Tag Archives: Velocity Dance Center

Full Bravado, Booty, and Skill

October 19, 2012 Courtney Meaker

It takes bravado to name a show “The Most Innovative, Daring, and Original Piece of Dance/Performance You Will See This Decade.” Which may be the same amount of bravado it takes to use this title also as a tongue-in-cheek recognition of how originality in that sense doesn’t truly exist, but still make a case for why we continue to watch amazing new works.

The conceit is that current art is inspired by previous artists and movements and collaged together to make it uniquely part of the artist’s aesthetic. Amy O/tinyrage (through Oct 21 at Velocity Dance Center; tickets) uses this thesis for a dance/performance dedicated to all the artists who inspire her work. And not only is the idea wonderfully worked out, it totally works as performance.

Set up as a series of exhibits, Amy O explores how we interact with forms of movement including the YouTube videos and dance expressions that we don’t want to like but totally do anyway. Yes. Even booty dances and stripper poles influence how we approach dance/performance and art in general. Set up with three gorgeous screens for video projections and a small plexiglass stage with neon lights underneath, Amy O commands the space.

Particular exhibits of note included an interpretation of the choreography of Ciara’s “Ride” video–a video, Amy O admits afterwards through video projections, that simultaneously makes you want to make out with someone and rant about the stereotypical depictions of women. (She does both.)

The booty dance exhibit dominated the performance and was by far the most memorable. It features video of person-on-the-street interviews asking questions about how you view your butt: What do you think qualifies as a booty dance? Do you like the booty dance? Do you like butts? Is your butt useful, and so forth. Not only were these interviews hysterical–some ended in some fairly impressive demonstrations of booty rocking–but some of them were surprisingly touching, and some creepy. Turns out when you ask a bunch of people about their own and others’ butts they can’t stop talking.The variety of experience collaged into an riotous exhibit replete with a communal booty dance led by Amy O with a few presumed plants from the audience.

And then, there’s the pole dance. Okay, let me just say that drooling is unbecoming in an establishment like Velocity Dance Center. People look at you funny. They think you uncouth, uneducated. But damn. There is an art to pole dancing, especially in two-and-a-half-inch clear plastic stiletto heels that light up when you walk. (Just don’t leave your mouth open while appreciating this on its artistic merits. You’ll look a mess.)

In essence, where Amy O shines is in her use of what we commonly think of as either solely erotic or solely artistic. Amy O blurred this wonderfully with her exploration of some of the most sexual forms of dance and showing you how they are artforms.

Due in part to a year-long workshop process at Velocity, Amy O has created a potent piece, edited skillfully to lead us from one moment to the next building to the BIG ONE. The concluding exhibit dedicated to all the family, artists, collaborators that inspired her in her performance history including everyone from Janet Jackson, Pina Bausch, Martha Graham, and Pat Graney. Having witnessed the preceding building blocks, the final exhibit is truly extraordinary with a little bit of everything thrown in. Nods to hip hop, opera, pole dancing, booty dancing, ballet, and all in between, the final exhibit showcases Amy O’s incredible talent as a performer.

Not surprisingly, this show is sold out for its second weekend. However, if you get to the box office door by 7:30 p.m., you can see if you can snag some elusive walk-up seats.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

Reading “Turbulence,” Keith Hennessy’s Dance About the Economy

September 27, 2012 Michael van Baker

Emily Leap and Seattle guest artist Markeith Wiley in Turbulence at Velocity (Photo: Tim Summers)

Keith Hennessy's Turbulence at Velocity (Photo: Robbie Sweeney)

The human pyramid in Keith Hennessy's Turbulence at Velocity (Photo: Robbie Sweeney)

Keith Hennessy's Turbulence at Velocity becomes a dance party (Photo: MvB)

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Nothing in Turbulence, the largely improvised movement piece from Keith Hennessy and friends, confronts you with anything like that moment in Crotch (all the Joseph Beuys references…) when he has to sew bystanders (their clothing) to his skin with red thread.

But something else happened during the performance at Velocity Dance Center that was perturbing in its own right.

The “only nonimprovised piece in the show” is the building of a human pyramid, with the performers and volunteer audience members stripped down to underwear or nudity. They have hoods made of a shiny gold cloth on. Given that “Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine” are the first five words in Hennessy’s program note, it would be difficult not to see a reference to Abu Ghraib here.

