Velocity Dance Center

Save the Date

Velocity — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 17:55:53 +0000

Almost ready to Launch!
Save the Date! April 25

It’s happening! Editor Mary Margaret Moore and designer David Wolbrecht are working with Tonya to put the final touches on Velocity’s latest initiative: STANCE, an online journal set to launch next month. STANCE responds to the dance community’s desire to push the breadth and depth of exchange about movement-based art and choreographic culture within Seattle and beyond. The first edition celebrates Seattle dance history with interviews with Wade Madsen and Pat Graney, and features Artist2Artist, a podcast project directed by Beth Grazyck. Interested in contributing?

Activity and Passivity in Art and Life

Velocity — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:36:15 +0000

Carrie Ahern Reflects on the Speakeasy Discussion around “Borrowed Prey”

Activity and Passivity in Art and Life:

I strive to make work where both myself and the audience are active participants. This is a primary reason why I have stopped making dances for proscenium spaces or traditional venues or why I don’t make traditional modern dances –period. It just kept feeling that I was here and you (the audience) was there. False and dead to me. I felt it didn’t have to be the only way…and that there is a way to make and perform work where we could all be in the room and more present.

Ruth’s words [a participants in our discussion] about her experience working her livestock farm has really stuck with me. She felt that there needed to be enough time to do each task on the farm properly and respectfully. On a livestock farm this means caring for each aspect of an animal’s life and death. Therefore, if you are raising too many animals it becomes impossible to be respectful let alone empathetic. Small farmers, like artists, can suffer burn out, from being spread too thin. But, at our best–we can do wonderful things. Ruth’s ultimate desire for her farm feels linked to my desire for my art–a place of profound richness in which I can pour my generosity and the generosity of the community; a place of discovery and connection to something greater than myself; a place both personal and detailed; a ritual–one many have done before and will continue to do after we are gone. Essentially a link to the ecstatic.

Lasting resonation of Theft+Devotion: Love, Chaos, Citation and Temples of Radicalism

Velocity — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:47:59 +0000

by Tonya Lockyer

What still resonates with me from NEXTfestNW: Theft+Devotion?

Fifty people gathered around a twenty-foot long table having an intimate conversation for the Opening Night Roundtable hosted by John Boylan.

We gathered on the Founder’s Theater stage, warm lighting reflecting off the oak floors, drinks in hand. Guest speaker and The Project Room founder Jess Van Nostrand observed that each art form has its own rules and laws around theft and appropriation. Literature, for example, has a long history of quotation and citation. Recently, David Shields wrote an entire novel from appropriated content. A few years back he wrote an essay in Harper’s composed entirely of stolen content. T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland is full of appropriated content.

This got me thinking about music: Bob Dylan stole titles for his songs and albums (and recently, controversially, images for his paintings from others’ photographs). His entire personae, Bob Dylan (aka Zimmerman) was a mash-up. In music, the cover song is a form of tribute. The music sample, a form of theft. Musicians make a business of talking about their beloved influences. The Beatles’ Sargent Pepper’s album cover is a gallery of Beatles’ cool: Lenny Bruce, Oscar Wilde, Albert Einstein. Influence is celebrated in music. Who does the latest band sound like? We enjoy recognizing stolen riffs and opening bars.

But in dance, when Richard Move makes a work that borrows every line and step from Martha Graham, or Jerome Bel creates a performance with excerpts from the major ballet canon (Veronique Doisneau), it is a radical move. I personally love these dance artists who no longer feel obliged to be “original”, and are more interested in investigating what dance as an art form is, has been, and can be.

In my own performance work, I’ve recently taken to adding “Works Cited” to my program notes. The citations acknowledge the material I’ve borrowed from life or other people’s work—from Girl Guide’s of America and Parisian Graffitti, to Beyonce and Bel. Citations give credit where credit is due. But citations also reveal that the performance is based on research. And citations expose the depth and scope of that research. Citations also remind us that a work exists within a context; of history and/or the present. They situate the performance and the creative process in the world –no small thing for the often over-rarified world of dance. They expose how dances are layered, full of intertextuality.

Modern Dance has suffered from the false myth that it is singularly motivated by “self-expression” and “originality”. When I was a student, we were told an “honest” or “authentic” dance must emerge organically (if somewhat melodramatically) from the “source” of the individual artist. I agree that Martha Graham was onto something when she wrote that each of us is “singular” and unique, but I’m suspicious of anyone who protests that their dances are born without influence, emerging from “their gut” or “instinct” as if they, and their work, could be ruptured from the world.

To acknowledge influence is to join a conversation. Dancing arises from sensation and experience, but be assured it arises from thinking too. Dance artists think through their mediums just like literary critics, poets and songwriters do. Citations reveal the dialogue of thoughts, ideas, feelings, images and possibilities informing the creative process: a creative process that in dance is rarely that of a singular artist–more often a collaboration.

