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Radioactive Practice Abby Z and the New Utility

Co-presented by Meany Center for the Performing Arts and On the Boards

Take a dive into the unknown with Abby Z

RADIOACTIVE PRACTICE is the newest evening-length work by New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award-winning choreographer Abby Zbikowski and her company Abby Z and the New Utility. The genre-bending work brings together a group of dancers to redefine purpose for themselves as they labor their way through complex, demanding, and often perplexing physicality as a means to confront expectations and dive into the unknown head-on.

Performances will be held at the Meany Hall - Studio Theatre

  • Thursday, October 27, 8pm
  • Friday, October 28, 8pm
  • Saturday, October 29, 8pm

More About This Piece

RADIOACTIVE PRACTICE, the newest evening-length work by New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award-winning choreographer Abby Zbikowski and her company Abby Z and the New Utility. The genre-bending work brings together a mosaic group of dancers to redefine purpose for themselves as they labor their way through complex, demanding, and often perplexing physicality as a means to confront expectations and dive into the unknown head on.

Utilizing the skills they have honed through their practices in movement traditions including (but not limited to) street dance, post-modern dance, contemporary African forms, tap, synchronized swimming, soccer, and martial arts, Zbikowski and cast draw from an arsenal of physical possibility to shatter assumptions of established forms and test the group’s own physical and mental limits. Working with Senegalese dance artist Momar Ndiaye as dramaturge, this work embodies the amalgam of contemporary living, chock full of cultural collisions, unlikely relationships, minor to major misunderstandings, a desire for logic, and being hard-wired to survive.

The cast features Alex Gossen, **
Kashia Kancey, Fiona Lundie,
Jennifer Meckley,
Benjamin Roach, and
Jinsei Sato**.

Radioactive Practice is commissioned and presented by The Live Arts Live Feed creative residency program, which is a laboratory for the development of new commissioned work directed toward the Live Arts theater. The Live Feed program is supported in part by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and Partners for New Performance. Radioactive Practice is a National Performance Network/Visual Artist Network (NPN/VAN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by New York Live Arts, Dance Place, American Dance Festival, Wexner Center for the Performing Arts and NPN/VAN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org.

Radioactive Practice is commissioned by ADF with support from the Doris Duke/SHS Foundations Award for New Works and The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. Additional commissioning funds provided by the Caroline Hearst Choreographer-In-Residence Program at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Dance Umbrella’s Four by Four program, United States Artists Fellowship, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

More About This Partnership

Abby Z and the New Utility’s Radioactive Practice, is co-presented by Meany Center for the Performing Arts and On the Boards. This co-presentation represents a deeper engagement with Bill T. Jones as 2022-23 Meany Center guest Artistic Associate, to increase artist engagement, support new work, amplify diverse voices, and further expand and diversify audiences for contemporary performance in Seattle, including increasing access to new generations of artists and audiences.

Photos by Yukina Sato

About the Artists

Abby Z and the New Utility

Abby Z and the New Utility

ABBY ZBIKOWSKI created her company Abby Z and the New Utility in 2012 with founding members Fiona Lundie and Jennifer Meckley. Zbikowski received the 2017 Juried Bessie Award for her “unique and utterly authentic movement vocabulary in complex and demanding structures to create works of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger.”

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Degenerate Art Ensemble

Degenerate Art Ensemble

Photo by Steven Miller

The 2025 Bessie Award winning company Degenerate Art Ensemble, led by Haruko Crow Nishimura and **
Joshua Kohl**, has shown their work throughout the US and Europe known for their large scale dance and theater projects, concerts, site-transforming spectacles and ongoing public experimentation.

Recent highlights of the group's work include a major exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in 2011, was commissioned by director Robert Wilson to interpret his work Einstein on the Beach in 2012 and collaborated with the Kronos Quartet in 2013. Also in 2012 Degenerate Art Ensemble was commissioned by the city of Seattle to create a massive site specific work Underbelly in collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair. The group’s 2015 work Predator Songstress premiered at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco in 2015. In of 2016 DAE teamed up with Czech rock legends Uz Jsme Doma for an epic orchestral work inspired by the group's music at the Archa Theatre in Prague with the South Bohemian Philharmonic Orchestra. DAE’s work Skeleton Flower was first seen as a work in progress at the Spotlight USA Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, had its world premiere in Seattle in 2019, was performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Mexico City in August of 2021. Their recent collaboration with sculptor Senga Nengudi and musician/dancer Eddy Kwon was commissioned by Colorado College and the Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati and was performed at New York Live Arts. Their newest work Anima Mundi premiered at the Moore Theatre in Seattle presented by Seattle Theatre Group.

@degenerateartensemble

degenerateartensemble.com

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