PHOTO BY Jim Coleman, Wind of the Vast and Intimate 2022
KARIN STEVENS DANCE PRESENTS
Our first LIVE and In-Person Concert Since 2020!
November 18 & 19 | 8PM
Yaw Theater | 6520 5th Ave S, Seattle, 98108
Tickets: $15-$25 (available online and at the door)
https://www.instagram.com/karinstevensdance/
An evening of two dances and a film, with music by Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Luther Adams, and Seattle’s “fearless and innovative” (Earshot Jazz) musician Beth Fleenor aka Crystal Beth.
“This is a community of dancers for whom movement means something.” - Sandi Kurtz, Seattle Dances
A fixture of the Seattle dance scene, Karin Stevens Dance presents Wind of the Vast and Intimate 2022, A Pearl in Sorrow’s Hand 2021, and the film Sky, Lava Rock, Palms, Sand, Woods, Ocean 2022, November 18-19 at Yaw Theater in Georgetown.
Inspired by the writings and music of composer John Luther Adams—2014 Pulitzer Prize winner for Become Ocean, commissioned by the Seattle Symphony—the dance, Wind of the Vast and Intimate 2022 (World Premiere: Seattle International Dance Festival June 2022), is a soaring and beautiful meditation for three dancers on body and landscape, wind and breath, mountains and earth, intimacy and vastness. The choreography by Karin Stevens, draws many of its ideas from Adams’ writing about the music, The Wind In High Places, recorded by The Jack Quartet, in his autobiography, Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska. The costumes, by Seattle designer Danielle Blackwell, further Karin Stevens’ interest in decentering the human to enhance the more-than-human dance of life.
A Pearl in Sorrow’s Hand 2021 (World Premiere: Seattle International Dance Festival June 2021) takes its title from a poem by Rumi. This dance for a soloist, choreographed by Stevens, contemplates courage to move through/with sorrow and grief to uncover the light in our pain and bewilderment. The music, Remix: So Much It Hurts, is by Stevens’ long-time collaborator and friend, Beth Fleenor aka Crystal Beth, from her 2019 album Push Thru. From a Seattle International Dance Festival 2021 audience member: “I was very taken by the solo on Saturday's SIDF concert, so serene, reverent, searching and yet also, so viscerally charged and embodied . . . really beautiful! I was especially moved by the dancers' performance, so calm and subtle, but with a compelling undercurrent of ferocity . . . always so fully inhabited physically, driven by some other-worldly yearning."
Sky, Lava Rock, Palms, Sand, Woods, Ocean 2022 is a film in the next evolutionary step of Stevens’ work addressing her long-time concern for the Western conceptions of mind-over-body, white supremacy, environmental disconnection/dominance/control/degradation, and the work of healing/evolving that requires a response from all of us. The film, as an extension of Stevens’ breadth of work, moves within the streams of philosopher Dr. Bayo Akomolafe: “Decoloniality if it means anything, it must mean coming down to earth. It must mean returning to a body. Not to the bodies of the Euro-American Enlightenment; not that body. But to a body that is now dancing; always performatively entangled with the world around it.”
Karin Stevens Dance at Yaw Theater, November 18-19, 2022, 8pm.