I selected Theft + Devotion as NEXTfestNW’s theme because I wanted to hear others’ thoughts. I don’t have solid opinions about copyright legality, or whether Beyonce’s recent theft from Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker is dead wrong. But I also selected this theme because I want to resist forces in dance (and commerce) who are holdouts for the concept of absolute originality, singular authorship and ownership. I want to resist those who immediately carry contempt for dance artists who borrow or appropriate from other sources.

Which leads me to another memory from the festival: During her NEXTfestNW performance-lecture, Velocity Artist-in-Residence Amy O’Neil responded to a question about black cultural appropriation in her own work by saying that Hip Hop dance and music have always been a part of her experience as an urban American. “Hip Hop is an indigenous urban American form” said O’Neil, a white woman. She does not feel she is appropriating when she uses Hip Hop in her work because she grew up listening to, watching, and dancing Hip Hop. Her comment made me wonder if the audience would have asked Arthur Mitchel, one of this countries first African American ballet dancers and founder of The Dance Theater of Harlem, a similar question about appropriation in his work, because he creates within the idiom of western classical ballet? Would they ask Donald Byrd that questions?

It appears appropriation gets most problematic when it’s about those deemed to have more power, appropriating from those deemed to have less.

As the roundtable came to a close, a collective idea emerged:

We appropriate, ingest and transform what we love, over time. We steal what we desire – fast and furiously. Out of a chaotic matrix of past, present and future new things are made.

A final memory: At the end of the roundtable another Guest Speaker, the economist Koshik Gosh, declared, “We need temples dedicated to radicalism. To dance is a radical act. I would say Velocity is a temple to radicalism.”

Exhaustion and Exuberance, Ways to Defy the Pressures to Perform

dwolbrecht — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:23:09 +0000

Part I: Wednesday February 8, 7-9:30p Reading/Discussion at Bluebird Cafe
Part II: Friday, February 10, 12:30-2:00p Movement/Writing at Velocity

Text: “Exhaustion and Exuberance, Ways to Defy the Pressures to Perform,” by Jan Verwoert

Part I

Join us on Wednesday, February 8th, from 7-9:30p at Bluebird Cafe (12o5 E. Pine– not far from Velocity) for a reading of the text. We will take turns reading aloud (or not, if that’s your preference) and taking pause to discuss when the occasion arises. We’ve decided to blend the reading and discussion together and hope it enrich the experience. (Vanessa and I have discovered that this is how we prefer to “read” theory! Hear the words from others’ mouths, from your own, and discuss with peers immediately. So gratifying!)

Part II

We will gather on Friday, February 10th from 12:30-2:00p at Steward Studio (VDC), for a session of writing and movement in relation to the text and our reading. This will give us time to delve further into the act of movement investigation around a text.

You may join for both or just one of our meetings, however, take note that you will need to read on your own if you come to the moving and writing meeting but not the reading session.

Looking forward!

Mary Margaret & Vanessa

The Works of Theft and Devotion

Velocity — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 15:35:02 +0000

In anticipation of STANCE*, I invited several members of the community to write in relationship to their experience at NEXT Fest NW. I felt it important to clarify to the writers that my aim was not to generate reviews of the new work presented at the festival, but to engage them as creators and critical minds, and allow them to use the written word as a means to dig into the festival’s theme, Theft and Devotion, and their digestion of the work.

Contributing writers: A K Mimi Allin, Vanessa DeWolf & Syniva Whitney

*STANCE: An artist-driven online journal to incite and increase the practice of writing and thoughtful discourse on contemporary dance and movement-based art. Stay tuned…and in the meantime, read this!

Writings from Syniva Whitney & Vanessa DeWolf:

Syniva, Vanessa and Kris Wheeler gathered post-show to discuss and write on their exchange with one another about their experience of the festival’s performances…

Syniva Whitney

Nobody’s Intersubjective Spectacles : Voyage Log 0001

Here is the crime. The west was not won, it was taken. Here, a pick pocket, a poncho. I remember border towns, the one my grandmother grew up in. There she lived, dusty, wicked sunsets, there, the tip of her thumb accidentally chopped off. Birdell’s thumb shut in the the passenger side door of her father’s pick up truck while her sister Hiawatha watched. This town exists for me, exists only in my grandmother’s voice, exists only in my imagination. I am its audience.

How far is too far? Storm clouds over the reservation, the sheep wandering, sheep with wool black, white, brown, as kinky as mine. There, she felt at home. Always, somehow, everything was about borders. The reservation, Mexico (she could clearly feel it spreading out behind her), the limits to her city, a place full of Black settlers, Mexican-Americans, Black-Mexicans, American-Mexicans, the First People, people full of hyphenated identities because so far this America spreads out far below her, all the way down to the tip of Brazil. It always has.

