Tag Archives: Velocity Dance Center

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

At Velocity’s Strictly Seattle, Students Draw a Crowd

©Tim SummersVelocity Dance CenterStrictly Seattle 2013
©Tim SummersVelocity Dance CenterStrictly Seattle 2013
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Choreographer Ricki Mason's "There is no 'I' in Bride" (Photo: Tim Summers)

Choreographer Mark Haim's "...In Pieces" (Photo: Tim Summers)

Choreographer Marlo Martin's "Missing Pieces" (Photo: Tim Summers)

Choreographer Ellie Sandstrom's "Isolated Folds" (Photo: Tim Summers)

Choreographer Zoe Scofield's "eight" (Photo: Tim Summers)

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The three performances of Strictly Seattle at the Broadway Performance Hall last weekend were sold-out or close to it — always an impressive feat when it comes to contemporary dance, and even moreso if the student dancers range in skill from advanced to beginner.

It was part of Velocity‘s summer dance intensive, which brings dancers from all over the U.S. to Seattle. With Tonya Lockyer at the helm, Velocity has widened its already significant embrace of dance-makers in Seattle, maturing in its role as not simply a producer but an instigator of dance around Seattle, in public spaces as well at at the dance center on 12th Avenue.

Strictly Seattle offered students the chance to work with choreographers Ricki Mason, Mark Haim, KT Niehoff, Marlo Martin, Ellie Sandstrom, and Zoe|Juniper, and the results made for an eclectic evening.

Things started off with a champagne-cork bang, with Mason’s fizzy fantasia “There is no ‘I’ in Bride,” where everyone gets a chance at the veil and bouquet-toss in a music-video style opening. During the Flower Duet from Lakmé it becomes a Busby Berkeley scene, with dancers sliding their “catches,” posed, across the floor, or with the 20-plus-dancer ensemble flowing into pattern after pattern.

Mark Haim’s “…In Pieces,” which immediately followed, demanded an abrupt shift, built as it was on a score of excerpts from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?, usually insults accompanied by the sound of something breaking.  The dancers, costumed in Corrie Befort’s mid-20th-century Brit, appeared in trios and outcast solos. Haim’s choreography wasn’t violently representational (no hurled china) — it seemed nostalgic, even, for an era when people might have danced around their living room.

KT Niehoff’s “Tipping Point” happened almost entirely with the dancers sitting on the floor, their legs in a V in front of them. It’s a kind of programmatic dance, in four parts, with the fifteen dancers following a set of rules. Even if you don’t know that, it’s still an arresting piece because of its constraints — the dance takes place in the arms, torso, neck. As it built, first one dancer then another gained her feet to take up a bird-like posture, elbows out, head cocked and sweeping side to side.

Marlo Martin’s “Missing Pieces” opened with Kaitlyn Dye in a solo against a back wall — here the “against” refers to conflict, not a backdrop. Later came a kinetic duet — one partner almost climbed the other to soar then collapse on their shoulder, a hand encircled the back of a neck to herd the other along — that got picked up in a round that ran through the ensemble. The roar that went up for this fragmented, disjunctive piece rivaled that for Mason’s good-time opener.

Ellie Sandstrom’s “Isolated Folds” didn’t make that much of an impression of newness on me; that isn’t a complaint, just an excuse for not having much to say about it. It, like Zoe|Juniper’s “eight,” seemed of a piece with what we’ve seen from the choreographers previously. “eight” had that ritualistic-rave air to it, the dancers in different colored briefs and tops, with stark shadows on the wall. There was the over-the-head slicing with arms, the attempt to close the book with a deep focus on the beat. It felt good, like a concert you were hoping would be good.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

Getting In On the Ground Floor with zoe | juniper

A moment from zoe | juniper’s “No one to witness” (l-r) Erin McCarthy, Kim Lusk, Britt Karhoff — Zoe Scofield with back to camera (Photo: Joseph Lambert / Jazzy Photo)

Last Friday night, after a few Euros (shot of Fernet and a Radeberger) at St. John’s, I was lying flat on my back trying to keep the people I saw from spinning. I was having no luck, though, because I was watching a dance performance (of sorts: It was also an experiment, research, and rehearsal). Zoe | juniper‘s “No one to witness and adjust, Study #4” took place in a small studio at Velocity Dance Center — you signed up for a half-hour block ahead of time, and at the appointed time a guide appeared in the Velocity lobby.

