Review of no one to witness
Seattle Dances wrote a review of our first performance.
With secret locations and alternative venues, the City Arts Fest built up quite a buzz for the weekend’s whirlwind of dance events. It also proved to be worth the hype. Let no one say Seattle’s dance artists are not as resourceful as they are creative. The artists each developed work suited specifically for the venue in which they performed.
ZOE | JUNIPER
Surprisingly tender and personal, Kate Wallich, Zoe Scofield, and Juniper Shuey took over a contemporary home in Madrona on October 19, 2012, to present a piece carefully composed within the geometries of the house’s architecture. Kate + Zoe exuded a bittersweet nostalgia for sisterly connection. The piece unfolded first from the outside looking in through the glass front of the house. A projection of school children inside the large, square window frame played while a woman lay underneath it in the horizontal, body-size window frame. Eventually Wallich and Scofield came forward to the flanking glass doors on either side, looking contemplative and somewhat absorbed, to complete the heraldic composition. After the audience traveled through the house to the back porch, again looking in through a large glass frame, the piece unfolded through layers of video projections on the walls (and sometimes on the dancers), paper silhouette portraits of Wallich and Scofield, and the two dancers themselves moving about the house as if “cut from the same cloth.” Like paper chain dolls in white, wrinkly dresses the two came together to move in folk-like symmetry with gentle, loving touches of chin to chin tip, cheek on cheek surface, curled up on the floor neck on neck like puppies.
Wallich danced with powerful serenity, tapped in to a teeming universe of textures, tastes, and sensations expressing itself in her very fingertips. Scofield, who showed increased vulnerability dancing with Raja Kelly in Northwest New Works this past summer, found a strain of innocence inside herself, though peppered with liberal doses of child-like frustration, rebellion, and almost ecstatic spitfire. To be able to view this complexity from up close but very physically separated reinforced the sense of schism in time through memory. The beauty of this work was in the thoughtful conception of the visual vantage point of the audience, which allowed indelible visual compositions to be received with full impact.