo by Anna Maynard
about real.live.people
real.live.people is the brainchild of Anna Barker and collaborator Leah Wilks. The dance-theater company, based in Durham, NC, explores the human condition via idiosyncratic movement and gesture. Through the combination of movement, music, text, humor, and theater, Barker draws from our shared experiences to create an exchange about our inherent social and interpersonal existence.