Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation

Lightning Talks: Artist to Artist

with G^2: John Maria Gutierrez + Beth Graczyk, S. Ama Wray, Taja Will, Meg Foley, Miguel Gutierrez

Online Series

Free

Tune in to hear our amazing faculty from this summer’s Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation share about their art, their passions and what currently drives their research and praxis. After introducing their work, they will engage in conversation and questions with the other artist.

SFD+I is made possible with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and the King County Festival and Events Fund. It is also supported by our community of individual donors, community partners, and arts advocates.

ARTIST BIOS

G^2: Beth Graczyk + John Maria Gutierrez

G^2: Beth Graczyk + John Maria Gutierrez

G^2 stems from artistic dialogue between John Maria Gutierrez, a NYC-born, 1st generation Dominican-American, and Beth Graczyk, a Seattle-born 3rd generation Polish-American. Their unique connection celebrates their diverse backgrounds and through a cultivated trust, have found ways to share their intimate struggles, hopes, and dreams with each other in a space that honors their differences while seeking to find empathetic understanding of each other. G^2 manifests material by collaging diverse improvisational concepts, post-modern, modern, hip-hop, and contemporary dance, theater, acting, poetry, and music into a multi-dimensional and imaginative worlds. G^2 has shared work in Detroit, NYC, and China and are faculty for the Peridance Certification Program in NYC where they co-teach Improvisation.

Instagram: @g2_bethjohn | Website 

S. Ama Wray

S. Ama Wray

For over 30 years, S. Ama Wray (she/her) has been performing, teaching and choreographing across 3 continents. With London Contemporary Dance Theater and Rambert Dance Company she toured Russia, China, USA and across Europe. As the Artistic Director of JazzXchange Music and Dance Company she was Artist-in-Residence at The Royal Opera House and Southbank Center, UK. Wray now also pursues ethnographic research and the Comparative and International Education Society presented her with the 2018 African Diaspora Emerging Scholar Award. Her current work encompasses knowledge embedded within African and diasporic performance practices. After completing her PhD at the University of Surrey in 2017, Wray developed Embodiology®, a culturally inclusive approach to improvisation. She has published work in British Dance, Black Routes(2016) and The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation (2019).

The methodology has also been utilized in an integrative medical setting with Nimishia Parekh, MD, working with her IBD patients. Disseminating the praxis internationally has included Temple University where she gave the 2017 keynote for the International Dance Studies Colloquium. and in 2018, she was Artist-in-Residence at: University of Wisconsin-Madison; Atlantic Center of the Arts, Florida and New Waves! Institute,Trinidad and Tobago. Here in OC through JazzXchange Wray brings jazz dance and music back into closer alignment, as it was at its inception. Collaborators have Included include Wynton Marsalis, Bobby McFerrin, Julian Joseph, OBE, Nicole Mitchell, Mojisola Adebayo, Fleeta Siegel and Kei Akagi. Additionally, in 2017 she co-founded the Africana Institute for Creativity, Recognition and Elevation with Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Photo by Parris Whittingham

Taja Will

Taja Will

Taja Will (they/them) is a queer, chronically ill, transnational adoptee; a ritualist, educator, performer, choreographer and Healing Justice practitioner.

For Taja, the foundation of Healing Justice lives in the practice, pedagogy and performance of dance improvisation and cultural somatics. This lineage is led by queer, trans, disabled and BIPOC folks, it is radical care work and essential for interdependence. They hypothesize these conditions create generative, alchemical, magical and virtuosic spaces for contact + improvisation to emerge.

Taja is a current Jerome Hill Artist fellow, and is based in southside Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce, ancestral lands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe.

Photo by Nanne Sørvold

Meg Foley

Meg Foley

Meg Foley (she/her) is a queer dance artist, educator, and parent who creates performances and somatic-based events using movement, design, and choreographic thinking as affirming practices of self: gender expression, sexuality, desires, and connection to others. Her current research examines the somatic, emotional, and psychic resonance of intersecting embodiments of parenting, queerness, gender, and belonging. Gay families, trans families, how we are formed… She investigates rocks, body heat, spirituality, and how we gestate ourselves in our distinct lineages: cultural, genetic, material. Her practice is daily, improvisational, and builds detailed movement vocabularies out of scientifically-engaged research and lived experience. She grew up in the DC area, was a creative movement baby and did a lot of club dancing, and now is a queerdo mama, mostly in Philadelphia.

Photo by Gema Galiana

Miguel Gutierrez

Miguel Gutierrez

Miguel Gutierrez is a choreographer, performer, music maker, writer, video artist, educator and Feldenkrais Method practitioner based in Lenapehoking, currently known as Brooklyn, NY. He makes performances to create empathetic and irreverent spaces to talk about things in complicated ways beyond the limitations of propriety, party lines, and conventional logic. He has presented his work internationally in venues including the Wexner Art Center, REDCAT, Festival d’Automne/Paris and American Realness. He has received four New York Dance and Performance Bessie Awards, a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, and he was a selected artist for the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

Photo by Paula Lobo

SFD+I SUPPORTERS

SUMMER