Velocity Dance Center Announces Fall 2023 Season

Velocity has announced its Fall 2023 Season. The season features new projects by Meg Foley (PHL), Amy O'Neal (LA), Alyza Delpan-Monley (SEA), and our next cohort of Pacific Northwest-based artists. 

At Velocity we love a good metaphor about the interconnected nature of the arts ecology. Enter mycelium, neural networks, and the innovation of our natural world. We're not the first to make these connections*, but we are inspired by how natural networks help us see how dance and performance experimentation is a collective (and joyful!) experience between artist, audience, and environment. 

Former Artistic Director of Velocity, Fox Whitney, writes, “like some varieties of mushrooms, performance art challenges narrow points of view by offering lived communal experiences that result from the unique interests and actions of the artists involved.”  This season we're embracing this ethos with four distinct pieces that share a playful, curious nature and communal process. 

With season subscriptions starting at $45, audiences can get four experimental nights out that will pack a creative punch on any budget. This season we invite our community to co-create their experimental dance experiences with us this fall at Velocity.

About the season, Executive Director Erin Johnson encourages audiences to approach these dance works with an exploratory spirit:

“One of the exciting things about contemporary dance is that it is always new, always changing, and rarely exactly how you expect it. The pandemic gave us a negative experience of the unexpected, but live performance helps us remember that the unexpected can be an awe-inspiring and  joyful experience that brings us closer to the people around us. These artists are making work that is innovative and grounded in desire to connect us to one another. Get connected and have a shared experience with us this fall.”

Season subscriptions are on sale now, with individual tickets available beginning in August. 

*We take inspiration from Adrienne Maree Brown, Vu Pham, and Seattle's own Fox Whitney.

Velocity Presents: BLOOD BABY

By Meg Foley [PHL]

AUG 31 - SEP 5

Various Locations

Blood Baby is an iterative performance quadriptych exploring the intersectional experiences of gender performance, queerness, parenthood, sexuality, and belonging.

Performance, dance and somatics extend beyond a discrete theatrical moment, as four related events—Carpet Womb, Communion, Primordial, and Touch Library—each embrace a distinctive aspect and materiality of the experience of a human body becoming: parenting and parenting queerly, gender dimensions, and  building queer universes through choreography, sculpture, and drag. A Queer Parent Convening invites queer and trans parents to connect and share about their experiences.

BLOOD BABY  is presented by Velocity with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and Seattle's Department of Neighborhoods.

Velocity Presents: The Hybrid Lab: Conversations in Merging Dance Cultures

By Amy O'Neal [LA]

OCT 5-7, 7:30 PM

12th Avenue Arts | 1620 12th Ave

The Hybrid Lab: Conversations in Merging Dance Cultures is part dance party, part performance cypher, part contemporary performance art, and part conversation facilitated by dancer/choreographer/curator/dance educator Amy O'Neal. The Hybrid Lab is a space for real time dialogue between dancers primarily from and in relation to hip hop culture who merge multiple movement styles and contexts to experiment with artistic form, build community, and shift power dynamics between artists, venues, funders, and audiences. For this engagement, The Hybrid Lab will feature the evolution of Amy O'Neal's work "A Trio” as well as appearances by Seattle hip hop culture luminaries Orb, Alfredo “Free” Vergara, Tracey Wong, and Majiin O'Neal among others to be announced. 

The Hybrid Lab is made possible through major underwriting by John Robinson. 

Velocity Presents: That's a HANDFUL!

By Alyza Delpan-Monley

OCT 11-14, 7:30 PM

OCT 14, 2:00 PM

12th Avenue Arts | 1620 12th Ave

Join zaza on a fact-finding adventure, diving into and exploring HANDS: handshakes, hand signals, pinky promises, palm reading, shadow puppets, finger prints, nerve sensation, touch and connection. Using their two hands and ten fingers, as well as other props, metaphors and perhaps a touch of whimsy with a dash of the imagination, we will put our finger on the pulse of these distal appendages, their sensitivity and their capabilities. How and why do we use our hands and what are all the amazing things we can do with them?

Velocity Presents: NEXT FEST NW

Artists to be announced.

DEC 7-9 + 14-16, 7:30 PM

DEC 9 + 16, 2:00 PM

12th Avenue Arts | 1620 12th Ave

Next Fest NW is Velocity's experimental new works festival, celebrating contemporary dance and movement-based artists innovating in our region. Next Fest NW 2023 is curated by Alyza Delpan-Monley, Takahiro Yamamoto, Berette Macaulay, and Shane Donohue.

