Me Entiendes

Me Entiendes is a solo performance that blends sound art and dance, exploring themes of immigration, displacement, and the quest for being understood, and thus accepted. Inspired by the phrase “Me entiendes?”, a common conversation filler meaning “Do you understand me?”, the performance reflects the insecurities of immigrants in a world often unwilling to understand them.

Soeine Bac (she/her) is a South Korean immigrant currently living in Vancouver, BC. Having lived in the UK for her studies, and regularly traveling abroad to work on art projects, the cultural frames she holds onto for her social survival are frequently challenged and morphed. The idea of boundary, in relation to those of ephemeral, vanishing, and trace, has been a central point of reference in the formation of her work. Although her education is largely anchored in a Western point of view, she pursues the natural world of matter in finding her sense of self, beyond all her cultural backgrounds. For this pursuit, Soeine has been studying various forms of improvisation via an interdisciplinary approach. Additionally, she has studied Zen Buddhist yoga and drumming for meditation, and Aikido, to better understand the mind in the act of improvisation. Since then, she has become interested in the spiritual aspect of art and how it is revealed in life.
@oceanontuesday | soeine.net

full of it

full of it is an exploration of intimacy because it seems, to Hernandez and Arellano, the closest thing they can find to god. They have been each other’s lovers, adversaries, representatives, collaborators, and saviours for a few years now–in this piece they will dance and laugh their way to something that could resemble salvation or [redacted].

BLUE SCREEN is an amorphously organised public forum and creative platform by **
Joseph Hernandez** (he/him), a Seattle-based choreographer and arts administrator.. He keeps dancing and making dances in the spirit best described by Kathy Acker: “The only reaction to an unbearable world is an equally unbearable nonsense.”

He began his work as a choreographer in Antwerp, Belgium. Since then he has made dances for companies throughout Germany, France, and Italy– most recently for Staatstheater Nürnberg, Festspielhaus Hellerau, and Societaetstheater Dresden. He was an active curator at STORE CONTEMPORARY in Dresden, as well as a founding member of the TANZNETZ DRESDEN Studio Round. In the US, his work has been presented by the Joyce Theater in NYC, Whim W’him Contemporary Dance Seattle, the Hamptons Dance Project, and Ballet Idaho. He was appointed as Associate Choreographer by the Northwest Dance Project in 2021, creating 5 works for the company before ultimately deciding to make art in a different way.

He currently works at Velocity Dance Center and is excited by their mission of uplifting experimentalism and artist-centred programming. He believes the future of dance is messy and hilarious, and only possible through community care and collective action.

@joseph____hernandez‍ ‍@blue_____screen | joseph-hernandez.com‍ ‍bluescreencontemporary.com

Michael Arellano (he/him) is a dancer and performance artist born and raised in Rochester, MI. Michael graduated from Western Michigan University in 2019 earning a BA in dance and BS in psychology. In 2017 he studied abroad in London, Englawnd at the University of Roehampton and attended the BalletBoyz Dancer’s Course. During his studies, Michael performed work by Aszure Barton, Kyle Abraham, James Gregg, Antony Tudor and many more. Since graduating he has been a collaborator and company artist with GroundWorks DanceTheater, BocaTuya, OpenSpace Dance, and most recently Whim W’Him Seattle Contemporary Dance. He has had the pleasure of performing new creations by Joseph Hernandez, Ihsan Rustem, Bret Easterling, Rauf Rubberlegz Yasit, Emilie Leriche, Ana Maria Lucaciu, and many others. Since 2024 he has been working as a freelancer and most recently performed in a production of Aida with the Opera de Rouen with choreography by Kristian Lever, and an evening length performance El Túnel by Kiani Del Valle. Michael is passionate about utilizing dance and performance as powerful, expressive forces for connection in the world.

Walls to Bounce Glances

Walls to Bounce Glances merges oral culture as embodied practice and latinx virtualities to reclaim social and technological imaginaries. The domestic is staged and augmented as an ambivalent and fragmented archive that exists between immigration and otherness, the inhospitable and the familiar, all unfolding halfway across mirages of the present and future.

Laura Luna Castillo(she/her) is a multimedia and new technologies artist and composer from Puebla, Mexico. Through convergences of time-based media, music, sculpture, and generative storytelling, Luna Castillo explores personal and collective identities shaped by political and intimate spaces. With a passion for machines, generative narratives, and the complexities of memory, she has developed audiovisual performances, installations, and hybrid works for festivals such as MUTEK Montréal, CYNETART Festival, and EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center). Luna Castillo has been recently hired as Assistant Professor at the University of Washington in the DXARTS department.

