Saturday, December 08, 2012

"Diane" Press & Dream Team

The show is open!!  Which means today I showered, ate a real breakfast, and peaked at the stack of mail and emails from the week.  Phew!

NEXT NW features six new works, of which my new work in progress, "Diane" is one.  I got to chat with Michael Van Baker from the Sunbreak about it and and he wrote up this sweet preview.

"This Weekend, Velocity Has Got Next"



 Since the program space is limited, I wanted to share more text!  Especially more about these dreamy performers and collaborators:

Title: "Diane"
Choreography: Shannon Stewart
Music: Jeff Huston, Mozart (Arvo Pärt), John Niekrasz
Sound Design: Adam Sekuler
Costumes: AIRBRUSH BY KEEP ONE
Performers: Meredith Horiuchi, Raja Kelly, Mary Margaret Moore, Adam Sekuler, Shannon Stewart, Jan Trumbauer, Rosa Vissers.


Special thanks to: DAYNA HANSON, JODY KEUHNER, DANA PHAELEN & WASHINGTON HALL, KITTY WU AND KEEP ONE, GREGG OLSEN, RAJA KELLY, AND ADAM. 

Shannon Stewart is a dance artist with a proclivity for the enigmatic, dark, nuanced, delicate, comedic, durational and cinematic elements of dance. She creates work under the moniker THE REAL SHANNON STEWART, co-directs dance films with Adam Sekuler, dances for Salt Horse locally, and just finished a season with tEETh. She is currently working on a new body of work entitled DAVID AND DEBORAH, investigating the role of influence and inspiration by working with material from iconic filmmaker David Lynch and adapting a solo taught to her by influential post-modern choreographer Deborah Hay.   Velocity is at the center of her work and she is honored to have been a 2012 Creative Resident, to be part of Velocity's Next NW, and to tour her recent evening length work through SCUBA National Touring Network for Dance in 2013.

John Niekrasz (composer/drummer) is a drummer, composer, teacher, and writer living in Chicago.  He received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, studied percussion in Cuba and classical Hindustani Tabla in India.  John strives to bridge the musico-poetic divide through text-based composition and syllabic musical notation.  His work struggles with such spectra as poverty and ornament, rigor and effortlessness, justice and militancy.  In addition to drumming in ensembles Why I Must Be Careful, Thicket, and Sporting, John has collaborated and performed with Fred Lonberg-Holm, Nate Wooley, John Butcher, John Wiese, Wally Shoup, John Gruntfest, Doug Theriault, Mika Singh, Shamsher Mehndi, Thollem McDonas, Akron/Family, Sally Timms, Neal Morgan, and Tatsuya Nakatani.

Originally from Alabama, kt shores is a dance artist, yoga teacher, martial artist, and mom based in Seattle, WA. Exploring the obscure via everyday existence, sculpture, film, and performance art - kt has studied and performed across North America, Europe, and India, and has taught various movement modalities for over 16 years. ktshores.com 

 Jan Trumbauer (performer) writes, creates images and plays with movement. She grounds her work in a sense of place and a sensitivity to texture, often collaborating closely with musicians, visual artists, and other writers and dancers. She is committed to the practice of improvisation.
Jan performed as the lead improvising soloist in Apparitions, a contemporary dance film directed by Nusha Martynuk that was a selection at the DMJ International Video Dance Festival in Japan. She has taken an interest in exploring intersections between writing and movement both in performance and on the page, most recently as assistant editor of Encounters with Contact Improvisation, a special edition of Contact Quarterly about contact improvisation in institutions of higher education, and as co-editor of Stance: Journal of Choreographic Culture, produced by Velocity Dance Center. Jan graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in Creative Writing and Dance and the Helen M. Ward Memorial Award for Excellence in Theater and Dance. She was co-founder and co-artistic director of In Noon Dance from 2010-2012.

Rosa Vissers (Performer) NL is an international dance artist, educator and advocate. For the past 10 years she has performed in Europe and the US with companies/artists such as De Meekers, Olga Pona, Elshout/Händeler, Marissa Rae Niederhauser, KT Niehoff, zoe|juniper, Jessica Jobaris and most recently with Shannon Stewart. Her own work has been performed in the Netherlands, Hungary, Utah, Idaho, Chicago, NYC, Portland and at venues in and around Seattle. She is currently working on her first dance for camera film, Pull, funded by 4Culture. Rosa holds an MFA in Modern Dance from the University of Utah and completed conservatory dance training at ArtEZ in the Netherlands and the Budapest Tanciskola in Hungary.





More on their way!

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