She read off a list: Be quiet walking in. Lie down where you’re told. Don’t try to sit up. You can move your head, but try to keep arms and legs inside the ride at all times. Leave your shoes and other belongings in the hall, you can collect them afterward. (Allll right, you thought, conflicted. Lots of instructions, but the lying down seemed easy enough.) At the doorway, the dancers greeted the audience and showed them over to taped off sections of the floor, where they were to stretch out and rest their heads on small pillows. Then the music (which would have contained excerpts from some of the following: FUCK BUTTONS, Henryk Gorecki, Glenn Gould, Greg Haines, Morgan Henderson, Ryoji Ikeda, Loscil, Tito Ramsey) and dancing began.

Juniper Shuey was crouched at one end of the shoebox-shaped studio with a camera, and you at first thought he might be responsible for the video playing on the ceiling, but yes and no: It didn’t seem live, though he was likely the one to have processed and edited the dance pieces shown, along with cosmic interludes. Hanging from the ceiling were casts of body parts made by Derek Ghormley with Zoe Scofield: an upper torso, an arm, a small bit you didn’t recognize, a chunk of human.

Stepping around and between the bodies on the floor were the dancers, in white tops, black tights, and hands dyed red: Britt Karhoff, Kim Lusk, Erin McCarthy, and Zoe Scofield. The choreography came in bits (Scofield would say something like, Have we done this one yet?), and the dancers might start walking in circles around you, hitting slo-mo every third step. Arms drew back, were cocked, sliced the air.

One segment was particularly ballet-centric, though Scofield’s interests in ballet have often to do with its limits, rather than its perfected nature. Here she brushed out tendus with her feet, began then abandoned developpés at calf-height. Earlier, she’d been strolling with a little bounce to her walk, a small smile on her face.

From my vantage point, I could see only so much: McCarthy’s torso framed by Karhoff’s legs, for instance. But the floor brought dance into my bones, each footstep transmitting an impact I’d have underestimated from a chair’s comfort. Bodies loomed over me, developing strange perspectives. The air in the tiny studio grew thickly warm and Scofield paused to turn a fan on. Occasionally a dancer glanced at me and met my eyes, and if she was close, leaning over, it quickly became a little too soul-baringly uncomfortable — a few feet away, and we could have a moment of respectful recognition. Once, an audience member and I locked eyes, and she reddened and looked the other way.

At some point, I realized I felt like a baby on its back, flopping my head around to see what’s what, amazed at the height of everyone, and really began to enjoy myself immensely. It felt like I’d never seen dance before, never quite realized that articulation looked that way. It was almost impossible to critique dance this way since it didn’t conform to prior experience — I found myself  registering qualities, Karhoff’s friendly curiosity, the cool serenity from McCarthy, the shy lightness of Lusk, all of which would require revision in a succeeding segment.

I had to restrain myself from high-fiving the red hands that strayed into my field of view. Not to high-five, really, but to feel that palm’s movement. To carry it. Suddenly we were done.

These “chamber studies,” which began in October 2012, will culminate in BeginAgain, a larger piece coming March 2014 at On the Boards. (So far there’s been Kate&Zoe at City Arts Festival, No one to witness #2 at Frye Art Museum’s Moment Magnitude, and For Forgetting at The Goat Farm/gloAtl.) But just as plenty of studies now grace the walls of museums and galleries, these performances also have the opportunity to live on their own, in the minds and bodies of people who have participated in them.

