Our first-ever video Master Class with Seattle dance-makers Zoe Scofield and Dani Tirrell. This class explores the rich similarities and differences between these two choreographers making work in Seattle. A dancer’s “Behind the Actors Studio”, this class invites viewers into the conversation where Dani and Zoe discuss dance philosophies, teaching methodologies, their love-hate relationship to ballet, and strong feelings about unison.
Inspired by the writings of Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, and Gertrude Stein, In a Rhythm by Bebe Miller Company is a suite of new dance works that explores the syntax of movement. Using sound and text as underlying maps of events and situations, choreographer and artistic director Bebe Miller focuses on the subtle interactions of gesture, timing, focus, and dynamics that are uniquely human yet often illegible outside of recognizable contexts.
Dance enters a new dimension in a daring collaboration between two former Merce Cunningham dancers and an iconic filmmaker. New perceptions of bodies in motion emerge as Rashaun Mitchell's and Silas Riener’s powerfully physical and precise choreography is mixed and projected live by radical video artist Charles Atlas. Ways of seeing evolve in real-time as the camera tilts, shifts, expands, and contracts, allowing for shocking new perspectives of human movement in time and space.
The merciless humor of comedian and social critic Paul Mooney is channeled in a fast-paced and ruthless new work merging stand-up comedy, theater, and physicality. Billing himself as “Seattle’s first Black talk show host,” choreographer and performer Markeith Wiley unveils a new, no-holds-barred persona as an engaging, brutally direct entertainer and loquacious dancer. Featuring live guests and a house DJ, It's Not Too Late is a timely capsule of emotional resignation around race immediately following the 2016 presidential election.
Outer space meets schizophrenia in this work made as a gift for a self-described psychic radio star. For over ten years, Seattle dance artist Ezra Dickinson has created emotionally powerful solo dance performances as gifts for his schizophrenic mother. Psychic Radio Star is a culmination of these gifts: a mixture of childhood memories, mythologies, an extraordinary imagination, and Dickinson’s virtuoso talents in dance and visual art.
Big Dance: Short Form is Big Dance Theater, distilled. BDT returns to its dance roots for its 25th anniversary celebration, theatrically re-imagining the conventions of a dance repertory program and presenting the company’s unique blend of dance-theater on an intimate scale.
Maneries [from Manare: spring form, emergence] works the body as linguistic material. Taking iconic, motivated and arbitrary signs, the performer builds and explores a series of tests on the limits of her formal capacities. These forms, having gone through time, constantly build, destroy and expose the body as producer of possible universes and perceptions over time.
With a passing nod to Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and a swipe at the age of selfies, this theater/dance performance examines the very moment something or someone is captured, recorded and then memorialized through technology. In an age where pictures and film are frequently doctored, Findlay//Sandsmark draw a line between the fragile image and the fallibility of memory.
A solo creation at the intersection of theater, dance and visual art installation, Bronx Gothic gives palpable force to the charged relationship between two girls on the verge of adolescence in the 1980s—where Newports are bought in singles at corner bodegas, and sex-saturated notes are passed in class. In a performance of psychic and physical collisions that threaten to break the body, it’s an unflinching look into the exquisite turbulence of one woman’s memory.
A fierce band of Seattle-based artists presents an intensely visual, music-driven theatrical event. Predator Songstress is a modern-day fairy tale of an anti-heroine in search of her stolen voice, set in a world where the tools that are used to stifle and control are appropriated as means for individual realization. Prepare your eyes and ears for otherworldly visuals, gorgeous vocals, incredible costumes, merrily creepy earworms, and a singular butoh-meets-anime vision.