What kind of reference is wide open, but it was a shock to hear how gleefully the audience responded, cheering and encouraging the participants as knees and elbows wobbled, palms slid. Despite the hoods, despite the evident point being exhausted collapse, the audience (generally speaking) seemed to want to treat it as simply a cheer pyramid, a test of endurance. (Perhaps one or two guards did, too, it occurred to me. Remember when a few pundits compared it to hazing?)

There’s no “right” way to respond to a human pyramid, of course–but this was proof that Hennessy had succeeded, it seemed to me, in getting the audience involved as an improvisational partner. (In Portland, there was a Champagne slip ‘n’ slide that brought hipsters into a playground of excess. So, involved, or complicit.)

He told Culturebot: “People have to enter it poetically or that won’t happen. If they’re just waiting for the content to arrive it won’t happen.” (You get confirmation of that from this upset review, which includes the line, “I am very patient with these things!!”) He’s done what he can.

You wander in to something already happening, a “fake healing” involving dancers laying on hands, setting objects on top of audience members, manipulating their limbs. People are gently invited to join (I turned my person down because I wouldn’t be able to see what was going on), and it’s explained why it’s fake (“There’s nothing wrong with you”) and how it helps people open up a little to what’s going on, even if they’re just watching other people being open.

There’s no need to justify what Hennessy is up to, since getting out of that box is part of the project. (In fact the set is mainly splayed-open cardboard boxes.) Turbulence is supposed to (like the economy isn’t but does) fail. The other ur-text here is Judith Halberstam‘s Queer Art of Failure, which talks about refusing normative values and practices.

Hennessy queers dance, then, your expectations of it (or of performance art) and pursues what looks like a terrible idea, because how can dance be about the economy…and be good? (Coincidentally, you can go see another dance about the economy at Pacific Northwest Ballet, Cinderella. It’s about as normative and representational as things get, to the extent that nothing about the economics that creates penniless serving girls registers.)

Despite occasional outbursts, Hennessy and his troupe–Julie Phelps, Emily Leap, Laura Arrington, Jesse Hewit, Jorge Rodolfo De Hoyos, Hana Erdman, Gabriel Todd, Ruairí O’Donovan, Empress Jupiter, Jassem Hindi, with special Seattle guests Markeith Wiley and Joan Hanna–largely refuse the prospect of arguing with the economy. What happens is somatic, the experience of the body. There’s a scratched-up, staticky soundtrack, dj’d live, that is more about the feeling of the words than the content.

People pair up, or antagonize each other, or tangle furiously. If two dancers practice linking themselves, their weight counterpoised, a third will jump in. Throughout, the dancers swap clothing, stripping down and dressing back up. A trapeze set becomes the setting for blind, hooded, acrobatic feats–though the climb to the top is always greeted with the question of where to go from there.

Dancers move among the audience members, sometimes shouting out to those on the floor, sometimes having semi-private conversations. A gold sheet is produced, and passed over audience members like they’re playing under the covers. No one is likely to have the same experience: There are too many rings in this circus to attend to all of them. You can pay attention to the dancer screeching and masturbating, or you can look elsewhere.

For somatic poetry on economic collapse, though, it’s hard to beat when Hennessy, sitting on cardboard and talking about bitterness and anger, also reveals that the dancer sitting next to him has peed his underpants, and they’re all sitting in it. So much is contained in this: the stench of homelessness, animal fearfulness, the way this more ignoble (than blood) bodily fluid unites us, contaminates us. If you bother to think back to when thousands of people were losing their jobs weekly, you’ll smell the piss-stink again.

A quote attributed to feminist scholar Peggy Phelan pulls some of these strands together:

Love, despite its toxicity and violence, can bring us closer to the possibility of expressing human tenderness. If one is ambitious enough to want to create a shared history, then one must be willing to risk an impossible dance, one that pivots on a desire to outmuscle exhaustion, a desire alive to our wavering capacities to bestow and receive responses, and an apparently insatiable desire to question these capacities and what motivates and blocks them, repeatedly.

The ending is individual; once the improv list has been completed, you’re invited to stay, come down off the bleachers. Some people formed another human pyramid. Many more joined in a dance party that Hennessy decided to turn into super-slow-motion. A few stood around and talked. A conga line formed.

