SWITCH: Post-Failure Potentials
By
MAKISIG AKIN + ANYA CLOUD/THE LOVE MAKERS COMPANY
JUL 19 | 6 PM
Kings Street Station | 303 S Jackson St Top floor, Seattle, WA
Presented through the Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation in partnership with ARTS at King Street Station, and featuring the SFD+I Professional Cohort.
*Individual tickets go on sale about 6 weeks before performances.
After 2024’s acclaimed performances of “We Are (Nothing) Everything”, Makisig Akin + Anya Cloud make their return to SFD+I with a brand new piece, site specific piece featuring this year’s awesome crop of dancers from the SFD+I Professional Performance Cohort!
SWITCH: Post-Failure Potentials | Makisig Akin + Anya Cloud
This piece is deeply visceral and experimental as it dares to reimagine failure as a beginning, revealing bold new possibilities for queer futures, radical resilience, and collective transformation. The politics of values, identities, and collective bonds are central. Performers engage in high-stakes and high-risk contexts as the audience is invited into active spectatorship reminiscent of an Olympic event or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu match. Informed by Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, martial arts, improvisation, and contemporary dance, the work subverts binaries as it spokes into the power, politics, and intimacy of post-failure potential.
Interested in working with these stellar artists? Sign up for the SFD+I Professional Performance Cohort and get in the action!
ARTIST BIOS
MAKISIG AKIN
ANYA CLOUD
PERFORMANCE AT SFD+I
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 National Endowment for the Arts, 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.
ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION
King Street Station has an ADA-compliant elevator that services every level of the station. Access it via the Amtrak level (1st Floor), which is on King Street. The plaze entrance is on Jackson Street and is the 2nd Floor.
ARTS at King Street Station also has ADA-compliant, all-gender restrooms. There are two wheelchairs available in the gallery, as well as folding stools.
Makisig Akin (they/them) | I am a queer, transgender Filipino born choreographer, dance artist, facilitator, and activist. I was born and raised in the Philippines and am currently based in Berlin and Colorado. My work focuses on the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with my ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. Holding spaces for Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (QTBIPoC) is an integral part of my artist activism. I hold spaces choreographically, curatorially, and educationally by examining how survival strategies can be translated into a communal physical practice for creative healing. Important collaborators and teachers include mayfield brooks, Jason Tsou, Anya Cloud, Nara Virgens, Eric Geiger, Ajani Brannum, and taisha paggett, among others. I co-founded The Love Makers Company with Anya Cloud, a project-based dance company. I also co-founded Emerging Change Tanzfestival with Nara Virgens, a dance festival featuring and curating QTBIPoC artists and their collaborators. I have taught dance workshops in many different communities including HZT Berlin, UCLA, Tanzfabrik Berlin Schule, Bennington College, The Field Center, and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among others. My work is deeply interconnected with my training in Filipino Traditional Dance, Kung Fu, Jiu Jitsu, Improvisation, walking meditation, Authentic Movement, Bouldering/Climbing, and Contemporary Dance. I received an MFA from UCLA in 2019.
*Photo by Jim Coleman
Anya Cloud (she/they) | I am an experimental contemporary dance artist originally from Alaska and currently based between Colorado and Berlin. As a queer white person, I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice. Collaboration, questioning, and deep physicality are central to all of my work. Makisig Akin and I co-direct the project-based dance company The Love Makers Company. Our work has recently been produced by DOCK 11, Tanzfabrik Berlin Bühne, Tanztage Berlin, Movement Research at the Judson, OUTsider Fest, Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation, and What You See Festival. Important collaborators include Makisig Akin, Sara Shelton Mann, Karen Schaffman, Eric Geiger, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Rebecca Salzer, and Nhu Nguyen. I have taught at festivals and institutions internationally including at Guatemala Contact Improvisation Festival, Tanzfabrik Berlin Schule, ImPulsTanz, Tanzquartier, wcciJAM, Ukraine Contact Improvisation Festival, The Field Center, BeingTouch, and Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation among others. I currently teach at the University of Colorado Boulder, earned an MFA from UCSD, and trained in the Feldenkrais Method® under Elizabeth Beringer.
*Photo by Jim Coleman
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