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Peggy Piacenza

The Forever Project: Piacenza’s personal and artistic movement archives are deconstructed and exaggerated with dark humor through a satirical ecofeminism lens.

Piacenza’s 30-year professional performance career and her history as a sex worker become an embodied tapestry of artistic material, a thematic entanglement of sex labor, the pursuit of freedom,... More

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About

About this performance

The Forever Project: Piacenza’s personal and artistic movement archives are deconstructed and exaggerated with dark humor through a satirical ecofeminism lens.

Piacenza’s 30-year professional performance career and her history as a sex worker become an embodied tapestry of artistic material, a thematic entanglement of sex labor, the pursuit of freedom, and ageism.

Piacenza’s personal and artistic movement archives are deconstructed and exaggerated with dark humor through a satirical ecofeminism lens, in a quest to answer how we find connection with others while undergoing the never-ending project of self-growth and the search for purpose. Larger-than-life characters originally performed by Piacenza in works created and directed by Dayna Hanson (Gloria’s Cause, Improvement Club, and The Clay Duke) are embodied within a single identity, combined with personal lived experience, and reimagined to explore touch, ironies of capitalism and labor, and tensions between safety and materialism.

Within The Forever Project, the body emerges as a container for the sacred and profane, a site for memoir and fiction to coalesce as the blurred lines between the real and artificial are explored.

The Forever Project is supported in part, by a grant from 4Culture, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and Base: Experimental Arts & Space.

  • Performance: January 18 - 21, 2024

  • Venue: On the Boards, Seattle, WA

  • Duration: 1 hour 24 minutes

  • Posted: Dec 19, 2024

Cast & Credits

Concept and Direction Peggy Piacenza
Choreography Peggy Piacenza in collaboration with the dancers
Performers Peggy Piacenza, Amelia Reeber, Julia Sloane
Dramaturgy Babette Pendleton
Creative Consultant Dayna Hanson
Director of Photography and Editor Douglas Arney
Projection Technician Leo Mayberry
Music and Sound Design Paul Walsh with contributions from Sean Curley and Doug Arney
Text Dayna Hanson
Lighting Design Jessica Trundy
Scene Direction Sarah Rudinoff
Scenic Design Etta Lillienthal, Peggy Piacenza
Scenic Design Consultant finch izatt
Make-up and Hair Luce Cousineau
Costume Design Peggy Piacenza, Dayna Hanson
Costume Consultant Frances Kenny
Costume Assist LeDawn King
Project Consultant Lila Hurwitz / doolittleandbird.com
Project Assistants Katie Daugtherty, Emma Lawes, Catriona Urquhart
Rehearsal assistant Sheri Cohen
Performers in dressing room scene Chloe Albin, Natalie Fernandi, Moonyeka, Kiki Robinson, Hannah Simmons, Julia Sloane

Some of the characters, images, costumes and choreography in The Forever Project, including the lobby installations (Peggy’s Purse and Eagle) are drawn from live performance and film works by Dayna Hanson, in which Peggy Piacenza was a collaborating performer. These works include Gloria’s Cause (2010), Improvement Club (2013) and The Clay Duke (2013). The Eagle video in The Forever Project is a remake of Piacenza’s 2008 video “Ode to Baba,” inspired by the rolling saint of India, Lotan Baba. The 2023 remake took inspiration from the original version which was shot and edited by Gaelen Hanson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotan_Baba

My body of work is inspired deeply by people whom I have studied or worked with throughout my performing history, including Pat Graney, 33 Fainting Spells (Gaelen Hanson and Dayna Hanson), Lynn Shelton, Deborah Hay, among many others.

About The Artist

Peggy Piacenza is a Seattle choreographer, video artist, and performer whose work draws from her explorations in improvisation/performance techniques, religion and gender studies, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her choreography has been commissioned and presented by Bonfire Gallery, Bratislava Movement Festival in Slovakia, Dance Theater Workshop in NYC, and in Seattle as part of Velocity Dance Center's Guest Artist Series, On the Boards, Composer/Choreographer, D-9 Dance Collective, and Northwest Film Forum. As a performer, she has toured nationally and internationally with Pat Graney, 33 Fainting Spells, and Dayna Hanson, as well as with her own work. She is also the co-founder of Base, a non-profit organization dedicated to elevating risk and invention in dance, performance, and multidisciplinary art. Peggy Piacenza is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas.

Photo: Peggy Piacenza headshot