SFD+I Performance Cohorts Showcase
with choreography by
DANI TIRRELL, HEATHER KRAVAS, ALYZA DELPAN-MONLEY, JARET HUGHES, KEYES WILEY + AMY O’NEAL
Fri, AUG 4 | 8 PM
Sat, AUG 5 | 2 & 8 PM
Erickson Theatre | 1524 Harvard Ave
TICKETS: $20 | $30 | $50
ARTIST BIOS
DANI TIRRELL
dani tirrell (Washington, DC) Seattle’s Mayor Arts Award recipient 2019, is a Black, Trans Spectrum, Queer choreographer, dancer, and movement guide. dani has guided people in Detroit and Seattle as well as sharing movement practices in other cities in the United States. Currently dani is the curator for Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas (Seattle). dani is the host and co-creator of several online talk programs Sunday Dinner, The Living Room, and Intimate Conversations. Currently dani works at Dance Place (Washington, DC) as Dance Place’s Artistic Director.
HEATHER KRAVAS
Since 1995 Heather Kravas has investigated choreographic, improvisation and collaborative practices in contemporary dance to explore the limits of choreography and her artistic abilities. Punk, feminist, precise and extreme, her work is continually built, wrecked and reconstructed to activate curiosity and examine relationships between art, power, agency and desire.
JARET HUGHES
Jaret is a Hip Hop Teacher and Choreographer. He has been at the core of Seattle’s hip hop and dance scene for many years, going back to his years with the Seattle Supersonics as the first male dancer in the NBA.
KEYES WILEY
“Multi-hyphenate art maker Keyes Wiley (they/them) is a designer of dance, theater, music, lights and sound. Their vast movement vocabulary continues to grow from break dancing to musical theater and now more burlesque! Wiley has been an arts educator in Seattle since 2009 teaching at Rainier Dance Center as the director of hip hop/street styles dance, choreographing with Seattle Children’s Theatre and teaching at their alma mater Cornish College of the Arts. You can catch them in action as dj dark_wiley monthly at TUSH & Peekaboo both at the Clock-Out Lounge.
Keyes has performed, collaborated or created work with Keith Hennessey, Kitten N Lou, Dani Tirrell, On the Boards, the CD Forum, Velocity Dance Center, Gibney Dance (NYC), Cal State San Luis Obispo & many others.
ALYZA DELPAN-MONLEY
Alyza DelPan-Monley (they/she) believes in the expressive power that can be accessed in the body through movement. Known for their embrace of whimsy, quirky non-sequitors and esoteric theatricality, they take inspiration from physical theatre, clowning, puppetry, cartoons, and a myriad of movement styles. As a movement designer and choreographer, their work has been presented at Cafe Nordo (Violet’s Attic, Jitterbug Perfume), Washington Ensemble Theater (Teh Internet, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., Straight White Men, Dance Nation), and ArtsWest (Office Hour, The Last World Octopus Wrestling Champion) and at 5th Avenue Theatre (ASTH, Sweeney Todd). They perform and collaborate regularly with Salvage Rituals and they are a company member and dancer with MALACARNE. Alyza is Velocity Dance Center’s Curating Artist in Residence through September 2023. As a mixed-race queerdo 2nd gen immigrant, they are always thinking about the liminal identity and the assumptions made on the perceived body, and how performance can both expand and restrict the possibilities of legibility. They strive to participate in and build processes where everyone feels like they can exist in their fullest selves by cultivating and celebrating every bodies’ unique form of expression.
AMY O'NEAL
Amy O’Neal (she/they) is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator merging contemporary and hip-hop dance since 2000 to challenge notions of race, gender, and the sampling nature of innovation. She teaches and performs nationally and internationally and choreographs for concert dance, experimental performance, dance film, music video, and virtual reality. From 2000 to 2010, along with musician and composer Zeke Keeble, O’Neal co-directed locust, a dance/music/video hybrid performance company based in Seattle. From 2010 until now, she works project to project creating dance experiences merging practices and values of hip hop and house dance culture with experimental performance. O’Neal is a grantee of Creative Capital, National Performance Network, National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts among others. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, DanceWEB/Impulstanz scholar, and Herb Alpert Award nominee with a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, where she earned the first Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014. After 20 years in Seattle (15 of those teaching and creating at Velocity Dance Center) O’Neal moved to Los Angeles in 2016. She joined the faculty of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in 2018 where she teaches hip-hop, house, contemporary, composition, improvisation techniques, Pilates mat, and lectures on Black social dance history, practices, and media literacy. She is currently working on her next evening length work A Trio and developing a research and performance platform called The Hybrid Lab: Conversations in Merging Dance Cultures.
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, 4Culture and ArtsFund. It is also supported by our community of individual donors, community partners, and arts advocates.