Leo Othón | Photo by Devin Muñoz
KARA BEADLE / HEAP TROUPE
Car Sick
MAY 21 – 22 | 7:30 PM
MAY 23 | 2 PM
Freeway Park Garage | 1267 Hubbell Pl, Seattle, WA 98101
Individual Ticket Prices:
Low Income – $25 | General – $40 | Champion – $60
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Run time: 1 hour
Presented through Velocity’s Regionally Established Creative Incubator Program
Car Sick will invite audiences to explore a multilevel underground parking complex that has been transformed into a bizarre dystopian vision of motorodom, aka Car Culture. Audiences will be led throughout the garage to witness dance and drama performances: a car crashes through a wedding while a man and motor read their vows; dancers in vehicular-drag tumble from the bed of a truck; audience members are sucked through a tailpipe into a fever dream of motor industry propaganda, inspired by road rage gestures, gendered personification of cars, and the visceral feeling of being car-sick.
The movement will specifically aim to embody the power structures, fallacies, and patterns of harm in our society’s abusive relationship with cars. The garage will be decorated with found object sculptures, signs, and propaganda posters to add visual interest and world building. The goal of Car Sick is to scrutinize and map the space taken up by car culture in the landscapes of cities and the psyches of citizens, to use dramatic narrative to provide moral clarity around real transportation conflicts in Seattle, to repurpose an enormous piece of car infrastructure as the stage for a memorable performance art show.
Car Sick comes at a time when public pressure is mounting for solutions to our failed transportation system. Seattle citizens are being killed by cars at an accelerating rate, spurred by increasing danger from the bulk and mass of modern SUVs and electric vehicles. At least 128 Seattle citizens were killed by cars last year, and half of these victims were killed while walking or biking, and the deaths are continuing through 2026. The federal government is gutting transit funding, doubling down on car investment, denying climate change, and downplaying our dependence on global violence to sustain a volatile oil extraction economy. Seattleites are aware of these things and yet it still hasn’t clicked that cars are existentially harmful to our society.
By staging our human-scale show within the car infrastructure of a (mostly empty most of the time) parking complex, we are pointing at the absurdity of the scale of motordom. Enhabiting this space outside of a car, audiences must reckon with the size, hostility, and inhumanity of what we’ve built.
ARTISTS
KARA BEADLE
HEAP TROUPE
ALETHEA ALEXANDER
BEN SWENSON-KLATT
LEO OTHÓN
LEAH CROSBY
ANDY ZACEK
ABOUT THE VENUE
We are still gathering access information for this venue. In the meantime, please contact Shirley at operations@velocitydancecenter.org with any questions or requests, or write us a note on our ticketing service when buying tickets. We will do our best to accommodate!
ABOUT THE REGIONALLY ESTABLISHED CREATIVE INCUBATOR
Velocity’s Regionally Established Creative Incubator, Co-Productions, are for Seattle-based artists who want to collaborate with Velocity to share the development, production and presentation of a new full-length work. These artists have experience self-producing their own full-length work, and usually set specific goals for this program that help them grow their long-term artistic mission, vision, and audience, while increasing their work’s technical scale, budget, and impact.
PARTNERS
PROGRAM SPONSORS
Velocity’s Incubator Programs are supported in part by 4Culture’s Cultural Support Services program and the TEW Foundation. Free and reduced cost ticketing supported by 4Culture’s Public Free Access program.
PROJECT SPONSORS
Freeway Park Association, Seattle Convention Center, Lance Milliman
Leo Othón, photo by Devin Muñoz
HEAP TROUPE
Heap Troupe is a Seattle-based interdisciplinary performance troupe that has been creating site-specific interactive performances since 2019. Heap uses play and experimental theatrics to celebrate joy in abundance, while critiquing overconsumption. Inside the fantasy worlds they build, Heap queers reductive ideas on bodily autonomy by drawing parallels between humans and objects; bicycles, ladders, oranges, etc. This collaborative project is directed by movement artist Kara Beadle, in collaboration with performer and handyman Andy Zacek, and several rotating artists. Kara’s choreographic process uses character building tools from role-playing games and structured improvisation, gearing their aesthetic to be easily approachable to non-dancers, using humor and props to stimulate empathy. Andy uses parts, hardware, trash and junk to create the sets and costuming to further develop the fantasy worlds that these characters inhabit. Leah Crosby has collaborated with Heap since 2024, they use text, sound, movement, and objects to tell stories about care and human connection.
