Recent Stories with tag alice gosti

Alice Gosti and Devin McDermott in "Spaghetti Co." (Photo: Tim Summers)

Near the beginning of Alice Gosti's Spaghetti Co. (Something just happened at 1:19 p.m.) a big bowl of pasta with red sauce is just that...a big bowl of pasta with red sauce, probably very tempting if you showed up to the Northwest Film Forum prior to dinner--it's part of the Forum's "Live at the Forum" performance series and ends with an 8 p.m. show tonight, December 18.

But by the end, the food has transubstantiated: the pasta is a doughy yeastiness in the air, a slippery cushion on the floor, the red sauce a gouache over the canvas of the body. While the people in the front row have had occasion to use their protective trash bags, the people in the second row are primed to duck the occasional rogue strand that heads their way.

The three striking young women (Alice Gosti, Laara Garcia, Devin McDermott) gathered so decorously around the table--bright red lipstick, fingernails, toenails--have buried their faces in their plates, poured wine in torrents, grabbed handfuls of pasta from the serving bowl, and worried at huge bites like dogs with a bone. Their chic little white dresses (by Mark Ferrin) are stained, and they have pasta in their hair and between their toes. While it sounds like Gallagher, it's surprisingly deliberate in pace, and nuanced, illuminating both the beauty and comedy to pasta unfurling in flight through the air, while capturing facet after facet of the social matrix that spans the table. ... (more)

"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.... (more)

Dancer/choreographer/curator Alice Gosti organizes Modern Dance Behind the Pink Door, a quarterly performance tonight at the Pink Door.

Modern Dance Behind the Pink Door. Dancer/choreographer Alice Gosti's quarterly curated contemporary dance evening at the Pink Door is tonight. The line-up features work by Gosti herself, Morgan Nutt, Anh Nguyen, Rachel Randall, Maya Soto, Alix Isom, Rashelle McKee, Anh Nguyen, A K Mimi Allin, and Vanessa DeWolf. Admission's free, but the show's dinner theatre-style, so show up early to eat or just show up early to drink, because the place could be packed well before the 10:30 p.m. start.

ARC Dance's Summer Dance at the Center. ARC Dance, a rather talented contemporary ballet company from up north, returns to Seattle Rep's stage for "Summer Dance at the Center," a mixed-repertoire evening of work from choreographers including Betsy Cooper, Penny Hutchinson (of Mark Morris Dance Group), Jason Ohlberg (of Chicago's Hubbard Street Dance), and artistic director Marie Chong, among others. I saw last year's performance and loved it, and there's only two performances left tonight and tomorrow. (Tickets $15-$25)

Sounds Outside Festival. Wunderkind Beth Fleenor--a young woman as adept at promoting avant-garde music as she is she is composing and performing it--is the organizing and driving force behind the fifth annual Sounds Outside Music Festival this Saturday at Cal Anderson Park (another lineup goes up next month). Sounds outside, though, features a fantastic lineup of talented contemporary jazz composers and musicians, making for an awesome afternoon of chilling in the park. Starting at one in the afternoon, for free, you can catch a line-up including Non Grata, Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, Zubatto Syndicate, Wayne Horvitz/Sonny Clark Memorial Sextet, and NYC's Father Figures. The second half of the festival goes up in mid-August.

The Satori Group's "Making of a Monster," part of NW New Works at On the Boards. Photo by Tim Summers.

Last weekend I made the trek back to Seattle from New York and managed to catch both the studio showcase and mainstage shows at the NW New Works Festival at On the Boards. As I've said before, this really is one of the best events in town all year, and it was a fairly humbling experience to watch artists whose work I helped select (I was on the panel last fall) bring the pieces to fruition, to say nothing of the fact that we've covered the development of some of these pieces over the last year.

At least five of the works killed. Paul Budraitis presented 20 more minutes of Not. Stable. (At all.), which helped flesh out the piece along with the presentation at SPF 4 this last winter, and shows the direction the show will go as it approaches its evening length debut at OtB this coming winter. Mike Pham's I Love You, I Hate You was a deceptively funny performance that had the audience uncomfortably laughing at Pham's evocation of the downward spiral of internalized anger, public humiliation, and the cruel process of building oneself back up.

Lily Verlaine. Photo by Tim Summers.

