DANCE

Of Other Galaxies

When Velocity Dance Center announced that their summer lineup included choreographic icon Meg Stuart, I was a bit embarrassed that my first thought was “Who is that again?”

“She’s huge in Europe,” says my Italian American friend. Having sadly not spent much time in Europe seeing dance performances, I’ll let myself off the hook for my ignorance, but considering Stuart hasn’t performed in Seattle since 1998, I’m guessing I’m not the only local dance aficionado who’s unfamiliar with her legacy.

The New Orleans-born choreographer cut her teeth in New York City’s downtown dance scene in the ‘80s before relocating to Europe in the early ’90s, where she made a name for herself. Stuart can be found currently producing work with her company, Damaged Goods, based out of Berlin and Brussels.

A cursory dive into the internet provides a sense of Stuart’s prolific portfolio: She’s made over 30 works with Damaged Goods since the company’s inception in 1994. The pieces include elaborate site-specific installations, video works, and wonderfully absurd encounters that range from an acrobatic duet between dancers wearing stilts and motorcycle helmets to a meditation on the Nuragic ruins of Sardinia. To date, she’s earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bessie Award, and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award at La Biennale di Venezia.

Now, Seattle audiences have a rare chance to see the icon in person with her work All the Way Around.

"Meg Stuart is a living legend of experimental performance. Bringing her to Seattle is something we’ve dreamed about for years,” says Joseph Hernandez, Velocity’s director of communication. “Her work shares a deep, rigorous, and soulful connection with the values of Seattle’s dance community.”

All the Way Around will be presented as part of the Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation. One of the most established forums of dance improvisation in the nation, SFD+I boasts nearly 30 years of drawing practitioners from near and far, providing space to research their work during Seattle’s long summer days. This rich history has nourished Seattle’s experimental dance scene, which often finds rigorous movement outside of virtuosic techniques. Meg Stuart’s work is in dialogue with this lineage, each performance featuring a complete commitment to the movement at hand, even if it isn’t an identifiable dance step.

Stuart’s first evening-length work, Disfigure Study, put her name on the map in 1991. You can still watch grainy excerpts from that show, where Stuart’s form emerges from the dark, twisting and bending in sharp, quick succession, each movement distinct from the last, unexpected. Thirty years may have passed, but this kind of facile unpredictability still underscores Stuart’s recent work, such as GLITCH WITCH (2024), a piece that speaks to the possibility of conjuring interpersonal magic inside a fractured future world. GLITCH WITCH follows three performers exploring an alien world of disco-ball boulders nestled in a shredded black material that covers the floor. At times, the dancers fumble, dive, and frolic in the otherworldly environment, then gesture and emote theatrically, as if attempting a conversation in a loud bar, but at hyper-speed. Then they’re casually conversing while exchanging clothes. One of the performers, Mieko Suzuki, is also responsible for the music in GLITCH WITCH; she is often returning to her DJ deck on stage throughout the piece, the intertwined roles as both performer and musician a perfect example of Stuart’s propensity toward radical collaboration.

Working with artists from other mediums is a cornerstone of Stuart’s practice. Over the years, collaborators include musicians like Suzuki and Brendan Dougherty, visual artists such as Claudia Hill, Jean-Paul Lespagnard, and Jompet Kuswidananto, and theater directors like Philippe Quesne and Tim Etchells. This outside influence fosters a broad range of moods and styles across Stuart’s repertoire. The work coming to Seattle is also a collaboration: Berlin-based jazz bassist Doug Weiss and Brazilian experimental pianist/performer Mariana Carvalho join Stuart on stage for an “intimate concert setting” that unfolds in unplanned ways. The improvisational conversation between sound and movement takes inspiration from the ballad song form—deconstructing and infusing it with gestures inspired by personal memories. This is a show for jazz and experimental music lovers as much as it is for dance audiences.

The loosely scripted nature of All the Way Around means that no two performances are alike, and the stripped-back environment of the show ensures a frank and human-scale delivery where the alchemy between artists can be observed in real time. In one iteration, at a recent performance in Berlin, Weiss leans into the low vibrational timbre of his instrument eliciting drone-like tones that lift in and out of melodic stirrings, the sound itself at times seeming to wrap and fold Stuart’s body. Carvalho’s playing begins sparse and then evolves into a driving prepared piano section that crashes through the theater. Another character in the performance is the lighting designed by Emese Csornai. Throughout the performance, light shapes the space with channels and pockets of illumination, which frames the action inside an ever-shifting container.

“With international touring becoming increasingly difficult, we don’t know when—or if—this will happen again,” says Hernandez. With that in mind, Velocity has rented out the bigger space at On the Boards to accommodate a larger audience for the one-night-only run.

Stuart is an especially appropriate offering for SFD+I’s “research week.” In the same way the festival gathers artists and catalyzes cross-pollination, Stuart’s work is a continual exploration of what possibilities emerge when artists of many backgrounds and genres come together, juxtaposing sensibilities to evolve the form.

“I’ve spent a lot of time imagining other galaxies, constructing spaces that don’t yet exist,” Stuart said in an interview earlier this year. Lucky for us, we get a chance to step into one of Stuart’s galaxies this summer. Get ready for the ride. ◼︎

All The Way Around by Meg Stuart and Doug Weiss with Mariana Carvalho will be at On the Boards for one night only, on August 8. Tickets available at velocitydancecenter.org.

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Kaitlin McCarthy is a dance artist, journalist, and teacher based in Seattle, WA. She is the Editor of SeattleDances and makes strange performances with collaborator Jenny Peterson as The Bonnies.