Turbulence may be meant to fail, but I don’t regret the time I was there, watching it refuse to amount to much, at least by some standards. It was a transient blip, in the greater scheme of things, but it created its own peculiar space while it existed. And if you think of healing in terms of wholeness, its ability to give you back the humanity in a human pyramid, the effervescence of an economic slide (both banished, we all had to pay somehow) is remarkable.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

Velocity’s SCUBA Brings Flour, Forks, and Transfiguration

May 5, 2012 Michael van Baker

“Like a Sun That Pours Forth Light But Never Warmth” is the brightly ominous title of Allie Hankins‘s dance at SCUBA (through May 6 at Velocity Dance Center; tickets), and she delivers strange goods as promised.

Her solo performance is at once theatrical, light playing on surfaces, and introspective, with unseen voids. With the iconic Nijinsky, Hankins begins a choreographic correspondence, borrowing his roles to write back with.

The work opens with Hankins bolting from the audience aisle upstage to a doorway into which she vanishes, and the lights go out. It’s just long enough for you to notice that she’s topless, in flesh-colored tights. Next she appears kneeling with her back to the audience, on a long red curtain-carpet. She arches backwards.

Cut again to her stage left, dappling shoulders with gold, her face a mask. Once more she exits, dashes back into the space. To Ravel’s “Bolero,” she repeats a formally precise set of slicing movements, before simply turning to jump (Nijinsky-like, one imagines) on the drum beats, a feat that becomes climactic.

All of this is mesmerizing, of a part with Hankins’s ongoing interest with what she calls the “betrayals” of the body. Dancing topless exposes one of those betrayals, I suspect. Though she’s slicked back her hair, and has the musculature for jumps with hang-time, Hankins doesn’t strap down her breasts. Women at intermission talk about the impact of it–you know, it’s just not done. They get in the way, distract. It’s not everyday you see someone embody an argument, and Hankins does, though it’s made more powerful by the suspicion that this is equally a challenge to herself.

Though SCUBA is about a cross-country network of dance presenters helping emerging choreographers tour and find new audiences for their work, this time around the ferment and eclecticism of Seattle’s dance scene means that there are two Seattle entries of the three on the bill. Alice Gosti’s Spaghetti Co. has been fascinating The SunBreak since 2010. Previously, Gosti problematized the dinner table.

BridgeAlice21 — Spaghetti Co.'s "I always wanted to give you a pink elephant" (Photo: Tim Summers)

In “I always wanted to give you a pink elephant,” it’s the living room that becomes a battlefield. During intermission, the dancers (Chantael Duke, Anh Nguyen, Devin McDermott, Any Ross, Markeith Wiley) came out to sit down on the sofa and get sifted with flour, but the piece opens with just McDermott and Gosti, in slips and half-light, dancing, grappling, hugging, collapsing, while the rest of the troupe sings TLC’s “Creep” (about ignored infidelity) a capella from beneath the risers the audience sits upon.

When the song ends, they emerge, crawling out to the “living room” and begin a twitchy, floury dance that turns the floor slippery, occasionally assembling into family portraits on the sofa. There’s jockeying for position, Nguyen tries to leave, but is hauled back, hands that might seem innocently resting on her shoulders now holding her in place. Gosti picks again and again at something in her mouth, like a stray hair. The group collapses inward. Entropy takes their careful poses, again and again. The floury air makes a few people cough.

There’s not really somewhere “to go” with this, so it peters out eventually, but let’s face it, family dynamics never resolve, not really–this is what Gosti captures with her poses that can’t be held, and reconfigurations. Spaghetti Co., of the local troupes I’ve seen, I rate most likely to be a cult in disguise–a good thing, in this instance, because the dynamics between all the members are so vividly realized. You believe in this fractious unit before you.

From Philadelphia came Gabrielle Revlock and her “A Fork and Stick Thing.” Curiously, the note on Velocity’s site that the work was inspired “by watching birds respond to hip hop music” was not reprinted in the program, which seems an odd omission.

It’s a sui generis piece no matter how you take it; the dance movements are performed to an assembled spoken-word soundtrack (Jacob Mitas and Justin Moynihan) that modulates from word-salad to occasional lines of lucidity. Revlock and her colleague Kristel Baldoz, dressed in raw silk from JRochelle designs, spend most of their time on the floor, shooting out their arm-wings on the word “time,” and once or twice hopping on each other’s back.

