HEATHER KRAVAS
RoCoCoCoCo
MAR 26 – 28 + APR 2 – 3 | 7:30 PM
APR 4 | 2 PM
12th Ave Arts Mainstage |1620 12th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122
Presented through Velocity’s Nationally Emerging Creative Incubator Program
RoCoCoCoCo — A Situation for Dancing, in Four Movements
I. March 26, 7:30 PM · one hour | First Movement: Allegro Symone Sanz & Julia Sloane
II. March 27, 7:30 PM · one hour | Second Movement: Adagio Carlin Kramer & Amanda Morgan
III. March 28, 7:30 PM · one hour | Third Movement: AndanteAllie Hankins & Sylvia Schatz-Allison
IV. April 2, 7:30 PM · one hour | Finale & Coda | The Cast
V. April 3, 7:30 PM · four and a half hours (with intermission and shared refreshments) | The Symphony | The Cast
VI. April 4, 2 PM · four and a half hours (with intermission and shared refreshments) | The Symphony | The Cast
Since 1995, Heather Kravas has investigated choreographic, somatic, and collaborative practices in contemporary dance to explore the edges of performance. For Made in Seattle, she offers RoCoCoCoCo—an evolving cycle of four dances, shared across four evenings and culminating in two full-length presentations of the complete work.
Imagined as a DIY folk dance that turns into a snowflake, fractals into a vortex, veers into a grocery list, emanates like an aura, aligns like a pinball machine, and collaborates like an ant colony, RoCoCoCoCo slips beyond classification.
Instead, it proposes a new structure for performance—one that holds dancers and audiences alike in states of heightened attention, curiosity, and desire. Created for Allie Hankins, Carlin Kramer, Amanda Morgan, Symone Sanz, Sylvia Schatz-Allison, and Julia Sloane, the work traces the layered effort of dancing together—energetic, rhythmic, precise, and tender. It invites us to sense how intimacy scales, how perception expands, and how dancing itself becomes a site for both clarity and complexity—a space of shared and essential presence.
RoCoCoCoCo takes place in the black box of 12th Avenue Arts, with spectators seated on three sides of the stage. The dancers share the space with two pianists performing Terry Riley’s Keyboard Study No. 1 on upright pianos bound back-to-back. The live sounds of the theater—breath, footsteps, resonance—are at times amplified, at times overtaken by electric music. Lighting, designed by longtime collaborator Madeline Best, shifts, echoing the slow transformations of daylight in nature.
Audiences are invited to experience RoCoCoCoCo in many ways: as singular performances that stand on their own; as a sequence unfolding across several days; or as the complete work, gathered in the final two evenings.
ARTIST BIOS
HEATHER KRAVAS
MADELINE BEST
NATIONALLY EMERGING CREATIVE INCUBATOR
Velocity’s Nationally Emerging Creative Incubator, Made in Seattle, provides support to Seattle-based artists through early ideation, development, premiere, and national tour of the work. In this program, Velocity provides a seed commissioning fund, and encourages artists to schedule the development of their work over a few years with both creative and technical residencies alongside setting a full development and touring strategy that includes building relationships with national presenters and applying to both local and national creation and tour funding. Artists in this incubator have made multiple evening length works and often have existing national relationships from past touring and presenting.
PROGRAM SUPPORT
Velocity’s 2026 season is supported by 4 Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, Artsfund, and Creative West. It is underwritten by John C. Robinson, the Glenn Kawasaki Foundation, in addition to generous support from our community donors.
Heather Kravas is a 2025 NDP Finalist Grant Award recipient. Support was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project with funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation in support of RoCoCoCoCo, laughing dances + goth cake conversation and to address continued sustainability needs.
John C. Robinson, Glenn H. Kawasaki 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.
Heather Kravas
Since 1995, Heather Kravas has investigated choreographic, improvisation and collaborative practices in contemporary dance to explore the edges of performance.
Her work investigates:
lines
shapes
distances
presence
exertion
intersections
endurance
calamity
contradiction
concentration
tension
failure
sacrifice
labor
love
the cobbled together
+
words
Full of contradictions and emphatically non-spectacular, her dances invite audiences into the terrain of their own minds.
Kravas grew up in Pullman, WA, where she studied classical ballet and the experimental theater theories of Jerzy Grotowski. Significant to her understanding of dance as a vital form are the many artists/teachers/colleagues she has been privileged to work with: Rebecca Brooks, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Antonija Livingstone, DD Dorvillier, Dayna Hanson, Stephanie Skura, Marina Abramovic, Okkyung Lee, Yvonne Meier, Mary Overlie, Tere O’Connor, Dean Moss, Neil Greenberg, among many. A Guggenheim Fellow, Kravas has received support from Creative Capital, Doris Duke Impact, Foundation for Contemporary Art, MAP Fund, National Performance Network, Seattle Arts Commission, 4 Culture, f.u.s.e.d, and Performance Works NW. Her choreography has been presented at American Realness, Base, Chez Bushwick, The Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Fusebox Festival, The Kitchen, Movement Research, On the Boards, Performance Space New York, Tonic, Walker Art Center and Velocity Dance Center, as well as internationally.
*Photo by Jazzy Photo
Madeline Best is a Lighting Designer, Performer, and The Director of Operations at the Chocolate Factory Theater. Recent artists she has worked with include Brian Rogers, Michelle Ellsworth, Aki Sasamoto, Moriah Evans, Yve Laris Cohen, Anna Sperber, Neal Medlyn, Ursula Eagly, Milka Djordjevich, Efrian Rozas, luciana achugar, Andrea Kleine, Anne-B Parson/Big Dance Theater, and more. Madeline grew up in Durham, North Carolina and currently lives in Long Island City, Queens.
*Photo by Paula Court
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