Dance Innovators Series:
We Are (nothing) Everything
by
Anya Cloud + Makisig Akin
Aug 10 | 7:30 PM
Run Time: 70 mins
Individual Tickets: $20-50 | DI Series: $45-150
What can we do together that we cannot do alone? This dance duet is a queer reimagination of a creation story. With patience, tenderness and prayer we epitomize the multiple ways that love can manifest. Intimacy facilitates straddling and queering notions of violence, care, pleasure, play and gender. Through performance we cultivate impossible conditions as an invitation to elusive spaces where desire, guilt, grief and love intersect. We hold the complexity and paradox of being socialized female bodies who are queer and racialized. Sometimes we share a body and sometimes we splinter into the ether — we simultaneously elevate each other and take each other down. What becomes possible when love is stronger than fear? We embody the wildest dreams of our queer ancestors.
DANCE INNOVATORS SERIES
Dance Innovators is a festival-style performance series that provides a glimpse into the current explorative work of celebrated faculty from Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation 2024. Each work will be presented in a low tech, low stakes format with the goal of sharing performative research with SFD+I’s Participants and Seattle’s contemporary performance community. This year the artists of Physical Education (keyon gaskin, Lu Yim, Allie Hankins, Takahiro Yamamoto) will perform on Thursday, August 8, Crow Nishimura from Degenerate Art Ensemble and Shannon Stewart will share work on Friday, August 9, Makisig Akin and Anya Cloud will perform an evening length work on Saturday, August 10.
Tickets to all three performances of Dance Innovators are included in full Research Week packages. Audience members outside of SFD+I can purchase individual show tickets.
ARTIST BIOS
Makisig Akin (they/them)
I am a queer, transgender Filipino born choreographer, dance artist, facilitator, and activist. I was raised in the Philippines and am currently based in Berlin, Germany. My work focuses on the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. I examine how survival strategies can be translated into a communal physical practice, which I then use as a catalyst to a creative healing process. I have taught dance workshops and Contact Improvisation classes in many different communities including HZT, UCLA, Tanzfabrik Schule, Bennington College, The Field Center, Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among others. My orientation to CI is deeply interconnected with my training in Filipino Traditional Dance, Kung Fu, Jiu Jitsu, Improvisation, walking meditation, Authentic Movement, Bouldering/Climbing, and Contemporary Dance. I received an MFA from UCLA in 2019. I co-founded The Love Makers, a project-based dance company, with Anya Cloud. I am the co-creator and co-director of Emerging Change Tanzfestival in Berlin, Germany. In the last three years my choreographic work has been presented in Tanzfabrik Bühne, Uferstudios, DOCK 11, Movement Research at the Judson, What You See Festival, OUTsider Fest, Tanztage Berlin, among others. My works have been supported by NEUSTART KULTUR Fonds Darstellende Künste, Distanzen in 2022/2023, Hauptstadtkulturfonds, and Fonds Darstellende Künste Flausen.
Anya Cloud (she/they)
I am an experimental contemporary dance artist originally from Alaska and currently based between Colorado and Berlin. As a queer white person, I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice. Collaboration, questioning, and deep physicality are central to all of my work. Makisig Akin and I co-direct the project-based dance company The Love Makers. Our work has recently been produced by DOCK 11, Tanzfabrik Berlin Bühne, Tanztage Berlin, Movement Research at the Judson, OUTsider Fest, and What You See Festival. Important collaborators include Makisig Akin, Sara Shelton Mann, Karen Schaffman, Eric Geiger, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Nhu Nguyen among others. I have taught/facilitated contact improvisation, improvisation, contemporary dance, and somatics internationally at festivals and institutions including at Guatemala Contact Improvisation Festival, Tanzfabrik Berlin Schule, ImPulsTanz, Tanzquartier, wcciJAM, Ukraine Contact Improvisation Festival, Metamorphosis Improvisation Research Festival, The Field Center, BeingTouch, and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among others. I currently teach at the University of Colorado Boulder, earned an MFA from University of California San Diego, and trained in the Feldenkrais Method® under Elizabeth Beringer. www.anyacloud.com
ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION
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. ASL interpretation will be provided at one of the performances. Bathrooms will be gender neutral.
For specific questions and accommodations, please contact Shirley at operations@velocitydancecenter.or
SFD+I SUPPORTERS
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, ArtsFund, and 4Culture. It is also supported by our community of individual donors, community partners, and arts advocates.
SFD+I SUPPORTERS
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, ArtsFund, and 4Culture. It is also supported by our community of individual donors, community partners, and arts advocates.