Results tagged “zoescofield”

Audible, 605 Collective. Hell yeah! After an hour of interpretive dance pieces heavy on long, languid, movements, 605 Collective emerged like an antidote, kicking it up more than a few notches. The five dancers that comprise 605 are electrifying, delivering an athletic, fast-paced, personality-driven snippet from a 60-minute work to debut at the Dancing on the Edge Festival in July. If you live in Vancouver, B.C., don't miss these people. Influenced by everything from hiphop to ballet, they delivered in a stunning way.

O'Neal's back it up leads off the program, assembling the dancers in street/rehearsal clothes, very "Fame! I'm gonna live forever," with music by MF Doom, X Clan, Riuchi Sakamoto, Pete Rock & CLSmooth, and Cut Chemist (featuring Edan & Mr. Lif). Costumes for all the pieces are by Jessica Markiewicz, and they add a great deal to each. They warm up, step into dance floor moves, pop and lock, and in general, front like an MTV hip hop special. But there's a current of contact improv that flows through the piece--O'Neal said later she was thinking of Peter Pan and his shadow--where the dancers grab at each other's ankles and are pulled along or pull themselves. We're not sure why, but it pleased us, this disruptive play during what felt like a set of polished pros, strutting moves.

    

You know how in horror films they were doing this thing where they'd delete frames and speed up or slow down the film to give the "evil" an eerie, inhuman quality? Zoe Scofield does that live, pretzeling, twisting, writhing, blank face dusted white with a silver streak down the center, her eyes disturbing pools of black under the lights. Yet...a hand reaches out to softly enfold the nape of a neck, there's a surrender, a leaning back. (For more on Scofield, check out Brendan Kiley's interview.)

Over the weekend Velocity Dance Center was hosting SCUBA 2007, a national tour highlighting up-and-coming choreographers. (Next up for Velocity is their Annual Bash on June 3, hosted this year by Sarah Rudinoff.) Friday night the Velocity space was packed with modern dance fans -- we suspect that, like poetry readings, the modern dance audience is roughly congruent with the set of area performers and their partners. We'd say it was standing-room-only, but they ended up getting mats out and laying them down for people to sit on.

SCUBA: The national tour presents works by three emerging national talents in contemporary dance: Zoe Scofield (YouTube) & Juniper Shuey (Seattle), LEVYdance (SF), and Justin Jones with Chris Yon & Friends (MN/NYC). We're fans of Scofield's work, which mingles ballet and modern dance, introspection and spectacle, and curious about the rest. Maybe we'll see you there.

After hearing "emerging Seattle choreographer" Zoe Scofield and PNB's Peter Boal at a talkin-'bout-dance panel Sunday, we were looking forward to Monday, which featured performances by Scofield and PNB. Non-dance highlights were our uber-local, fast-talking, Spalding-Grayish Matt Smith monologuing about manliness and his move to Bainbridge Island, the new wave rearrangements of cover band Nouvelle Vague (including a sing-along to "Too Drunk To Fuck"), and finishing the day inside a sweaty knot of teens listening to CocoRosie getting all rapped-up with vocal beat boxing and shiznit. We know that sounds sexy.

All music all the time wears us out, so we decided to hopscotch around Bumbershoot this year and take advantage of the talks, arts performances, and art exhibits.

Saturday we went to see Ten Tiny Dances, co-curated by Seattle's Crispin Spaeth and Portland's Mike Barber. All the dances are made for a 4' x 4' plywood stage, and this year Barber had decided to tighten the constraints by insisting that the performers stay within a foot or so of the stage if they stepped off.