REDCAT, CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts, presents Girl Gods, a new work by Seattle-based choreographer Pat Graney, Visual Designer Holly Batt (who won a Bessie for Outstanding Visual Design) and Composer Amy Denio from Thursday November 3 to Sunday November 6, 2016, as part of the Sharon D. Lund Dance Series. Times and ticket details are below.
The fierce women of Girl Gods may be wearing cocktail dresses and little heels, but their explosive physical language and wry humor reveal the anger simmering under the surface of the collective feminine mind. In Girl Gods, Graney explores the ancestry of women and deeply embedded layers of molten rage and repressed passions.
Girl Gods is set within an immersive video and sculptural environment. With a physical language expressing undomesticated and long-buried feelings, the dancers fiercely reveal the emotional underbelly of the female experience. Girl Gods is the latest spectacle from renowned choreographer Pat Graney, who has been making and touring work focused on women and the feminine psyche for thirty years.
The Pat Graney Company has toured to most major American cities as well as internationally to Japan, England, Scotland, Germany, Singapore, Chile and Brazil. Choreographer Graney received numerous Choreography Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from Artist Trust, the Washington State Arts Commission, the NEA International Program, the National Corporate Fund for Dance and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
In 2008/09, Pat Graney received both a US Artist Award and the Alpert Award in the Arts/Dance. In 2011, Ms. Graney was selected as one of two artists to receive an ‘Arts Innovator’ Award from Artist Trust and the Dale Chihuly Foundation. In 2013, Ms. Graney was one of 20 Americans selected to receive a prestigious Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. Graney has been commissioned by Pacific Northwest Ballet, has created several large-scale gymnastic performance works, including ‘Seven/Uneven’ with visual artist Beliz Brother and ‘Pier 62/63,’ which featured 150 gymnasts aged 8-50 and was presented as part of the Goodwill Games Arts Festival in 1990. In 1996, Ms. Graney presented the Movement Meditation Project, which featured 130 female martial artists in an environmentally designed work at Seattle’s Magnuson Park.
Composer Amy Denio is a Seattle-based multi-instrumental composer of soundtracks for modern dance, film and theater, as well as a songwriter and music improviser. Often called an unclassifiable avant-garde jazz musician, she is also deeply inspired by world music. Best known as a vocalist, accordionist and saxophone-player, her current musical involvements are The Tiptons Sax Quartet (formerly The Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet) and Die Resonanz Stanonczi, a radical folk group based in Salzburg, Austria. She has also collaborated often with the Pat Graney Dance Company, David Dorfman Dance Company, Victoria Marks, and with many other choreographers. Her first recording was No Bones released as a cassette on her record label Spoot Musicin 1986. Her first LP was with the Entropics. She founded Tiptons in 1987, and also started Tone Dogs with bassist Fred Chalenor, whose first release Ankety Low Day was nominated for a Grammy Award. She has performed and recorded with Matt Cameron, KMFDM, Curlew, Fred Frith, Pointless Orchestra, Francisco López, Danny Barnes, Pale Nudes, Blowhole, the Danubians, The Science Group, Chris Cutler, Guy Klucevsek, Pauline Oliveros, Relâche Ensemble, Hoppy Kamiyama, Derek Bailey, Chuck D, Dennis Rea, Bill Rieflin, Quintetto alla busara, Kultur Shock and the Shaking Ray Levis, (among others)
Performers: Jody Kuehner, Sara Jinks, Sruti Desai, Jenny Peterson, Michelle de la Vega, and Cheryl Delostrinos (understudy).
Creative Team: Pat Graney (Choreography/Direction), Amy Denio (Sound Score), Holly Batt (Visual Design), Amiya Brown (Lighting Design), Frances Kenny (Costumes), John DeShazo (Engineer).
“Powerful contemporary dance . . . Graney [has a] penchant for exploring the inner worlds of women.”
– The New York Times
“By turns meditative, ironic and explosive.” – The Seattle Times
Girl Gods is made possible in part by support from the National Performance Network (NPN) Performance Residency Program. For more information:www.npnweb.org. Additional support was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
