The Speakeasy: Traversing a Mountain
Addressing the Elephantine Alp How many ways to traverse a mountain? Around, over, through. A circumambulatory hike around the base may have given us a peek to what landscape, what skies and weather conditions the other side is capable to offer; instead we hoisted our pickaxes immediately and tried to chip our way through solid rock. The ills of no existent structure can be cured in 25...
The Nether Highway of the Social Contract: Part 2
Through my dashboard the rhythmic hologram of Venus projecting up from reflective dashes, her columnar nakedness a stolid repetition of disfigurement as idealization, brokenness inevitably paired with the female form. It was Kansas, and I was driving because that’s what we all did, because it was the plains, everything stretched out into brown-dry wheat fields and endless parking lots. Like many images from my psyche of that...
The Amorphous and Agile Swarming of Belongingness: Part 1
Planets whizzing out of control, stars flung like frisbees into the farthest, darkest fields of the universe? Somehow not. Planets have orbits, stars congregate in clusters, gas clouds accumulate and billow. In this void, this vacuum surrounding us, something beyond gravitational pull and the momentum of mass is at work. Calculations (and serious inquiry) only in the 1970s to begin to understand dark matter—the hidden substance, an...
Gift-ask-receive-re-gift: A beginning
A figurine like the Venus of Willendorf but in her original state, not yet pockmarked by thousands of years of rock abrasions and surrounding decay. Crease of her pelvic girdle smoothly and deliberately pointing to her sex. Provocative, yes, for the purposes of my necessary shrine, the harnessing of a lion. Lady of the Girlboss, small chant, small mouthing. Lady of the Girlboss, grant me badassness. To...
Identity Riot Speakeasy: Velocity’s NFNW 2014
In conjunction with Next Fest NW, Velocity presented the Speakeasy Series: Identity Riot, where we examined the New West from the perspectives of feminism, riot grrrls; African-American and Filipino-American dance culture. View the footage of this speakeasy event, and help us continue online the discussion centered around the weaving together personal history and current affairs in our fast-changing city. Curated by Tonya Lockyer and hosted by dance...
El Norte Speakeasy: Velocity’s NFNW 2014
Starting off Velocity’s Next Fest Northwest Festival, Speakeasy Series: El Norte started our conversation about the New West with a look to the Old West and to Mexican-American and Latino-American artists working in our community. Dance artists Nancy Blanco and Fausto Rivera hosted this performance, talk, and community conversation, with a film screening by Rodrigo Valenzuela. View the footage of the speakeasy event, and help us continue...
What is the New West?
Is there a New West? What does it mean to make performance out of the vibrant culture of the evolving 21st century American West? A range of dance artists, in their proposals for Velocity’s Next Fest NW program, weighed in on what comprises The New West. The breadth of their insight is as expansive as the West itself, and their collective reflections organically shape a multifaceted answer...
Owen David: What is the New West? Next Fest NW14
We are thinking about frontiers and pioneers; about circling the wagons, mutual dependence, and the struggle for worth; and about how white masculinity, sovereignty, socio-economic agency, and the ghost of Eden all lie tangled in some notion of an American wilderness. We are coming at this as members of the post-recession millennial generation, an amalgam of fantasies, desires, and fears about the American Dream; at once...
Hannah Simmons: What is the New West? Next Fest NW14
To make performance in the American West is to adopt its cultural idiosyncrasies. The vibrant culture of the New American West is currently defined by the influx of computerized devices. Technological innovation is providing us with new tools, new options, and even whole new ways to stimulate the senses. The presence of technology is allowing artists in the West to define new paradigms of expression: genres are...
Angelica DeLashmette: What is the New West? Next Fest NW14
As an emerging dance artist in Seattle, I feel that to make performance out of the vibrant culture of the evolving 21st century American West means to ask yourself questions you don’t have the answers to. To ask questions that will perhaps remain unanswered, but which will ignite unfamiliar dialogue within both artist and the audience. When I create work, I begin by asking myself questions. I...
Anna Conner: What is the New West? Next Fest NW14
I feel that a surge of a new electric energy has come over the Northwest dance scene, creating an aesthetic very unique to our region. As this new energy changes, we take what we have learned from our brilliant and creative forerunners who continue to pave our way, and combine it with what is happening today. We are concerning ourselves with setting heavy personal limitations, yet creating...
Xavier Vandermay: What is the New West? Next Fest NW14
Hope for the New West I wish that I could go to sleep and awaken to a West that I’ve imagined: In which we truly embrace one another, in which respect exists for low- to mid-rent tastes as it exists for the high, and where the dance community forgoes the clan mentality in favor of freely “nerding out” along the spectrum of dance. No one is a...