& On Working with Lorde, Bad Bunny, Labrinth, and Beyond.
When SLEEK first spoke with Kianí del Valle in 2024, one thing became immediately clear: movement, for her, is much more than mere physical motion. It is a way of making sense of the world, exploring identity, emotion, and the spaces in between.
This mindset has taken the Berlin-Los Angeles-based director, choreographer, dancer, and performance curator from Puerto Rico to nearly every corner of the globe. Her work spans a solo practice of over 20 years in theatre, film, pantomime, museums, site-specific settings, the development of her own KDV Performance Group, and collaborations with major music artists including Lorde, Travis Scott, Aphex Twin, Bad Bunny, and Labrinth. Del Valle has built a career that constantly moves between disciplines, distinguishing herself uniquely and paving a path rarely seen among movement artists in the Berlin and Los Angeles scenes.
Ironically, her journey did not begin with dance but with painting and sculpture. Yet, looking at her work today, this evolution seems almost inevitable. Each new discipline has become another language, another layer for exploring the same profound questions about the body, the mind, and the world around us.
Two years after our first conversation, we caught up with Del Valle again to discuss everything that has unfolded since. We met her backstage at Lollapalooza, just before Lorde’s main stage performance, where Del Valle was responsible for stage direction and choreography. She shared insights about working with such big and exciting names: “With Lorde, the process is quite holistic and experimental. I’d say it’s very similar to my own practice, which is rare when working with an artist like her. It’s been wonderful, really, really beautiful.”
"When working with artists, you have to understand their universe, but I try to still have a sense of my body of work living inside the universe of the artist." - Kianí del Valle
For Berlin audiences, many of us have experienced this understanding in one of Del Valle’s avant-garde works at some point. However, take Bad Bunny’s halftime show, for example. That daring stunt choreography on the pole, where Del Valle’s universe quietly supported him conceptually and physically. But let’s start from the beginning.
The NFL halftime show in February was a sold-out arena spectacle, 128 million people watched this show, making it the most-watched live televised performance in history. Bad Bunny was at the center, admired not only for his music but also for his advocacy, especially for Puerto Rico and all Latin American people.
As the first artist to perform an entire Super Bowl halftime show in Spanish, Bad Bunny held nothing back. Hidden symbols, layered references to Puerto Rican history and culture, and gestures to the wider Latino community were everywhere across the nearly 500-square-meter stage.
The show opened with sweeping camera shots over sugarcane fields and workers, past a piragua stand, to the casita, the classic Puerto Rican home, doors open to family and friends. Then, the pinnacle: Bad Bunny standing atop an electricity pole. Behind this three-minute stunt choreography was Del Valle, deeply connected to it as a Puerto Rican woman and daughter of activists. A whole life, career, and journey intersected in this very opportunity.
The song performed during that moment was El Apagón (engl.: The Blackout), about an ongoing crisis: Puerto Rico’s electricity collapse, intertwined with its colonial status and the near-total absence of support from the United States. Every year, 3.2 million inhabitants suffer blackouts. The longest blackout in American history was the nearly year-long one Puerto Rico endured after Hurricane María. The U.S. government’s response? Nothing. Residents taught themselves basic electrical work and began climbing live power poles, risking their lives to restore power.
Bad Bunny, perched on that pole, symbolized every person who had lived without electricity and suffered the repercussions of a broken colonial status. Among those affected were Del Valle and her family. “The song I was given is highly political, so I felt a lot of responsibility and focused on doing a good job. I didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of it until the dress rehearsal. I was really stressed and focused on using my time to make sure there was the heart and voice of the Puerto Rican people in those short minutes,” she says.
For Del Valle, movement is the foundation of her work. It is the language beneath everything else. She describes her art as the best and most honest form of communication for herself, a translation of what she feels and perceives, turning lived experience, emotion, and observation into movement: “Movement is basically the tool and language that gives me the most freedom to say what I cannot express in words.”
In recent years, her expertise has expanded into directing and visual art. Currently, Del Valle is directing tours for Puerto Rican rising stars RaiNao und Young Miko, adding to her resume as the only female show director of major music events coming out of Puerto Rico in the past year. Her work for superstars Lorde and Labrinth will continue in what is left of 2026.
In her own practice, this year Del Valle is about to perform one of the biggest museum commissions of her career. In September, her dance company KDV Performance Group premieres a new work at Berlin’s very own Neue Nationalgalerie, while also continuing to tour her solo work De Brujas Y Fantasmas with composition by Ziur und Pitch Pigeon Puerta with composition and codirection by fellow longtime collaborator Kelman Duran und AGF.
Notably, in the Berlin landscape, Del Valle is also one of the few choreographers to be signed by a gallery in recent years. Her representation by Puerto Rican international gallery Embajada has led her to her own solo show featuring her choreographic drawings, all the way to Material Art Fair Mexico and, now, in December, the presentation of new video and drawing work at NADA Fair Miami as part of Art Basel Miami.
Berlin, of all places, is where this practice truly took shape: “Berlin gave me my practice,” she says. In New York, LA, and London, she was juggling three jobs just to pursue her passion for art. Puerto Rico is her home, where everything started and the root of her research and identity. But Berlin didn’t demand that trade-off. It gave her years to focus on her journey, to build her own company, and develop solo work.
That same precision followed her to Lollapalooza. For Lorde, Del Valle crafted choreography that felt pared-back and fluid, making other acts seem small by comparison. Thirteen years of Lorde’s career were folded into a single set; a blend of intimacy and nostalgia, charged with the electronic pulse of Solar Power. You could feel the body of work of Del Valle herself living inside this major pop star’s set. An electric energy that was visible in every movement on stage.
That’s also what lingers after watching Del Valle’s work: the sense that she genuinely tries to understand an artist’s universe rather than simply filling the time between songs. Especially in an era of choreography built for viral moments, her work reveals the profound stories that movement alone can tell.
At SLEEK, we have been covering nearly a decade of Del Valle’s work and progression in the Berlin landscape. It’s beautiful to see how, in recent years, this work has propelled her to the international and global scene. We can’t wait to see what’s next.
CREDITS
Fotografie: Valentin Dobrun
Styling: Asya Urazbakhtina
Special Thanks to Timo Kreitz, Ottolinger