The idiosyncrasy of the movement (slow backward somersaults that might break right or left, the impression of ruffling feathers) keeps you entranced, even as you try to decipher the sliced-up lines. Again, it is hard to say where this should lead, or how it should end. Presumably birds keep right on being birds even after the hip hop wanders off.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance, Theatre

Fear and Queer with Cherdonna and Lou

April 16, 2012 Courtney Meaker

In terms of Seattle theatre, I try to adhere to two rules: 1) I never waste my time with a show that adds nothing to the current cultural mythology (see: Neil Simon), and 2) I never miss an opportunity to see queer performance.

Lucky for me, I attended the one night only show of Cherdonna and Lou‘s out out there (A Whole Night Lost) at Velocity Dance Center, which satisfied both.

Working from the concept of fear (and using a Friday the 13th performance to their advantage) Jody Kuehner and Ricki Mason (Cherdonna and Lou, respectively) created a genre-mixed gang bang that simultaneously terrified and tickled. Dressed in their typical drag personas and monster masks, and at one point, performing nude, they melted elements of Hollywood horror and atypical fears with dance, humor, politics, and queer theory (Yes, I’m about to stand on my “Queer performance theory is awesome” soapbox, see below) for one truly incredible night of performance.

The entire evening balanced what we commonly think of as horror (monsters, stabbings, running from an attacker) to uncategorized fears (not being able to screw a lid on a jar and making out with a bust of one’s own head). Additional threateningly comedic bits like impending darkness and bottles broken over heads, balanced with political fears like anyone dictating what a person can do with her own damn body.

Also addressing performance fears Cherdonna and Lou froze in their light unsure of their next line, or movement piece, and wallowed in that uncomfortable moment audience and performer feel together when the performer does nothing but stand and stare blankly.

Later, Lou’s light blacked out prompting another moment of uncertainty about what comes next, which naturally progresses into a lip-synced closing number of “Send in the Clowns.” Naturally.

But rather than alienating, these fears brought the audience into the dreamlike consciousness of two unique perfomers. The soundscape, expertly designed by Matt Starritt, added to the dreamlike quality by aurally mixing laughing/screeching children with sounds of heavy breathing and running, the sharp sounds of metal on glass, and a trippy echo when Lou calls out for a missing Cherdonna.

Cherdonna and Lou’s ballet in monster masks was utterly terrifying as they creeped closer and closer to the audience. And their dance with collapsible knives as they stabbed themselves and one another was hypnotic. This dance was heightened to absurdity when Cherdonna came forward to warn the audience about the knives on stage. (Knives are dangerous, you know. Even butter knives.)

Beyond the performance itself were the milestones of these characters. Most notably, Lou did not perform with the typical BenDeLaCreme voiceover the audience has come to expect. By owning her own voice, Mason has taken the character of Lou that much farther down the queer road by performing as dude, but having an effeminate voice, calling into question assumptions about presenting masculine, being masculine, and what exactly is masculine?

Kuehner (a female-identified drag queen) uses her facial expressions and drag queen make-up to add to these questions as well, presenting a feminine character under the paint and pomp of a typically gay male persona. Ultimately, they have continued to queerify and grow these characters to push past caricature, which in turn makes for better comedy and showcases their indomitable skills as dancers and performers.

Cherdonna and Lou cannot be categorized. They are dancers, make no mistake, but also artists, drag performers, comedians, actors and all that lies between, making their performances all the more interesting and compelling to watch because you can’t guess where they’ll move next, or exactly how they’ll get there.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

Catherine Cabeen’s Hyphen Will Leave You Breathless

March 23, 2012 Michael van Baker 2 Comments

5 Windows, choreography Catherine Cabeen, performers Catherine Cabeen and Kane Mathis (Photo: Tim Summers)

Composites, choreography Catherine Cabeen, performer Catherine Cabeen (Photo: Tim Summers)

Gravitas, choreography Catherine Cabeen, performers Karena Birk and Brian Chin (Photo: Tim Summers)

On the Way Out, choreography Catherine Cabeen, dancer Sarah Lustbader (Photo: Tim Summers)

All of the Above, choregraphy Catherine Cabeen, performers Brenna Monroe-Cook, Karena Birk, Ella Mahler, and Sarah Lustbader (Photo: Tim Summers)

Cabeen in rehearsal (Photo: MvB)

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Catherine Cabeen is, at what seems to me a young age, a significant choreographer and, colloquially, a smartypants. Her MFA from the University of Washington centered on 20th century history and feminist theory, and locally, she belongs in that group of dance makers (other names jumping to mind are Spectrum’s Donald Byrd, Whim W’Him’s Olivier Wevers, Salthorse’s Beth Graczyk and Corrie Befort) whose works tend to engage their audiences in a battle of wits.

