Photo by Gabriel Bienozycki

*PLEASE NOTE 5PM START TIME SUN, OCT 26.

Breakdancing, live beats, hip hop, and gender roles: five B-boys from different generations and cultures come together in curiosity, strength, vulnerability, and grace.

In Opposing Forces, choreographer Amy O'Neal examines the paradoxical nature of B-Boy culture as it relates to femininity and the value systems of dance battling, commercial dance, stage performance, and freestyle cyphers. How do these different environments affect expression? Where are stereotypes changing and where do they remain the same? O'Neal pries open these topics and more via conversation, collaboration, and transfixing dance moves. Seattle's own WD4D performs live music. With lighting design by Amiya Brown, artwork Ben Zamora.

FEATURING
Fever One of Rocksteady/DVS Crew
Alfredo "Free" Vergara Jr. of Circle of Fire/SoulShifters Crew
Brysen "JustBe" Angeles of Massive Monkees/SoulShifters Crew
Mozeslateef of Circle of Fire/SoulShifters Crew
Michael O'Neal Jr. of Chapter1NE/The Beat Hippies Crew
WD4D of Care Package/Stop Biting Crew

SEATTLE | DANCE | HIP HOP | BEATS | COMMUNITY | GENDER

Photo Credit: Photo by Gabriel Bienozycki

About the Artist

Amy O'Neal

Amy O'Neal

Amy O’Neal (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator merging contemporary and street dance. A 2026 Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography, she has created and toured nine critically acclaimed evening-length works nationally and internationally and countless shorter works for concert dance, music video, dance film, virtual reality, weddings, flashmobs, and experimental performance in black boxes, galleries, nightclubs, warehouses, basements, and streets.

From 2000 to 2010, along with musician and composer Zeke Keeble, O’Neal co-directed locust, a dance/music/video performance company based in Seattle. From 2010 until now, she creates dance experiences merging practices and values of hip hop, house dance, and experimental performance.

She is a practicing guest of Black social dance culture participating in clubbing, sessions, battles, and advocacy. Along with dani tirrell, she co-founded the House dance classes and open session at The Beacon: Massive Monkees Studio in 2014 and co-organized Seattle House Dance Project, the first multi day House dance event in Seattle in 2017.

O’Neal is a grantee of Creative Capital, National Performance Network, National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art, among others. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, DanceWEB/Impulstanz scholar, a Kennedy Center Social Impact Residency Artist, Visiting Dance Innovator at Harvard, and Herb Alpert Award nominee with a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts where she was recognized as Distinguished Alumni in 2014. She joined the faculty of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in 2018 as part time lecturer and works between LA and Seattle. She is the Executive/Artistic director of Hybrid Dance Lab, a research/performance platform for street dance artists to experiment in the theater context, address the creative process of hybridity, and nurture cultural literacy.

@amyoforreal

amyoneal.com

Artist page →

CREDITS

Amy O'Neal | Concept, Direction and Co-Choreographer
Alfredo "Free" Vergara Jr., Brysen "Just Be" Angeles, Fever One, Michael O'Neal Jr., MozesLateef | Performers and Co-Choreographers
Sammy Tekle, Robert Eyerman, Dan Tekle | Guest Performers from Dogg Pound Crew
Waylon Dungan aka WD4D | Music
Kyana Saleem | Original voice over for Lateef’s solo
Amiya Brown | Lighting Design
Ben Zamora | Floor & Wall Design
Wazhma Samizay + Danial Hellman, with Bobojan | Costume Design
Stefanie Karlin and Squid MGMT | Management

Co-comissioned by OtB, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the National Performance Network. Opposing Forces was supported through OtB's Performance Production Program.