Jungwoong Kim, born and raised in South Korea, has been a dance/performing artist, actor and arts educator for 25 years.  He is trained in Korean martial arts and traditional dance/ritual of Korean shamanism, which strongly inform his aesthetic and artistic vision.  Kim describes his practice as “a dynamic dialogue between my training and background in South Korean traditional dance and music and my embrace of western improvisation, especially Contact Improvisation, as a performance medium.”  His performance practice includes improvisational solos, durational ensemble work with long-time collaborators, site-specific engagements with visual and media art, and movement characterizations for mainstage theater productions. He teaches workshops nationally and internationally that focus on movement and observation practices as a form of thinking that we can apply to any aspect of life, be it dancing, making, or being in the world. During the past couple of years his work has focused on how movement and voice are pathways to finding a sense of “home” and belonging at a time of increasing migration, displacement, hostility toward immigrants, and human isolation.  Recent engagements include the role of the water seller in Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater production of Bertolt Brecht’s Good Person of Szechuan and leading improvisation workshops in Colombia, Argentina, Germany and South Korea.

*Photo by Rachel Keane

Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters met in San Francisco in 1997 dancing on steel apparatuses under the direction of Jo Kreiter. Since then, with gaps and lapses, they have been in the middle of a project together more than not, creating across various life stages and state lines. Their work has been presented in many of the places they’ve lived including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle. It has also taken them to Almada, Portugal where they tasted the world’s finest egg tart, Jakarta, Indonesia, where they had a surreal karaoke experience, and Bytom, Poland, where the entire town’s power shut down for 15 seconds in the middle of their show. Their dances have been both lauded and panned by press, have sold out and been ignored, and have provided them with 25 years of process and friendship and sometimes ambition and occasionally depletion, and always something both known and a mystery. Rachael is an associate professor at the University of Washington and Leslie is a professor at San Diego State University. Some of their shared mentor/collaborator/influences are: Sara Shelton Mann, Jo Kreiter, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Bebe Miller, K.J. Holmes, Amelia Rudolph, Keith Hennessy, Kim Epifano, Joe Goode, and LIVEpractice/AVID. They are currently touring Long Playing, part three of an accidental trilogy of evening-length duets.

*Photo by Tim Richards

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