“Battle” might be too confrontational; “wits” too specific. Said another way, Cabeen’s choreography treats your brain as an erogenous zone.

In Hyphen (through March 24 at Velocity Dance Center; tickets: $20), you also get the pleasure of watching Cabeen herself perform in her new work “5 Windows” and an encore of “Composites.” In the latter, particularly, you get to see the twin currents of choreography (Martha Graham and Bill T. Jones) that appear so prominently in Cabeen’s dance history: The dance is set to music by Julian Martlew and a fascinating spoken word performance by Jay McAleer (at least, it’s his text, I’m assuming that he’s reading the bulk of it).

As Michael Upchurch writes in the Seattle Times, Cabeen took things a step further than you might have expected, devising “a ‘phonetic movement vocabulary’ that corresponds to the sounds of McAleer’s words.” It’s not the sort of thing that necessarily “reads” to an audience, consciously, but, watching Cabeen, you do feel spoken to in gesture. You sense a complementarity to what you’re hearing. And every inch of Cabeen is expressive, from the shape of and tension in her fingers and toes, to a sinuous wave kicking up as if from the pelvic floor, to her fondness for arabesques forced past the pretty.

In “Composites,” her phonetic approach yields a quick-paced, punchy–sometimes martial–declarative stance, while McAleer references the fact that prior to 1883, railroads had to deal with up to 150 different time zones in the U.S., since many localities used “local solar time.” (Assembling the many into fewer is a theme of composites.) The result is incredibly chewy, rumination-friendly choreography.

“5 Windows” unites Cabeen with composer and accomplished oud musician Kane Mathis. It begins with him seated on a small bench, Cabeen prone on the floor in front, then arising with a cat-like stretch. There’s also something feline in the way–anyone with a home office and a cat will recognize it–she incorporates Mathis into her choreography even though it is clear that he is busy doing something that requires attention. Cabeen doesn’t simply circle around Mathis, she balances her leg on his, perches one-legged behind him, frets her arm in imitation of his playing, and even reaches through his arm to strum the oud, one-fingered, herself.

Twice, Mathis glances up and offers his hand–the timing required is to the second–to a falling-away Cabeen. At other times, Cabeen moves across the floor from Mathis, only occasionally glancing his direction from under lidded eyes, and dances out something between ritual and reverie, with that compellingly precise articulation she possesses.

There’s not much to look at besides the dance, at Velocity; sometimes curtains are pulled into use, but it’s the lighting by Amiya Brown that recasts the space: sometimes in sharp rectangles, sometimes lights steadily diminishing into shadows.

In “All of the Above,” Cabeen switches gears a bit. For a quartet of dancers (Karena Birk, Brenna Monroe-Cook, Ella Mahler, Sarah Lustbader), the piece reminded me strongly of what a yoga class led by bonobos might look like. I don’t want that to sound deprecating; the effect is like an oxytocin dance-bomb. The quartet, pairing off, roll over each other, form lean-tos that a third climbs upon, spoon, and always respectfully touch, touch, touch. Every interaction seems greeted with a slight smile, an appreciation, a “thank you for being here.” In a sort of counterpoint, there’s a recurring movement where a dancer slowly threads one outstretched leg through the curved ankle of the other. The music by Nat Evans and Ross Simonini speaks to the fun observed.

“On the Way Out” and “Gravitas” are, perhaps, the most like exercises, a working out of a “What if?” Both are new. The first is a solo for Sarah Lustbader, and is site specific, making use of an upstage doorway at Velocity. Kane Mathis makes beautiful music on the kora, with what looked like thumb- and forefinger-picking technique, while views of Lustbader are cropped by the doorway. Cabeen says she was thinking about how a camera sees dance, but as I say, she can easily think about two things at once, and her choreography charges the liminal space, with Lustbader pressing up against the frame, conforming to it and springing back. It’s a kind of pas de deux with the audience’s desire to see her.

