parable of kinoptics
By
d. sabela grimes
with an opener by
Fox Whitney
AUG 9 | 7:30 PM
12th Ave Arts Mainstage |1620 12th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122
Presented through the Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation.
*Individual tickets go on sale about 6 weeks before performances.
Attend the Seattle Premiere of Parable of KinOptics by superstar d. Sabela Grimes with a special treat opener by local powerhouse Fox Whitney!
Parable of KinOptics | d. Sabela grimes
This piece is an audio-visual movement manuscript that unfolds through the invocation of Octavia E. Butler’s Afrofuturist spatial and temporal insights to explore our current realities and collective dreamscapes. The portal is the eye of the needle—a space threading worlds together, meditating on Butler’s connections to Los Angeles, Seattle, and the emergent destiny of Earthseed. Blending the prophetic vision of Parable of the Sower with the self-fulfilling prophecies from Butler’s personal notes, the performance embodies, improvises, and manifests the futures she envisioned and willed into being. In this synchronization, we embody the struggles, hopes, and transformations of Lauryn Olamina, kinetically shaping Earthseed’s doctrine—embracing change as a divine force and forging a collective path toward Earthseed’s destiny. This performance becomes a living testament to the novel’s profound exploration of survival, resilience, and community.
As an extension of the larger creative constellation, Parable of Portals, an ongoing collaboration with Meena Murugesan, Parable of KinOptics continues to dream Butler’s professional and personal writings to life through live performances, audio-visual installations, site-specific short films, 3D animations, improvisational movement meditations, and interactive community activations. Each experience unfolds as an exploration of quantum Blackness—a way to engage with the nowness of recurring futures.
Opener: In process work | Fox whitney
Fox Whitney wants to take your photo. He is obsessed with the surreal nature of transformation, how we identify ourselves and others and how personal and collective identity is an ever shifting and evolving landscape. His projects center his queer and transgender point of view. His current performance work in development, LOOKOUT, is a psychedelic blend of autobiography and metafiction inspired by image making practices, experimental drag and dance, meditation techniques and Seattle’s queer nightlife + indie music scene. He invites a group of collaborators to move with him in structured and improvised ways informed by QT art history, somatic techniques and the ever evolving practice of culture + community building informed by Fox’s lived experience as an anarchistic director, performer and producer.
Fox and a crew of dancer collaborators that also practice photography, film + video, sound making and community building through somatic practices join him in creating performances that blur the lines of self+other, gender and artistic genre.
“My choreographic practice has been called cinematic and sculptural and is deeply informed by my love for dancing at queer bars, the tradition of tableau vivant, Afrofuturist and independent filmmaking (Sun Ra and Fellini are big inspirations), and acting practices rooted in risky curiosity and compassion for self and others. I create experiences for people to meditate on how we become who we are, how we might evolve into who we want to be and all the trippy spaces we find along the way even if we don’t stay.” – Fox Whitney
Interested in working with these stellar artists? Sign up for SFD+I and get in the action!
ARTIST BIOS
d. Sabela Grimes
Fox Whitney
PERFORMANCE AT SFD+I
The Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation is a vibrant month-long immersion in the Seattle dance community, and a chance to explore with dance practitioners experimenting at the leading edge of dance technique, creative practices, and dance improvisation. Grounded in SFD+I’s nearly 30 years of community-building and intergenerational collaboration, this festival is a gateway for new dancers to connect with artists making work in the Seattle dance and improvisation community, and a chance for Seattle-based artists to train and research with internationally renowned artists.
During our Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation, Velocity also presents work by local and visiting faculty members. These presentations range from work-in-process sharings to larger scale productions, and are often one-night-only presentations. We also commission artists to work with participants to create new work that is shared during the festival.
PROGRAM SUPPORT
The Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation 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.
The presentation of d. Sabela Grimes is made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION
12th Ave Arts is fully accessible for wheelchairs and walkers. The lobby and bathrooms are at street level, and seating is available without the need for an elevator or stairs. The venue is also equipped with an Assistive Listening Device.
