Choreographer Amy O'Neal Gives Us the Lowdown on "The Lowdown," Tonight at the Moore

Photo by Gabriel Bienzycki

“There’s been some confusion—or curiosity—around this new name," Amy O'Neal told me two weeks ago, sipping on a Jameson neat at The Sitting Room shortly before night three of The A.W.A.R.D. Show! next door at On the Boards. "There are tons of different projects that go under this name," she said, referring to the company "AmyO/tinyrage" she developed in 2007. "I'm interested in leaving the company model behind. Sometimes I’m doing solo work, sometimes I’m doing a group piece, sometimes it’s a video project, sometimes I’m curating a show," such as The Lowdown, her first foray into programming a show featuring other artists.

Going up tonight, February 11, at the Moore Theatre (tickets $24), The Lowdown: An Unexpected Night of Seattle Dance Performance, is a mixed evening of live music, performance, and dance, with O’Neal’s newest piece, Again, No Excuses, headlining an evening where she'll be sharing the stage with DJs, B-Boys and a sparkle-smart burlesque brigade, putting the energy of a hip hop crowd, an underground club, and nouveau cabaret all in one room.

The DJs will be spinning in-between acts (she hopes that people will take advantage of the "get up and move around time" liberally) and afterward for an after-party in the historic lobby. She wanted the night to feel more like a music show with two openers and a headliner.

“Over the years, I wondered why even when people tour from out of town, why they don’t have local opening acts?” she tells me. “To sort of help bring in an audience when people don’t know them. I know that idea’s kind of old-fashioned, it’s been done, but it kind of makes sense.”

WD4D will be spinning for the SoulShifters, and PotatoFinger is scoring O’Neal’s headlining piece. When she first encountered PotatoFinger at Re-Bar, “everybody was out there, dancing their asses off.” O'Neal wants to bring some of the feel of hip hop community into the modern dance world, complete with an all-out, all-ages busta-move at the end.

The program includes the Can Can Castaways, the house act at the Can Can Cabaret, and includes Rainbow Fletcher and Ezra Dickenson whose modern dance company, incarnation of similar casting, The Offshore Project, won night three of The A.W.A.R.D. Show! Of choreographer Rainbow Fletcher, O'Neal says: "She’s really taken an old school form and taken a fresh twist on it. She's tricking people in a way, into watching modern dance.”

AmyO/tinyrage's piece, Again, No Excuses, based on No Excuses, which was made for Velocity Dance Center’s Strictly Seattle this summer and performed by nine women.

“Human beings are really afraid to own our own fears and be good—and be great and be happy, and just own the potential that is just there,” she says explained of the ideas she explores in the piece. “We’re totally terrified of it.”

As well as elaborating on the ninja as an image of internal conflict, an idea she previously applied to her solo piece In the Fray, which debuted at On the Boards’ NW New Works Festival last June, she's also thinking about how being watched changes what we do. "There are sections where we’re just watching each other do a solo, we’re shining lights on each other—it’s very voyeuristic and intimate.”

The development of her movement in this piece stemmed in part from imposing limitations on her own body. “I’ve been giving myself the task to not do certain things that have been hurting me,” O’Neal says, “like kicking my left leg over and over again or thrashing my head around and giving myself whiplash.” Not doing things that hurt her seems in line with the title of the piece, for inhibiting yourself, by self-injury or by fearing potential.  

The idea of self-imposed limitations extends beyond defining her movement vocabulary. In fact, in the piece O'Neal continues exploring a more minimalist approach than much of her work with locust, the company she's been choreographing for and co-directing since 2000. A short solo she has in the piece is expressly her attempt to see "how much I can say with very little," which she attributes to her experience studying in Japan while in residency at the US/Japan Choreographers Exchange in 2009.

That tension between minimal and explosive that drives her movement is even compacted in the non-company name inked on her foot. “[tinyrage] came from a moment with one of my best friends” who also has the tattoo, O’Neal tells me; it’s something she never though she’d do, get a matching mark of solidarity. “But,” she says, “it’s since become a reminder of own my anger as a woman, and [to] do something positive with that, to own that sort of restlessness."

"And plus I just really like the two words together,” she laughs. “And it’s not some big feminist thing or anything.”