Some in the performing arts believe that there is a “finished” product, and keep the curious away until opening night. That’s a model of a performer/audience relationship, but it’s not, certainly, the only one. My presence was literally an obstacle for the dancers, a disruption, but I think they sensed, from the response of others as well, that they were making dance with us, disruptively. It’s difficult often to tell people what you mean by modern dance, but in this sense, it’s easy: What’s modern is the willingness to push something out in public(s) before you think you’re ready, to iterate its development and use that feedback to develop further, to organize creativity rather than try to direct it.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

Three New Works Invite Repeated Viewing at Velocity’s SCUBA 2013

Green Chair Dance Group‘s Tandem Biking and Other Dangerous Pastimes for Two ends the SCUBA 2013 program at Velocity Dance Center (through April 28; tickets) but as they are visitors to Seattle, let’s talk about them first. That way we can get right into how they quirkily talk the audience through an “inside look” at a three-person dance troupe and their interpersonal dynamics.

That the explanations are often unclear, gnomic, or non sequiturs takes nothing from the earnest helpfulness with which they share the names of various pieces (“We Are Reasonable People,” “We Are Luscious People,” “We Are Desperate People”), announce the rationale for their order (the favorite one comes first), or instruct the audience that the games they’ll be playing, however, are “real” (immediately undercut by Sarah Gladwin Camp letting everyone in on the fact that de Keijzer’s game is wearing natural fabrics: cotton, organic cotton; while she, Gladwin Camp likes to play “Don’t Touch My Face,” a game inspired by the fact that she doesn’t like water or people touching her face, and which is indicated by her making a shuffling gesture of disdain with her hands and fingers).

Early on, Gregory Holt gets so carried away with his narration that he mansplains another dancer out of existence, dropping to the floor to show everyone what her dance is like. Dance is decentralized here — or, looked at another way, made so diffuse it permeates everything. Though the work begins with a polished, in-unison phrase that they bring back (seasonally, in swim wear and snow gear) — kicking prettily from a beach-blanket pose, jacking through a turn on their backs by swiveling their hips, hopping to their feet for some stepping — there are also extended, aggressive capoeira-esque bouts, “monument” building where bodies are placed on or jointed into other bodies, and de Keijzer’s contorted face and tongue “dance.”

Gladwin Camp mentions, of a Holt-de Keijzer duet, that it was, for her, like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. The tension inherent in Tandem Biking for a three-person group gives it both cohesive and propulsive force. De Keijzer says that she’s pretty sure they could all three handle being cooped up in one small room for years, so long as, on a rotating basis, one could leave to have some time alone. The flip-side of that is when one watches as the other two perform. Gladwin Camp emerges bundled up like the kid from A Christmas Story, and it’s both a metaphor for a sort of bruised tenderness, and not a metaphor at all, but a wintertime reality.

Maureen Whiting‘s About That Tree, with its painted-face dancers in tunics and pelts, seemingly living among or caught by the battered branches of a fallen tree, swiftly generates an atmosphere that, this particular year, might remind you of Rite of Spring‘s mythic primitivism. There’s not a lot of spring to be seen, though — the tree has fallen, and a bag of dusty, dead leaves is emptied onto the stage (costume and visual design are by Danii Blackwell and Jean Hicks). Music by Dave Abramson, Eyvind Kang, and Evan Schiller, in vastly different idioms, fits perfectly with the choreography for a 14-person ensemble.

When I saw an excerpt in rehearsal, Whiting was still determining if the “center would hold,” in terms of there being a focal point for the audience — 14 dancers is a lot to attend to. But she’s pulled it off without resorting to strict unison movement that might dampen the individuality expressed by her dancers. She uses breathing, and the sound of it, to move your attention; competing rhythms arise and generate a sort of group “breath” — or not. At one point, a dancer grabs the tree and holds a chunk aloft, another begins a solo with a sort of switch, another balances small branches on her shoulders, head, in the small of her back. The piece ends with a dancer, having grabbed the tree for herself, dropping it to let its clatter disrupt the breathy group communion.

This world premiere is a work you may want to see — and hear — a few times. There’s a poetic compression to it that leaves you wanting more.

