mayfield brooks | Photo by Cherylynn Tsushima
RESEARCH IN PERFORMANCE
Works by Raphael Xavier and mayfield brooks
AUG 5 | 7:30 PM
12th Ave Arts Mainstage | 1620 12th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122
Individual Ticket Prices:
Low Income – $25 | General – $40 | Champion – $60
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All ages
Presented through the Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation
Research in Performance is a festival-style evening that offers a glimpse into current explorative work. Each piece is presented in a low-tech, low-stakes format, with the goal of sharing research in progress.
Every Research in Performance artist is also on faculty during SFD+I Research Week, August 1–8, 2027. Sign up to take an intensive with them: registration opens November 13, 2026.
RAPHAEL XAVIER | GENIUS FROM THE 1900S
Xavier looks back on his approach to movement practice over the last 40 years through the lens of Carl Jung. A choreographed improvisation.
mayfield brooks | WAVE JUMPER
Wave Jumper is a dance spell created in conversation with the legendary Detroit underground electronic music duo, Drexciya. The duo named themselves after pregnant African women who were thrown off slave ships and gave birth to amphibious creatures known as the Drexciyan wave jumpers—great warriors of the abyss. This mythos was first noted in the inner sleeve notes of Drexciya’s 1997 release, The Quest.
ARTISTS
RAPHAEL XAVIER
MAYFIELD BROOKS
ABOUT THE VENUE
12th Avenue Arts is fully accessible for wheelchairs and walkers. The lobby, bathrooms and theater spaces are at street level, and seating is available without the need for an elevator or stairs. Bathrooms will be gender neutral. Seats are 16″ wide with arm rests on either side. Please let us know what we can do to make your dance experience more enjoyable and accessible. Examples of requests below:
- ASL, CART, Assisted Listening Device
- Reserved Ground Floor Seating
- wider chairs
- + more
For requests, please contact Shirley at operations@velocitydancecenter.org or write us a note on our ticketing service when buying tickets. We will do our best to accommodate!
ABOUT THE SEATTLE FESTIVAL OF DANCE + IMPROVISATION
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.
PARTNERS
PROGRAM SPONSORS
SFD+I is supported in part by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and ArtsFund. Free and reduced cost ticketing and classes supported by 4Culture’s Public Free Access program.
Photo by Sorcha Augustine
RAPHAEL XAVIER
Raphael Xavier is a professional breaker/dancer and artist, working in a variety of fields including music, performance, photography, and film. As a Breaking practitioner since 1983, he was inducted into the Breaking Hall of Fame class of 2025 and honored with a citation and proclamation from NYC. Xavier’s work focuses on the longevity and maturity of Breaking highlighting personal topics.
Photo by Nir Arieli
mayfield brooks
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall, a Hodder Fellow alum, and most recently a Creative Time Research & Development fellow. They love living by the sea.