My brother visits this town, or this is the story I tell myself about him in New Mexico. He returned with souvenirs. He purchased his first and only poncho, serape, sarape (something specifically made to sell to foreigners). He wore it everyday for the good part of a year. He was acting like The Man With No Name and he really still is a Black White Mexican Clint Eastwood. I am his audience.

Questions:
What makes a smooth criminal?
Are we still seeking new frontiers?
Are we outlaws stealing old frontiers?
Are we ready to admit what is stolen?

D0D

The Prince of Pop. He’s here under the zippered shiny American Apparel jacket. Sweat shop free (TM). There is no face here and the Prince of Denmark appears to be from Seattle this time. Nice skinny jeans. It could be Justin Bieber under that black hood for all I know, but, no, it looks like this Justin can spin, can turn like a dream. This is a person that watched the Thriller video, like, a thousand times. They know the moves.

And what prince doesn’t need a private place to scream? A place to writhe and listen to Lykke Li? A place to think about their dead ex-girlfriend? A place to have a beautiful tantrum?
Is it possible to steal nobility?
What power does a prince have over himself? Over others?
top

Vanessa DeWolf

Stealing content
Stealing forms
Kitsch
Dress-up
Campy
What makes kitsch? What does kitsch need?
Collage processes.

NOBODY’S INTERSUBJECTIVE SPECTACLES: Voyage log 001

Why do I steal from my cultural luggage?
I watch the landscapes
I watch movies
I feel myself in the desert, a scorpion battle viewed by children.
I watch Clint Eastwood. If I must wear a dress it will be the undergarments of The Unforgiven.

Sand gathers at the hooves of my horse. Sand keeps changing at the edge of the Pacific. Carkeek Park, is really pebbles. They don’t the Atlantic of Cape Cod out here. The light from a cigarette is tiny and afraid of cigars.

DØD

The figure in death
The figure in insanity
Hamlet’s untied knot, a tangle so profound it floats.
To play the Dane despite my clarity, seeking that instability and those clear naked words.

A billboard swings into view. Burma shave lights the story as legible as 75 point font and candy coated. The car does not need to pause. The cape of a daughter’s drowning. As if the devotion to a longstanding love was no more then vinyl theatrics.
After appropriations are complete where resides the realm of the now?

ROOM WITH THEMES

We lean in but only one makes it to the center.
There are spaces we do undertake together yet don’t traverse
the lights and the music and the runway in some new configuration
did I take it in my new configuration
the low rumble that penetrates past it all painfully reminding the built-in crescendoes
here the brokenness and we carry together one in dream-walk the other holding onto the bridge
together in the dirt they remember other footprints from some previous world,
it is not their bent spines it is not the serpentines it is that echo of a door opening and a windowing sliding shut.

TENSIDES: AN EXCERPT WITHOUT THROWING PLATES

The men sit on all the sides looking over the balcony
Does it matter that the administrative meeting isn’t happening?
Steal the rights to that emotion and there right there with your breath push it out
You’ve stolen so many melodramas, we all have
and we don’t get forgiven for that. Sitting in the coolness but in desire
What devoted waiting they do?

ORA ET LABORA

Those are not my shirts, I’ve bleached it to the toyhouse

They reside like we all do separated by our tasks, by laundry, by doing the laundry, by ignoring it , by pushing the buttons, turning the dial by arriving in the sunshine on the cloudy days by stains and prayers and there they didn’t expect the pleasure of a mischief….isn’t that a wet t-shirt? Isn’t that metal? And is she a nun? at least isn’t that her magical voice singing liturgical opera? My seat is like a pew my laughing is like a teenager with her first period. I’m trying to carry my suitcase, my beauty case, my lipstick and my clean clean laundry to the golden gates.

INQUIRES

If there is nothing new, how essential is it for artists to know who we are quoting from, stealing from? Is it possible to enhance “you-ness” with stolen material?

Stealing
Appropriating
Collage
Imitation
Homage
Synchronicity
Circularity

I often notice the return to the bare-essentials on the stage. An empty space. Naked elements of form. What shifts away from the state of imitation as learning? Does imitation = craft? Stealing as play. Stealing as authorial sabotage. Stealing without context. Orientalism. Precious. Kitsch. Nostalgia. Camp. Re-contextualizing cliche. Preconceived > reconceived. Shifting lineage. Duchamp. Source material. How to score the possibility of stealing so the collaging has depth and life and is simple direct and rebellious/unallowed. Not processed enough. Mashup. Copyright issues. Not knowing which is the original. Levels of mental metabolization.