“Gravitas” features a trumpet composition by Chad McCullough, performed by Brian Chin, with emphasis on the range of trumpet noises we think of as correct, and those considered extraneous. You hear a lot more breathiness, squeaking, and falling off from the trumpet’s clarion sound, before Chin gathers himself to step up and play. His efforts are mirrored by Karena Birk’s–she hops, skips, and jumps about the stage (in addition to some strenuous arm swinging), circles the stage with Chin, and then does it all again. If the technique is balletic, it’s mostly low-orbit, a display of Birk’s invisible coiled springs and flashing footwork, rather than grand, gazelle-like leaps. The growing risk of fatigue shadows each kinetic burst.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

11 Minutes of Jumping & More at Catherine Cabeen’s Velocity Dance Show

March 21, 2012 Michael van Baker

This story first appeared at the Capitol Hill Seattle blog, because Justin is always pestering MvB for Capitol Hill arts stories.

IMGP5892 — Catherine Cabeen and Kane Mathis in rehearsal (Photo: MvB)

Last week I pulled up a chair in the Kawasaki studio at Velocity Dance Center, where choreographer Catherine Cabeen, dancer Sarah Lustbader, and musician/ composer Kane Mathis were busy rehearsing their parts for Cabeen’s 2012 “Hyphen” dance program (March 22-24 at VDC, tickets: $20).

This is going to be different kind of program than her previous multimedia spectacle “Into the Void” at Queen Anne’s On the Boards, Cabeen informed me. In Velocity’s more intimate space, it’s all about the dance and the dancers, offering a more visceral communion with the works: expect music and heaving breaths with sprayed sweat, at least in the front row.

The relationship of music and dance is a theme of the evening, of sorts, as Cabeen explained that one of the three world premieres that Catherine Cabine & Co. is presenting, “On the Way Out,” is choreographed site specifically: Mathis performs on the kora, but he’s “out of the pit” (as Cabeen puts it), situated up front while Lustbader’s dancing is seen only through doorways at the end of room.

“Everyone has a partial-view seat” for this one, said Cabeen. “We think we see the ‘whole’ dancer, usually, but we don’t. This piece makes that explicit.”

When I was settled at the recent rehearsal, Cabeen and the fiendishly talented Mathis, playing the oud, started with “5 Windows,” which Cabeen calls a duet, and exploration of “Ottoman musical structures in a contemporary visual and sonic context.” (As you can see from the photo, Cabeen’s extensions are remarkable.) Some of what is interesting to Cabeen, as a choreographer–the novelty of working with 10-beat music–may slip by the casual viewer. I can’t count beats to save my life, I always lose my place, but I do savor that rigorous, yet labile Graham technique.

The two together, Cabeen and Mathis, come to form a sort of split-screen view of music and dance, or, more figuratively perhaps, of a musician’s soul, in an out-of-body experience, made visible–the interplay between attending to, and immersion in.

“My biggest fear,” said Cabeen to Mathis, “Is that when I go to put my foot on your knee, I’m going to kick it.” There was also a question of where Mathis’s toes should be, prompting a call for a toe understudy.

Because of the oud, my mind kept suggesting Eastern associations — was that a hint of something in the hip flex? — but chatting with Cabeen after, I learned she had consciously avoided trying to incorporate region-specific dance elements, (not wanting to be the latest white girl to appropriate the exotic, I suppose). Instead, she wanted to evoke the music’s “sacred geometry” in space, with spirals, crossings, figure-eights.

Another new work, Gravitas, set on Karena Birk, features “11 minutes of jumping,” as a fulfillment of Birk’s request for some elevation, and a response to the notion that contemporary dance is stuck in earthly clay. Cabeen took inspiration from the red-faced exertions of trumpet players, and said, smiling slightly evilly, said that Birk gets to a point where she’s “just trying to survive the choreography.” Trumpeter Brian Chin has it equally rough.

“All of the Above” is a quartet for four female dancers, Birk, Brenna Monroe-Cook, Ella Mahler, and Lustbader, to new music by composer Nat Evans. “I have no interest in the linguistic conversation,” admitted Cabeen, about the discussion over the correct label for new dance (modern, contemporary, post-modern?). She quoted Bill T. Jones, for whom she danced for over a decade, saying, “The answer is in the doing.” Here she tries to unite the “heavy” and the “whimsical,” asking questions about parts and wholes, and concluding, as the title implies, that it doesn’t make sense to slice dance too finely. “Composites,” with music by Julian Martlew and text by Jay McAleer, is the encore on the program, having had its premiere in 2010.

For a glimpse of what Cabeen’s choreography looks like in motion, try this sampler on YouTube:

Velocity Dance Center is located at 1621 12th Ave. You can learn more at velocitydancecenter.org.

Curious Georges in a conversation with Seattle