BRIDGE PROJECT 2025
Velocity’s Emerging Creative Incubator
Featuring new works by
DaeZhane Day, kelly langeslay, + No Girls, No Masters
FEB 6 + 7 | 7:30 PM
FEB 8 | 2 PM + 7:30 PM
Base: Experimental Art + Space | 6520 5th Ave S #122nd, Seattle, WA
*Individual tickets go on sale about 6 weeks out from performances.
Everyone’s favorite Emerging Creative Incubator is back! Aimed at connecting audiences to dance artists at the ground floor of their career, this year’s Bridge Project features DaeZhane Day, kelly langeslay, and Kai Leigh Roach + Sylvia Schatz-Allison– It’s gonna be one for the books!
I remembered what it smelt like when you walked through the room | DaeZhane Day
discusses the trauma in black children witnessing substance abuse in their parents. This exposure therapy approach relives the most tender moments as an adult, and as a child, seeing myself as a memory but also as a reflection of who I have become. Combining the deep metaphysical experience and rhythmic pulses that live within hip hop and contemporary performance, this work will fuse the two aiming to bridge these current movement influences with a creative process that invites each dancer to excavate their own memories, through unspoken but deep connection between the dancers and the audience.
[an]archive | Kelly Langeslay
In her first animated musical, featuring seven original songs, Barbie comes to life in this modern retelling of a classic tale of mistaken identity and the power of friendship. Based on the story by Mark Twain, Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper features Barbie in an exciting dual role as a princess and a poor village girl who look amazingly alike! The girls’ paths are fated to cross when Princess Anneliese is captured and Erika, her look- alike, must try to save her. Can Erika pretend to be the Princess and foil her captor, the evil Preminger? And what of the handsome King Dominick, who falls in love with Erika, mistaking her for Anneliese? In this magical musical performance, two beautiful, adventurous girls dare to follow their dreams and discover that destiny is written in a very special place: your heart!
Third Degree Binge | No Girls, No Masters
The piece is a fusion of structure and improvisation focusing on the importance of female nudity, the relationship of our two feminine bodies within the context of a production, and manufacturing power through gore and the horror of the body. We lust for physical exertion and pain. We want to hurt each other, we want to love each other, we want to hurt and love ourselves. We want to yell and sing and choke and whisper sweet nothings. Through the female experience of discipline, worship, transformation, and life under patriarchal/masculinist oppression,
we hope to connect to the audience on a more visceral level and to blur the boundaries of watcher and do-er.
We ask, can you help us find a home for this cruel and sexy bondage?
What are the bounds of tenderness and rigidity?
What will become of us?
ARTIST BIOS
DAEZHANE DAY
Kai Leigh Roach
KELLY LANGESLAY
Sylvia Schatz-Allison
EMERGING CREATIVE INCUBATOR
Bridge Project is Velocity’s Emerging Creative Incubator, supporting experimental dance artists who have been making work in the greater Seattle area for 5 years or less and who self-identify as an emerging dance artist.
In this program, Velocity provides time, space, and money to research a new dance idea, and is introduced to foundational self production skills through the process of making and performing a new, 20 minute work. The Emerging Creative Incubator Program acts as an introduction between artists and Velocity, as well as Seattle audiences, and established artists for feedback.
PROGRAM SUPPORT
The Bridge Project is a core residency program, and supported by the Raynier Foundation along with Velocity’s season sponsors and community of individual donors. The Bridge Project is presented in partnership with Base.
Interested in joining the community of support to make the Bridge Project possible? Contact erin@velocitydancecenter.org to learn how you can be involved.
ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION
BASE is an ADA compliant and accessible space located on the ground floor, with all-gender and wheelchair-accessible restrooms available. The Factory has a ramped entrance located at the north end of the building. Once inside the Factory, Base is accessible by ramp through our front doors. Our tech booth is not wheelchair accessible. Base has one wheelchair accessible, single stall restroom. The Factory has two gender neutral multi-stall restrooms and two wheelchair accessible single stall restrooms.
DaeZhane Day [she/they] Movement artist DaeZhane Day emulates the blend between Seattle contemporary dance and Bay Area street hip hop. With a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts DaeZhane shares her hybrid form in and around the Seattle area and beyond. DaeZhane has set work for Seattle Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well as performing in Intiman theatre’s Black Nativity last December. They have studied with artists like Charlotte Boye-Christensen, Keyes Wiley and can be seen in work by Melecio Estrella, Rubberlegz, and more. DaeZhane has taught for Pacific Northwest Ballet, Whim Whim Contemporary Dance Center, Summer Dance Lab, and is currently on faculty at eXit Space School of Dance.
*Photo by Jazzy Photo
kelly langeslay is a queer dancer and writer. they tell stories to and/or about you. their recent research investigates queer time through the writing of José Muñoz, CGI Barbie movies, early 2010s pop music, and conversations with friends and AIs. much of this research is made possible through the space and resources provided by the public library, to whom they owe $313.49. they are motivated by a love of excess, nostalgia for a nonexistent past, and insatiable hunger for approval. they have something to say about camp sincerity and overlaying their queer body on nostalgic figures and reinhabiting the past to imagine alternative ways of being; of course, this is mostly nonsense. they aspire to create a pathetic kind of art through a pathetic way of living. they make their best work when you’re not texting them back.
*Photo by Marcia Davis
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