Next Fest NW 2023 is made possible by the Capitol Hill Arts District with funding by the Cultural District Economic Recovery Fund initiated by Seattle Office of Arts + Culture. This Program is additionally underwritten by Brian O'Reily and Erin Johnson.

ABOUT VELOCITY

Velocity is Seattle's center dedicated to contemporary dance, and an essential incubator for new dance in our region. With artist-driven, community-responsive programming, Velocity provides vital resources and advocacy for one of the most active dance communities in the nation. Velocity's programming includes classes, workshops, residencies, performances, discussions, and the Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation.

Home to hundreds of independent dance artists and renowned for producing investigative, thoughtful work, Velocity's artist residencies have fostered the early work and careers of Cherdonna, Zoe Scofield, Dani Tirrell, Kate Wallich, Danielle Agami, Alice Gosti, Kim Lusk, Coleman Pester, and several more; and was the first to bring to Seattle the work of art stars Tere O'Connor, Miguel Gutierrez, Anouk van Dijk, Bebe Miller, Deborah Hay, Ralph Lemon, Faye Driscoll, Monica Bill Barnes, and many more. 

Velocity advances contemporary dance and movement-based art by fostering the creative explorations of artists and audiences through an invested commitment to education, creation, performance, inquiry, community participation, and inter/national exchange.
 

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ARTIST BIOS

Meg Foley is a queer dance artist, educator, and parent who creates performances and somatic-based events as self-affirming practices. She currently researches gay and trans families and how we are formed. Her improvisational practice builds detailed movement vocabularies out of scientifically-engaged research and lived experience. Artistic collaborations include co-curating Tender Hotel, a 24-hour virtual hotel hosting rooms facilitated by 100+ International Artists within Art Station Foundation's and CounterPulse's Grand reUnion, and a National Center for Choreography Akron Dancing Lab exploring how artistic and parenting practices overlap with fellow artist parents. Foley is a 2020 New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project awardee, a 2012 Pew Fellow in the Arts and a former Vox Populi member. Foley's work has been presented by LA Performance Practice, Prague Quadrennial, Philadelphia Contemporary, CounterPulse, and Philadelphia Fringe Festival (curated), TanzFabrik Potsdam, Art Stations Foundation at Malta Festival, Moore College of Art and Design, Pilot+Projects, Icebox Project Space, and Vox Populi Gallery. She grew up in the DC area, was a creative movement baby who grew up to do a lot of club dancing, studied visual art and dance, and now is a queerdo mama, based in Philadelphia. 

Amy O'Neal is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator. A sought-after artist for over two decades, she teaches and performs nationally and internationally and choreographs for live performance, dance film, music video and virtual reality.  From 2010 until now, she creates experimental dance work merging Black social dance practices from hip-hop and house culture and contemporary dance while directly addressing race, gender and the sampling nature of innovation. She premiered her first evening-length solo in 2012 for Velocity Dance Center's first Made in Seattle program, where she examined her influences, questioned her relationship to Blackness as a white woman, and paid homage to her teachers and dance heroes. As a practicing guest of Black dance culture, she has participated in experimental and all-styles battles in NYC, San Francisco, and Seattle, co-organized and co-produced Seattle House Dance Project, and developed hip-hop curriculum for the University of Washington. Her passion and research meet at the intersection of the hip-hop, house and contemporary dance communities. Within this intersection she explores the complex differences, nuances and layers of hybridized movement vocabularies.

In 2016 Amy relocated to Los Angeles and started The Rhythm Assembly, a freestyle techniques class merging the social and exploratory natures of hip-hop and contemporary dance. She joined the faculty of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in 2018 where she teaches hip-hop, house and freestyle techniques, composition and improvisation, contemporary dance, and lectures on Black social dance history, practice, and media literacy. Amy started The Hybrid Lab: Conversations in Merging Dance Cultures in Los Angeles in 2019 as part of the LAX Festival produced by Los Angeles Performance Practices. She feels the most at peace when she can embody her full human experience as an artist and is passionate about creating space for others to do the same.

Alyza DelPan-Monley (they/them) believes in the expressive power that can be accessed in the body through movement. 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). 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. They strive to participate in and build processes where everyone feels like they can exist in their fullest selves by cultivating and celebrating every body's unique form of expression.

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