Shannon Stewart’s An Inner Place That Has No Place (Photo: Tim Summers)

I had a similar feeling about the excerpt from Shannon Stewart‘s An Inner Place That Has No Place, which I saw an earlier version of a year ago. Here, what had been the last segment came first — dancers Meredith Horiuchi, Mary Margaret Moore, Aaron Swartzman, Rosa Vissers, and David Wolbrecht start off with a high-energy routine, complete with whoops of theoretic delight, that evokes a workout class’s slightly manic pace (music is by composer Jeff Huston).

Initially, the movements are both mechanically precise and slightly cliché, Broadway-musical-style, but then the dancers start shouting out icebreaker-style questions to each other about their pasts that get a litte intrusive (“Where did you lose your virginity?”) and as answers are given, the strict cohesion falters and they start interacting with each other with more idiosyncratic movement. But later, they’ll group around a single dancer and barrage him or her with questions, bumping up against, until the person seems to pass out, so it seems that perhaps moderation is key.

Behind the troupe, a striking video projection (courtesy filmmaker Adam Sekuler) shows them repeating into infinity — this later changes into an expanse of night sky that feels both beautiful and ominous, with a single dancer left. In a middle segment, the troupe poses for a series of memory-photographs, in ways that are both satirically funny (they look to be drunken party shots) and increasingly eerie, as the dancers’ expressions freeze into rictuses or slowly melt away. Even in excerpted form, the work packs a punch that you’re never quite ready for, as its set-ups veer off down unanticipated alleys.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

Dance a Shamanic Dance, this Weekend at Velocity

FOUNTAIN Trailer from Jeremy Wade on Vimeo.

February 15 and 16th at 8 p.m., Velocity Dance Center will try to achieve ecstasy. That doesn’t mean instigator-choreographer Jeremy Wade will, or even any single attendee. His piece Fountain is not about, primarily, what he or you gets out of it — it’s about the audience helping to create a charged atmosphere, and how his work as ” shaman, preacher, and fool” enables him to “receive and transform the energy” of those present.

Wade, American-born but living now in Berlin, graduated from Amsterdam’s School for New Dance Development in 2000, and ever since has been experimenting not simply with the hoary notion of “audience participation,” but with what amounts to live choreography. That is, there’s not a dance event that the audience, on the periphery, participates in; the audience performs the event. It’s a roundabout way to rediscovering the power of ritual. As Wade explained in an interview:

At the same time I was reading about the Buddhist Tantric practice called tonglen. Tonglen is like a compassionate science in which the object is to breathe in the pain and suffering of another and to exhale love and compassion. I became super fascinated with this and also these loving-kindness practices, and so I integrated it one night into one of the group experiences, and then this ended up becoming FOUNTAIN.

It’s always risky to put, truly, the audience at the center of a work because on any given night, the audience may not make that swerve toward ecstasy. (This is something that happens in the music business virtually every night, as musicians are all too familiar.) It’s Wade’s role to confront the obstacles that might get in the way, the distracted self-consciousness, the refusal to surrender to the moment.

He’s familiar with all that — as he said in the same interview: “I wasn’t a trained dancer, and I basically learned how to work with my body through failure and awkwardness and learning to embrace that.” All of this enters a space when you have a crowd learning and expressing themselves through dance, and Wade tries to embody that — he literally breathes it in, carries it, and hopes to give it back changed.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

At Velocity’s Next NW, Dance Runs the Gamut

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"9andOne" (Photo: Tim Summers)

"9andOne" (Photo: Tim Summers)

"Hour Hand" dancer/choreographer Molly Sides (Photo: Tim Summers)

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Almost all of the dance works at the Next NW 2012 festival (at Velocity Dance Center through December 9; tickets) feature a movement or a tableau that seem to lodge themselves in you, like a good short story will. The six pieces are limited to 12 minutes each, so there’s a similar constraint, though you never see the same thing twice.

It might be the time of year, but a twilight eerieness (Amiya Brown’s lighting) infused more than a few works. Paris Hurley’s installation in the bar — she stands half-dressed in a bathtub, up to her knees in potting soil, while a video monitor shows a trickle of blood down a breast, being wiped away but reappearing — was unsettling. Sarah Butler’s mammoth playing-card-structure out front (30 decks, I think she said), which she built while doing the splits, seemed more cheerful in this context.