Heap is currently an artist in residence at Freeway Park, and has performed in On The Boards Spectacle Spectacular, Next Fest Northwest: Rupture/Reverence, Texas Dance Improvisation Festival, Co’s Show 5, Space Station Dance Residency in St Lewis, the Walk Don’t Run Art Marathon, Georgetown’s Art Attack, The Shed’s Freeform Residency Showing, The Flight Deck Residency Showing, 18th and Union’s Portable Performance Festival, Velocity Dance Center’s Fall Kick-off: Portals, Launch, TakePause, and The Seattle International Dance Festival.
In November 2024 Heap produced their own show Automorphs, in partnership with Cascade Bicycle Club, a non-profit bicycle advocacy group. The piece was toured at Estrogenius festival in NYC in May 2025.
Kara was awarded a 2025-2026 City Artist Grant for the creation of Heapride: Behind the Handlebars, a mobile bike-based performance inviting audiences to ride bicycles and witness performances on Seattle streets from behind the handlebars which premiered May 2026.
Photo by Briana Jones
KARA BEADLE
Kara Beadle (they/them) is a movement artist, dance educator, and massage therapist based in Seattle, WA. As a non-binary, neuro-queer dance maker, Kara values queering dance through humor, improvisation, and object/human relationships to explore their interest in the interplay between neurodivergence, gender-nonconformance, the pressure to fit into society, and performative art. Kara is a lead collaborator of Heap, a Seattle-based performance troupe created with musician and handyman extraordinaire Andy Zacek and several rotating artists. Their experimental theatrics celebrate abundance, while critiquing overconsumption. Inside the fantasy worlds they build, Heap designs absurd scenarios between objects and bodies to subvert objectification and flaunt our lust for inanimate things.
Photo by Devin Muñoz
ALETHEA ALEXANDER
Alethea Alexander (M.F.A.) is a Seattle-based dance artist and educator. Community, sensuality, care, effort and collaboration are central tenets of her creative work with dance partners human, object and sonic. She performs her own improvised, choreographed and installation-based works in collaboration with multidisciplinary artists in Seattle and nationally.
In Seattle, Alethea is Co-Founder and Teaching Artist for Ballet Rituals, a queer and community-based movement practice. She is also Artistic Co-Director with Undercurrent, where she additionally teaches local weekly classes and international traveling workshops. Bringing practitioners together in open-level movement joy, Alethea has been teaching Dance Church® in Seattle since 2017, and served as the inaugural Director of Training and Teacher Relations for the company from 2022-2026.
Born in Washington State, Alethea grew up in the little northwest corner city of Bellingham. www.aletheaalexander.com
Photo by Summer Hanson
BEN SWENSON-KLATT
Ben Swenson-Klatt (they/them) is a non-binary queer arts administrator and performing artist, specializing in dance, theater, singing, and burlesque. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, they graduated from St. Olaf College with a B.A. in Theater and Dance and a concentration in Women’s and Gender Studies before moving to Seattle in 2018. They have recently performed and worked with Enchanted Ravens, Babylon Productions, Karin Stevens Dance, Dacha Theatre, Seattle Rep’s Public Works Program, Washington Ensemble Theatre, AnA Collaborations, and more. They have performed original work at S.O.A.P., CO-SHOW10, 12 Minutes Max, Chlo & Co. Dance’s DROVE IX, and in other festivals nationally. Additionally, they have received artistic residencies through Open Flight Studio’s Flight Deck, UW’s BST, Velocity’s Creative Residency, and the Center for Performing Arts in Mpls, MN and were recently crowned Seattle Shining Star at Studio Saturdays at Kremwerk. They are a company member of Karin Stevens Dance and perform burlesque around town as Lavender Liqueur/Lavender Lasso. They are thrilled to be back working with Heap Troupe after biking around town during Walk Don’t Run!
Photo by Summer Hanson
LEO OTHÓN
Leo Othón is a multidisciplinary artist and performer whose experience riding bicycles as a means of transportation has spurred a decades-long fascination with the ways we inhabit, co-create, and move about our built environments.
Photo by Summer Hanson
LEAH CROSBY
Leah Crosby uses text, sound, movement, and objects to tell stories about care and human connection. They have an MFA in Art from the University of Michigan. They love biking and bikes, which is maybe obvious.
Photo by Summer Hanson
ANDY ZACEK
Andy Zacek is a bike mechanic and artistic collaborator. He creates with parts, hardware, trash, and junk to furnish the fantasy worlds of HEAP. His deep skepticism of “normal” elements of society— car dependency, mass consumption of disposable goods, and technology fetishism, to name a few— provides continual fascination and inspiration for his work.