RESEARCH IN PERFORMANCE
Works by Corrie Befort, Kayla Hamilton, Moriah Evans
AUG 8 | 7:30 PM
12th Ave Arts Mainstage |1620 12th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122
Presented through the Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation
RESEARCH IN PERFORMANCE
Research in Performance is a festival-style performance that provides a glimpse into the current explorative work of celebrated faculty from Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation 2026. 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 faculty artists, Kayla Hamilton (NYC), Moriah Evans (NYC), and Corrie Befort (WA) will share their research is as a shared bill.
I. Nearly Sighted / Unearthing the Dark | Kayla Hamilton
In this piece, Kayla explores the gaps in knowledge that exist between what we perceive, how we interpret, and what we understand in a sight centered (performance) world. The Audio Descriptions in the show are delivered live by people who become an integral part of the piece. Their tone, style, and point of view are made ‘visible’, finding humor and insight in their subjectivity. Kayla’s dancing, entangled and chasing the literal light, mirrors the exhaustion of having low vision in a visually obsessed world, and offers the possibility of accepting the darkness, and the faith that the light will come when it comes.
II. […/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^] | Moriah Evans
In this short solo, Evans confronts her own body as an ambivalent site.
III. Vertical Structures | Corrie Befort
Sounds and shapes in a box. An imaginary movement conversation with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Fred Sandback.
ARTIST BIOS
Corrie Befort
Kayla Hamilton
Moriah Evans
REGIONALLY ESTABLISHED CREATIVE INCUBATOR PROGRAMS
The Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation is a vibrant month-long immersion in the Seattle dance community, and a chance to explore with dance practitioners experimenting at the leading edge of dance technique, creative practices, and dance improvisation. Grounded in SFD+I’s nearly 30 years of community-building and intergenerational collaboration, this festival is a gateway for new dancers to connect with artists making work in the Seattle dance and improvisation community, and a chance for Seattle-based artists to train and research with internationally renowned artists.
During our Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation, Velocity also presents work by local and visiting faculty members. These presentations range from work-in-process sharings to larger scale productions, and are often one-night-only presentations. We also commission artists to work with participants to create new work that is shared during the festival.
PROGRAM SUPPORT
The Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation is made possible with generous support from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and the King County Festival and Events Fund. It is also supported by our community of individual donors, community partners, and arts advocates. If you would like to join this community of sponsors, please contact Erin O’Reilly at erin@velocitydancecenter.org.
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.
Sabela grimes (he/him) is a trans-media storyteller, sonic ARKivist, and movement composer. Improvisational systems and collaboration are at the heart of his creative practice, inhaling through socio-historical observation, self-examination and speculative meanderings, exhaling through layers of interconnected sonic, visual and kinesthetic arrangements. Sabela’s creative practice invests in the poetics of assemblage, the magic of mutability, and mastering misuse. Sabela works closely with experimental video and movement artist, Meena Murugesan, to invent graphic symbolic systems to inspire sound design, video content and generate movement scores. Past projects include Philly XP, World War WhatEver, 40 Acres & A Microchip and ELECTROGYNOUS, which declares that Black gender qualities are infinite, multidimensional and distinct manifestations of wombniversal consciousness. Sabela’s current collaborative endeavor with Murugesan, Parable of Portals, dreams Octavia E. Butler’s body of work, including Butler’s personal writing and unfinished manuscripts, into modular multi-disciplinary performance/installation experiences. Each experience realizes quantum Blackness as a means to play within the nowness of recurring futures. On faculty at USC’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, he continues to cultivate, Funkamental MediKinetics, a movement system that draws on the layered dance training, community building, and spiritual practices evident in Black vernacular and Hip Hop/Street dance forms. He is a 2023 USC Associates Award for Artistic Expression recipient, 2021 Bessie Award recipient for Outstanding Performer, 2017 County of Los Angeles Performing Arts Fellow and 2014 United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow. Sabela loves pancakes, speculative fiction, and his kinfolk.
*Photo Alon Koppel
Fox Whitney [he/him] is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of dance, music, film+video, theater, writing and visual art. Fox is obsessed with the surreal nature of transformation, how we identify ourselves and others and how personal and collective identity is an ever shifting and evolving landscape. His projects center his queer and transgender point of view. His current methods are informed by the interdisciplinary performance project Gender Tender he started in Seattle in 2012. Gender Tender movement research continues to influence his performance practice, teaching artist style and life in general. He is grateful for the way Gender Tender practices and performances have created a safe space for many different kinds of queer and trans people and their friends to move together beyond binary thinking and limited ideas about body based art practices, identity formation and community building. He fronts the trans-futurist psych band Light Aloud that grew from his performance project MELTED RIOT inspired by research into what played on the jukebox the night that the Stonewall Riots started in 1969. His work is inspired by the history of QT art + activism and his experience as a trans dancer, drag performer, gigging musician and event producer that started his medical transition well into his public performance career.
Fox’s work has been commissioned and produced by the Henry Art Gallery; On the Boards; Velocity Dance Center; Seattle International Dance Festival; Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival and was selected for the inaugural season of Seattle’s Gay City Arts. Light Aloud has played at Trans Pride Seattle, Capitol Hill Block Party and the Seattle Art Fair. He has performed in work by Meg Foley, Will Rawls, keyon gaskin, Morgan Thorson, Andrew Schneider, CommonForm Dance Project, Malic Amalya and Gabrielle Civil. He got his MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited his short films and visual art nationally. Fox is also a yoga and meditation teacher, movement teaching artist and arts journalist currently writing for SeattleDances and Variable West.
*Photo by Fox Whitney
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