“9andOne” took a mythic approach to the theme of Real/Time, with a trio of gold-painted dancers (Ariana Bird, Matt Drews, Micaela Taylor) connected by strings from their navels to a fourth (Alia Swersky), who at times tugged at them as if the strings were reins, and was at times pulled into the trio’s midst.

The choreography by Babette McGeady, sinuous and tension-filled, incorporated the strings into cat’s-cradle formations, and also had the dancers appear to pull the strings directly through their midsection. The trio is topless and their appearance is statue-like, but except for one weightless coupling (Bird braces herself via Drews’ down-stretched arms while her legs wrap around his middle), they’re full of life and emphatically rolled shoulders.

In “Hour Hand,” choreographer and dancer Molly Sides appeared in a cloud of smoke-fog, for an almost Graham-esque piece in which the dancer tries mainly to inhabit the movements. The result is performance, a dance for an audience, but it also feels like a ritual of sorts. To a tick-tick-tick rhythm, Sides begins small, with a stair-stepping stasis walk (up on toes, then down), then the upper body joins in, along with quickly retraced side-steps. She moves throughout the space, showing you what she’s doing now…and now…and now.

“Diane” is the work from Shannon Stewart (with Mary Margaret Moore) that I previewed earlier. Watching it makes you want to go back and review David Lynch’s work as choreography — Stewart has drawn the movements from the first 30 minutes of Fire Walk With Me. Moore is unfolded, in dead-bodyweight splats, from a sheet of plastic.

Stewart and Moore trade consciousness in a tricky, compelling duet (involving two chairs) where one slumps as the other wakes. Stewart sweeps one chair around just as Moore reclines onto it — the timing has to be (and is) perfect. Three back-up dancers (Meredith Horiuchi, Jan Trumbauer, Rosa Vissers), all dressed to Lynchian nines, slowly enter and retreat through two doorways at either side — they shudder or make phone calls. Near the end, everyone enters the space, and as the lights slowly, slowly fade and Adam Sekuler’s wind vocals blow, they become a forest of untrustworthy trees.

Erica Badgeley’s “(earthworm)” featured Badgeley on a short bench, in a tank top and jeans, painted silver up to her neck. With her hands held a slight distance over her knees, she slowly, smoothly opened and shut her knees, before getting up and, using one arm, adjusting her body into new configurations, doll-like. In addition to music by Benjamin Marx, there are mutterings and rhythmic breaths by Maiah Manser that Badgeley responds to: She might, flat on her back on the floor, form a contracted U in time with the breaths.

Finally, Badgeley returns to a pool of liquid red (paint), drawn to it, one arm out, a finger extended, drawn back, thrust forward again. Then she’s in the paint, hands and feet leaving tracks as she moves away on all fours. Suddenly she turns back, rolling in red. It ‘s hard to tell how we got here, but it is gripping.

“TRE (2nd movement)” is a dance by Markeith Wiley + The New Animals that I am still pondering. Three dancers (Jamie Karlovich, Molly Sides, Calie Swedberg) are dressed in three different colored tops. The movement looks abstract, at first. Karlovich runs in circles, freezes in a fists-balled runner’s pose. But then two dancers keep initiating contact. One will line up behind the other, mimicking an upward reach; moving past, one will catch the other’s arm. It doesn’t seem to come to anything. They’re as likely to fall to the floor and begin a short core-strength routine.

Raja Feather Kelly (aka The Feath3r Theory) closed the program; the work bears a title whose length would make Fiona Apple catch her breath, and I refuse to type it all out. Let’s call it “25 Cats” for short (which is, by the way, a Warhol reference), though it also includes this song title and notes what’s known as “the 7-minute lull.” Tissues atop softball-sized balls hang from fishing line like little satellites.

