“The piece started as an image I’ve had for a long time of a performance around a dinner table,” dancer/choreographer Alice Gosti said in a telephone interview last week of her piece Spaghetti Co.: Something Just Happened at 1:19 p.m., which opens Thursday as the latest edition of NWFF’s Live at the Film Forum series (through Sat.; tickets $12/$15). She was meandering a bit, drawing together the disparate details that have coalesced into the film/music/dance presentation, before sort of laughing and commenting: “I feel sometimes like I still don’t know what it’s about.”
The first time I called Gosti, she didn’t answer her phone and instead I caught her voice mail, which surprised me: I’ve met Alice Gosti a couple times and never recalled her having such a thick accent. Asked about it, she explained that the message was actually some six years old, from when she moved to Seattle from her native Perugia, Italy to attend the UW. And no, it’s not “Alice” as in housekeeper from The Brady Bunch; it’s “Alee-tsa.” Or so I’m told.
I first encountered Gosti last year collaborating with Monica Mata Gilliam in Denying the Space Between Us, the live performance culmination of a year-long web-based experiment called You’re Right Here, in which dancers created videos of improv dance, and responded to videos submitted by others. It’s like a online discussion forum, in video form, written in dance. It’s fascinating–you can check it out on the website.
Since then, she’s popped onto my radar repeatedly: in addition to her own projects, which range from curating the quaterly Modern Dance Behind the Pink Door series to a site-specific technology performance at Gasworks Park over the summer, she’s performed in Laara Garcia’s Sakura Rising at the last NW New Works Festival, and most recently in Paige Barnes’ Audapii. So I figured I should finally arrange an interview and get a better sense of the artist and her work.
Although Gosti was born and raised in Perugia (Seattle’s “it’s complicated” Italian sister-city), her mother was from Seattle, and as Gosti was preparing for college, she found herself disinterested in pursuing dance in Europe, where the art form is taught in an intense but narrow academy environment. Instead, she opted to move to the U.S.
“I didn’t want to stop learning other things,” she explained. At the UW, she actually studied film and multimedia, and credits that experience with shaping her approach to creating dance.
“When I think about movement and composition,” she told me, “I’ve been watching more with the eye of a filmmaker.”
That serves as pretty good prep for NW Film Forum’s second Live at the Film Forum season, which invites artists to use their space for a live performance that (I’m not sure it’s required, but why wouldn’t you?) also makes use of the multimedia opportunities presented by a cinema. Previous participants have include Paris Hurley and Amy O’Neal, and Gosti’s piece, which mixes dance theatre with live music, bookended by films, promises to be equally interesting.
As noted above, the piece grew out a simple image Gosti had of a performance set around a dinner table. She played with it a few years back before abandoning it, only to return when the opportunity at NWFF presented itself, which allowed Gosti to start making intuitive leaps off that simple image.
“Eating is something we all share,” she pointed out matter-of-factly, and as such is deeply tied to memory, family, sense of place, and belonging. And exactly what would be the main course quickly presented itself.
“Spaghetti cooked perfect has always made me feel at home,” she said. “I learned to make it how I liked when I was very young.”
Of course, for an Italian immigrant, the story is more complicated; spaghetti is about as cliche an image as they come, and as such the piece is also about Gosti’s sense of displacement as an immigrant, by taking something close to her own heart and transposing into a stereotyped image.
Structurally, the piece is fragmentary; although a live band will be playing, Gosti’s dance performance will be separate, not a response to the music, so that the band will provide “emotional breaks” from the physical intensity of performance. And that–like the cinematic bookending, is a conscious choice to try to change the way audiences react by incorporating dance as only one element of a complex, multifaceted artistic presentation.
“I’m really interested in the creation of experiences,” she explained. “A big part of this has been to trying to create an experience like film, emotionally engaging the audience in completely different ways” that a straight dance performance.
But for all that, I broke one of my longstanding rules and closed with a terribly obvious question: If she’s Italian, and spaghetti’s that important to her, what exactly is the secret to Gosti’s spaghetti?
That elicited a slightly embarrassed laugh, but she indulged me in at least one piece of solid advice for American cooks: “It’s the sauce. Tomatoes in the U.S. are much sweeter. You have to add a lot of black pepper to the sauce. You won’t taste it, but it makes it less sweet.”