Exhaustion of meanings.
top

Free writing from THEFT & DEVOTION @ Velocity on Friday 9 December 2011

A K Mimi Allin

Nobody’s Intersubjective Spectacles: Voyage Log 0001
DØD
Ora et Labora (part 1)
Room with Themes
tenSIDES: an excerpt without throwing plates

Nobody’s Intersubjective Spectacles: Voyage Log 0001

but but but
sharp but edible
over-sized but potable
cute but dangerous
in the shadow of the bee
stung injured sleeping
mimicking night

with a studded hovering yellow-eyed fly
overhead with white mandibles
&feather antennae
things tumble in &out here
in cycles

welcome to dungeness wyoming
never menacing never serious
rife with drifters &crawlers
delicates &toughies
a balletic organic machine
fills the night with a flickering

if you look close up you’ll see
how grotesque &beautiful
we’ve become
with our aboriginal masks
dotted blue &orange
when we pass under the light
it’s like a film

the night has fingers fingering the sea
tippity tiptip tap across the floor
the ocean is a cold heart
put your head inside the night
you can hear the porcelain legs
of them rotating rolling
we’re the ones we’re the twos
we’re ones again playing piano
at the bottom of the sea

you’d think the ugly reigned here
but no we have a sweet sort of peach
a peaceable calm &irresistible here
&small sounds in profusion
can produce a very big night
&night is only repeating day
in a dark way
so download yourself

here they come
the time cowboys
what’s your stance boys
wide or double wide
we’re riding full circle
out &back
we’re riding hard
hell we’re creating landscape
mucho mas ground to cover
between the plains &here
to that there sea
gonna be a robert browning ride
&my horse might sweat to death
so what happens when you get to the horizon
you gonna double back or hunker down

the nocturne lives in the head in the head
bring it on back to buoyant &ruffling
echoing strands of blue neon
umbrellas billowing out
mouths floating in the sea
in the sea
that stops us all
…………………………….top

DØD
i have seen nothing

i have seen nothing like the king
like the king
like the king i have seen nothing
i have seen nothing

baz luhrmann is lurking tonight
in the battery
in the news flash
o with a stroke
i cannot look
going back now to try it again
give it a good go now
you’re a socket set
in the hands of a blind man
he couldn’t even pull a kingdom together
a few more steps &try again
forward &back
just forward &back
there’s no drama in retreat
absolutely none aiyee
rubbery rubbery
your head is on again

i’m not reading
so hmm
perhaps you’re not thinking
you’re in the now visible
front page news
& i can see your violence
in your eyes
this is no empty set
you found a slick
a pool a horror
to sink into
anguish muck
the knowing is sticky
&the audience death
are you going to end it now
&how how

aka
…………………………….top

Ora et Labora (part 1)

we’re stuck with this modern shit
hi-tech machine rate
it’s a case of
cat fighting cat
let’s gender wash tonight
get it clean &new
there’s not a prayer undulating
in the cycle now

give us a porcelain pitch
give us the wildwildwest
shake shake shake it out
&amen

when repeated at a machine rate
even the breasts lose their paradigm
let’s get back to the church pace
drifting falling
there’s beauty in salvation
in the delicate wash

give us a porcelain pitch
give us the wildwildwest
shake shake shake it out
&amen

but we can’t stay here
can we
charles &ray lined em up
took one step back
&saw we were beautiful
a visual rhyme
woman is also a machine

now it’s woman &the washing machine
in a fast spin
pick up the pace girls
it’s jean de henri vs le machine
but its metaphoric water
& a metaphoric stain

in the end
they both win
but one is crucified
&the other crippled

…………………………….top

Room with Themes

burglar thief offender intrude
snaked charmed glass walled
glooey rubber band rounding
roping in fluids toward &away
toward &away a wavering sound
a street lamp broken
an alarm sustained
movement becomes an effort in a new way
laden with bags casing the place opening a safe
going in through the window over a wall
around the corner becoming invisible
invisible like the dust
&something is going to happen
the pitch
the pitch is changing
rising racing
&we’re seen
we hit the ground
fall &roll
the pace the place breaking the peace
pulsing now heavier
a light the thing to steal
draws us
our predetermined need
heaving around boneless bodies
torsos heavy we have no choice

…………………………….top

tenSIDES: an excerpt without throwing plates

need attract embrace reject
close in resist love aloof
clutch kiss grope leave
add subtract change retreat
enter exit position direction
cocktail cello meeting lap
lounge bedroom boardroom box
waiting elevator hallway door
revolving hidden stunned frozen
the ambiance of others is the duet of us
when we move together we are energy
when we oppose drama

…………………………….…………………………….…………………………….…………………………….top

A K Mimi Allin is a conceptual artist working in movement and gesture,
experience-mapping the world via installation and performance. Live
and contemporary visual art inform her writing and life.
http://akmimiallin.weebly.com/