Kelly, though he’s an accomplished and magnetic dancer, seems more interested here in imperfection and failure. In a light-green-to-platinum wig, a red T-shirt, and blue briefs, he dances out a portrait of someone in another world. It’s a disjointed piece energetically (with music by Michael Wall and Tito Ramsey) — he is listless, then briefly inspired. He sinks to the floor and stares off into space (a lull). At one point, he dances out invisible boxes on the floor, again and again. He leaps into the air in a spin. He exits with the music still playing, as if tired of improvising, mouthing the words “thank you.”

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

This Weekend, Velocity Dance Has Got Next

Next NW 2012: Real/Time is this weekend, December 7 to 9, only (at Velocity Dance Center; tickets), and brings you, as Velocity often does, a collection of new experiments from an intriguing cross-section of the dance scene. The festival continues, on screen, at Next Dance Cinema on Monday, December 10 (at Northwest Film Forum; tickets), with even more participants, including the irrepressible Alice Gosti. (A kick-off party-slash-benefit, Velocity Is Burning, is December 6.)

On the choreographer side for Next NW, you have Shannon Stewart, thefeath3rtheory (Raja Kelly), Babette McGeady, Erica Badgeley, Molly Sides, Sarah Butler, and Paris Hurley + Markeith Wiley’s The New Animals. They’re collaborating with a host of composers and visual artists, such as Tito Ramsey, Benjamin Marx, William Hayes, Barry Sebastian, Derek Ghormley, Jeff Huston, and Adam Sekuler and John Niekrasz.

I’d had a chance to see one of Stewart’s collaborations with Huston and Sekuler, “An Inner Place That Has No Place,” in April, and its appeal has only grown in my memory. (That work is returning to Velocity in April 2013, as Stewart’s part in the SCUBA tour.) By way of a preview, I met up with her at rehearsals at Velocity, to discuss what her new work would explore, in 12 minutes or less. It turned out to be David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me.

Rehearsal featured Stewart talking to her dancers about how to act when “the narrative of what we’re doing starts to disintegrate,” and teaching them how to be creepy Northwest trees. “It’s the air moving your branches,” she told them, and they practiced feeling gnarled.

A cold November rain had the Kawasaki studio’s skylight sounding like a snare drum, and that and a 4 p.m. twilight conspired to bring back in a rush what was so eerie about Twin Peaks, as Stewart and her dancers took on the characters of FBI agents drinking coffee, stern and glaring older women, a traumatized high school girl. A wordless chorus smoked languorously, put a hand up in self-defense, retreated.

It’s not at all an accident that so much of the dance reads like Lynch’s movie, because, as Stewart explained, when she saw it years ago, she made a a visceral connection to Lynch’s project — here was something so like dance, unable or unwilling to put itself into words precisely, but instead of courting the audience’s interest, it piled mystery upon mystery. It met small town melodrama, and murder, with a cool distance, less an investigation than an improvisation, a provocation. The dance was with your expectations.

A blurry Shannon Stewart in rehearsal (Photo: MvB)

Stewart was struck particularly by the way Lynch reversed foreground and background — the Northwest gloom, its emotional textures, became a character, and the characters became the scenery. Taking Lynch, or what she knows about him, as a starting point, she began to ask herself what his process would be like. In the event, she’s borrowed his movement vocabulary from the first 30 minutes, and made something new.

(At the same time, Stewart, who studied with Deborah Hay over the summer, is working on developing another piece — or not, leaving room for honorable failure — that arises from following Hay’s practice daily. Giving herself over to these two influences, she hopes, will help advance her discovery of her personal choreographic style.)

The drum solo that the dancers had to learn went 6 beats, 5 beats, 8, 6, 13, 7, 3. People kept visibly slipping into a trance surprised by that fleeting coda. “Complicated counting,” supposed Stewart, is her way on contrasting cold on hot, not letting the audience find a safe “place” to observe.

In the film that she and Sekuler have in Next Dance Cinema, 1922, a Steadicam roves through an empty old house; it’s an observer and dancer, creating a space from its single vantage point. Stewart says something about how the audience will “metabolize” what it sees. It’s also about memory, its rewards and ruts, and about how to move from one space into another. “The challenge of contemporary work,” she mused, partly to herself, “is to push forward. A finished style isn’t helpful.”