KT Shores: What is the New West? Next Fest NW14
Told to funnel my energy into one discipline (dance), time spent in other pursuits was highly criticized. I was reproached time and again for learning arts outside the staid prescription of what a dancer is or is not. In Europe, I got a taste for moving from a more human center point. All aspects of embodiment as radii allow for a full experience of the circumference. Finished...
Colleen McNeary: What is the New West? Next Fest NW14
“If you want to, you can lay me over the table and amuse yourself. And even call in your men. Well… No woman ever died from that. When you’re finished, all I’ll need will be a tub of boiling water, and I’ll be exactly what I was before – with just another filthy memory.” -Jill McBain (played by Claudia Cardinale. Once Upon a Time in the West,...
Luke Gutgsell: What is the New West? Next Fest NW14
Everyone seems to think that New York is the sole location where vital and relevant dance is being made. Of course, it is a gem, a home to so many gifted artists who I admire. But for me, it is also an environment where making work requires the sacrifice of one’s very quality of life. The trade-off inherent in this paradigm is enormous. What is lost is...
Carl Lawrence: What is the New West? Next Fest NW14
Making work in Seattle has become an engagement with Manifest Destiny. What once was the Last Frontier has become a New Frontier, in which the promise of salvation and new beginnings has ceased to be a lateral movement. There is no more land to discover, no further West we can go. Instead, we look up and implore some measure of vertical salvation, in which there is...
Kim Lusk: What is the New West? Next Fest NW14
The New West is obsessive innovation and excessive opportunity. It is an ‘And’ Culture. It is stronger and easier and cleverer and healthier and more complex and more out of the box and . . . We see the ‘And’ Culture in the West-Coast-dominated tech industry (your iPhone is small and fast and can tell you the weather and looks good). We see it in West Coast...
Alexandra Maricich+Mariah Martens: What is the New West? Next Fest NW14
The West is freedom. It is cowboys and Native American prints and Manifest Destiny. The West was promised to be wild, and it was. We’ve stolen freedom. They say it comes at a cost and that cost is thievery. We put our feet up in coffee shops and get naked in dance studios across the nation. We can’t smell marijuana anymore because it is just the city...
Next Fest NW 2014 Request for Proposals
REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS Application deadline September 15, 2014 / 5 PM PST NEXT FEST NW 2014 New West A New Works Series for Artists in Washington, Idaho, Alaska, Oregon, Montana and B.C. Performances December 12, 13, 14 2014. photo by Edward Burtynsky Next Fest NW is Velocity’s new works series celebrating what’s happening in contemporary dance, movement-based performance and dance cinema in the Northwest. Next NW was established to...