On the mainstage, Amy O'Neal stripped down (literally and figuratively) with In the Fray, a new lo-fi solo work that saw her move away from the spectacles of Locust and explore something more personal; a woman wearing pasties has never looked more powerful and intimidating than O'Neal at the end, clutching a pink samurai sword. Mark Haim's This Land Is Your Land probably takes the cake for most commented on and most controversial, in the sense that reactions are fierce and divided. I loved it: for 20 minutes, a crew of dancers and non-dancers simply strut forward and backwards across the stage, with subtle changes at each passing. Haim's choreography is a bit like microscope slides: a relentlessly intent focus on a series of different details, inviting the audience to consider everything from the simple act of texting while walking to the ways in which different naked bodies move.... (more)

Jim Kent and Ellie Sandstrom in Scott/Powell Performance's "Home." Photo by Peter Mumford.

So yes, there's one big dance event this weekend that everyone's going to be paying attention to. But it would be a shame if that overshadowed a pair of shows from two of Seattle's own leading choreographers, each with an impressive resume of her own, as well as a site-specific performance early next week that deserves consideration in its own right.

First up, tonight is the opening night of Scott/Powell Performance's Home, at the Erickson Theatre off Broadway (tickets $12-$15). I have to admit, when I saw this piece in a shorter form last year at NW New Works, I had mixed feelings about it at best. But with a year's time to reflect, I've grown to appreciate Molly Scott's sculptural vision, mixing, as she does, both a choreographic and visual art approach to her work, which certainly showed in the piece's unique costuming and emphasis on subtle, repetitive movements.

Plus, extended to evening length, I imagine Home has lost most of the episodic feel that initially bothered me. And anyway, this piece features a remarkable line-up of dancers, including Beth Graczyk, Jim Kent, Jess Klein, Michael Rioux, Sean Ryan, Ellie Sandstrom, and Belle Wolf, the sort of people whose skill allows them to work wonders with subtlety.

Second, tomorrow night, choreographer and dancer Catherine Cabeen and Company is presenting an evening of mixed works called Form and Fluidity, at the Seattle Changing Room (tickets $15). Cabeen's a remarkable dancer and choreographer, as anyone who's seen her work knows. With her company and associated collaborators, Cabeen is exploring the "shifting intersections" between various means of communication, in a performance that promises to be charmingly intimate (the Changing Room is actually a yoga studio). Friday night is, unfortunately, already sold out, but tickets are still available for Saturday.

And finally, Tuesday, May 25, dancer and choreographer Alice Gosti is presenting a site-specific performance atop Kite Hill in Gasworks Park. Gosti, a dancer who, among other things, produces and curates the quarterly Modern Dance Behind the Pink Door series, is presenting DO While, performed by Gosti, Devin McDermott, and Meredith Mieko, explores "endlessness through body performance by juxtaposing physical endurance with spatial architecture." Set before the backdrop of the city at twilight, the costumes feature lit elements which track the artists' heartbeats, creating both a dramatic visual dynamic and a representation of the complex internal processes of the body. The performance is, of course, free to anyone who wants to come, but check back to its Facebook page, as this week's performance was effectively rained out due to mud.

On Sunday, Dec. 20, in a the back suite at 1017 10th Ave., with the music from Neumos--which shares its south wall with the space--thumping dully through the brick, dancer/choreographer Mônica Mata Gilliam brought to fruition a year-long project called You're Right Here with the last of six live performances.

Conceived more than a year before, You're Right Here was a web-based experiment that explored space and connectedness. With a friend and fellow dancer moving out of Seattle, Gilliam conceived of a online video project between the two artists. One would make a dance video, post it to the web, and the other would respond, creating a choreographic dialogue, to be posted on the project's website.

Eventually, Gilliam's main collaborator became dancer Alice Gosti, and the project was opened up to the rest of Seattle's dance community as an experiment in dialogue. So far, the project has generated a couple dozen videos and response, all posted blog-style at YoureRightHere.com.

The late-December performance, called Denying the Space Between Us, adapted bits of choreography from the videos submitted over the year (along with an original work by Paige Barnes). The space was divided into multiple settings: a kitchen, a hallway, a bedroom, a closet, and finally a vacant white space where Barnes' work was performed. The original videos appeared throughout the space, either in small, digital video picture frames or projected on the walls. Adding to the sense of digital dis/connectedness, the live performances were webcast through the project's website.

Although Gilliam completed her original concept by bringing the idea full-circle, back to a live performance, You're Right Here is continuing its web existence and a creative dialogue between local artists.