Sabela grimes (he/him) is a trans-media storyteller, sonic ARKivist, and movement composer. Improvisational systems and collaboration are at the heart of his creative practice, inhaling through socio-historical observation, self-examination and speculative meanderings, exhaling through layers of interconnected sonic, visual and kinesthetic arrangements. Sabela’s creative practice invests in the poetics of assemblage, the magic of mutability, and mastering misuse. Sabela works closely with experimental video and movement artist, Meena Murugesan, to invent graphic symbolic systems to inspire sound design, video content and generate movement scores. Past projects include Philly XP, World War WhatEver, 40 Acres & A Microchip and ELECTROGYNOUS, which declares that Black gender qualities are infinite, multidimensional and distinct manifestations of wombniversal consciousness. Sabela’s current collaborative endeavor with Murugesan, Parable of Portals, dreams Octavia E. Butler’s body of work, including Butler’s personal writing and unfinished manuscripts, into modular multi-disciplinary performance/installation experiences. Each experience realizes quantum Blackness as a means to play within the nowness of recurring futures. On faculty at USC’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, he continues to cultivate, Funkamental MediKinetics, a movement system that draws on the layered dance training, community building, and spiritual practices evident in Black vernacular and Hip Hop/Street dance forms. He is a 2023 USC Associates Award for Artistic Expression recipient, 2021 Bessie Award recipient for Outstanding Performer, 2017 County of Los Angeles Performing Arts Fellow and 2014 United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow. Sabela loves pancakes, speculative fiction, and his kinfolk.
*Photo Alon Koppel
Fox Whitney [he/him] is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of dance, music, film+video, theater, writing and visual art. Fox is obsessed with the surreal nature of transformation, how we identify ourselves and others and how personal and collective identity is an ever shifting and evolving landscape. His projects center his queer and transgender point of view. His current methods are informed by the interdisciplinary performance project Gender Tender he started in Seattle in 2012. Gender Tender movement research continues to influence his performance practice, teaching artist style and life in general. He is grateful for the way Gender Tender practices and performances have created a safe space for many different kinds of queer and trans people and their friends to move together beyond binary thinking and limited ideas about body based art practices, identity formation and community building. He fronts the trans-futurist psych band Light Aloud that grew from his performance project MELTED RIOT inspired by research into what played on the jukebox the night that the Stonewall Riots started in 1969. His work is inspired by the history of QT art + activism and his experience as a trans dancer, drag performer, gigging musician and event producer that started his medical transition well into his public performance career.
Fox’s work has been commissioned and produced by the Henry Art Gallery; On the Boards; Velocity Dance Center; Seattle International Dance Festival; Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival and was selected for the inaugural season of Seattle’s Gay City Arts. Light Aloud has played at Trans Pride Seattle, Capitol Hill Block Party and the Seattle Art Fair. He has performed in work by Meg Foley, Will Rawls, keyon gaskin, Morgan Thorson, Andrew Schneider, CommonForm Dance Project, Malic Amalya and Gabrielle Civil. He got his MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited his short films and visual art nationally. Fox is also a yoga and meditation teacher, movement teaching artist and arts journalist currently writing for SeattleDances and Variable West.
*Photo by Fox Whitney
Kai Leigh Roach is a dancer, visual artist, and writer. They studied for one year at Cornish College of the Arts, before that they were a devoted competition dancer all through middle and high school. The competitive rigor that centralized precision, musicality, character, and technical skill has become roots that now serve to make wild and unruly works of art. Kai Leigh craves the colors of the brutally honest, the tenderness of love, and passionate play. They have trained at the Carmel Dance Festival, SFD+I, and Whim W’him intensives, are actively taking dance classes in Seattle, and have an ongoing investment in the merging of dance, visual arts and writing.
NO GIRLS NO MASTERS | Emerging artistic duo No Girls No Masters is an experimental dance project made up of Kai Leigh Roach and Sylvia Schatz-Allison. The two have been collaborating in Seattle for the past two years. Through their found love for contact improvisation, durational performance, and risk-taking they discovered a deeply shared language that they use to explore their collaborative and individual works. They hurt, they exhaust, they surrender, they encourage audacity, and they promote grit.
*Photo by Sonya Moros
Body Poet Sylvia Schatz-Allison is a sister, a devotee, a pleasure seeker, and a body currently studying dance at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle Washington. She has trained with and performed for Heather Kravas, Alia Swerskey, Lavinia Vago, Slowdanger, and many others. Sylvia’s main interests are in performance art, postmodern dance, and improvisational performance practices. She is inspired by the beauty of the grotesque, the female performance experience, human brutality, and violent instincts amongst many things.
NO GIRLS NO MASTERS | Emerging artistic duo No Girls No Masters is an experimental dance project made up of Kai Leigh Roach and Sylvia Schatz-Allison. The two have been collaborating in Seattle for the past two years. Through their found love for contact improvisation, durational performance, and risk-taking they discovered a deeply shared language that they use to explore their collaborative and individual works. They hurt, they exhaust, they surrender, they encourage audacity, and they promote grit.
*Photo by Pearl Schatz-Allison