@lunacas | lauralunacastillo.net

Anaid Mendoza Márquez Bohor (she/her) was born and raised in Puebla, Mexico. She is a theater actor, director, writer and producer. She studied Dramatic Literature and Theater at UNAM. She founded the theater group Carne de Gusanos alongside Alfredo Cruz Veldañez. She has collaborated with several Mexican theater companies such as Colectivo Macramé, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, and El Carro de Comedias, UNAM. This has allowed her to explore and create within various genres of theater, such as documentary, participative, classical, and street theater. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Acting at The Juilliard School.

Diary of Us

Diary of Us is a love letter to Black queer femme love. This piece looks at pleasure as power, pleasure as resistance, and how to have agency over your body in a world where it’s demonized.

Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis

Akoiya Harris(she/her) is a movement artist based in Seattle, WA. Her work uses a queer Black gaze to explore ways in which communal and personal stories can be interwoven into dance works. She has collected oral histories on behalf of Wa Na Waris Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute, and Black Collectivity. Akoiya has also participated in the Black Embodiments Studio Arts Writing Incubator. As a choreographer, she has shown work at the Seattle Art Museum, Wa Na Wari, On The Boards, Friends of the Waterfront, Velocity Dance Center, The Moore Theater, and more. H is a founding member of Black Collectivity, a group that explores memory and culture through embodied responses. Following a matriarchal lineage of teachers, Akoiya is a dance educator working with youth at Ailey Camp and Pacific Northwest Ballet. She has also performed with Spectrum Dance Theater, Will Rawls, zoe | juniper, Third Rail Projects, The Congregation, and SoloMagic. She is a 2024 Base Art + Space Resident.

KATABASIS

KATABASIS is a ritual performance and a journey through hell. In a series of tableau vivants, VIM and VUM face trials, craft protection rituals, and receiving visions. They emerge, enlightened, to reveal their APOTHEOSIS, as the androgynous divine.

maximiliano(they/them) is a SOULVVN/CHIVNX (soulaan/chicanx) experimental visual and performance artist based in Portland, OR. They use semiotics and ritual to commune with liberation.

@thulsa_moon | maximiliano.info

AshaAung Helmstetter(she/her) is an oil painter and mixed media artist, born and raised in Seattle’s Central District, where she is still based today. In 2017, AshaAung realized that she would dedicate very much of her life to art, and she has spent the following years actualizing that reality for herself. Having left school early to manage chronic health issues while focusing on her personal and artistic development, she has very little formal training. Through her work, teaching, and participation in community spaces, she amplifies community-connection and finding freedom from within. Her paintings reflect her imagination, and perseverance: two things that are difficult to miss when encountering her person, or any of her creations.

From the Artist: “No matter my limitations, my purpose is clear: create art, strengthen community, and be unapologetically myself. I create art with painting, crafting, burlesque, and go-go dancing. I strengthen my community with love, learning history, teaching, and listening. And when I'm unapologetically myself, I hope to make space for others to do the same. I’m not me without these pillars, and throughout my growth, this purpose has always remained.”
@artsyasha | artsyasha.com

ILVS STRAUSS(she/her) from a sociodemographic standpoint, is a 45 year-old educated, queer, mixed-race, white-passing, female bodied, Honduran-American artist. From a non-sociodemographic standpoint, she’s still those things, but manifests in 3D by the ethereal: experience, values, judgment, desire, need, love, motivation, inspiration, etc. ilvs once had a job as an analytical chemist for a pharmaceutical company, BA Chemistry - OSU, but then slowly pivoted to the arts and received an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Simon Fraser University. The hats she wears are many, and at times, she has been known to wear several at once: multi-disciplinary performance artist, writer, dancer, facilitator, technical director, lighting designer, and sound engineer. Born in the Los Angeles area, she grew up in Portland, OR, then moved to Seattle before coming up to Vancouver, BC, and now returning to Seattle. At present, she has no intention of moving to the Yukon or Alaska.

@velvetilvs | ilvsstrauss.com

NW New Works 2025 Performance Description

ñ (enye)

ñ (enye) is an audiophile’s unhurried song analysis which tangents into explorations of the physics of sound, speculations about the advent of language, and inquiries about basic human needs. Humorous, sly, and introspective, the titular character is a brat-green rabbit who guides the audience on a journey through an intentional soundscape, audible and otherwise.

Obsidian

Obsidian is a play about Ouai, a city dweller living in a 400 sq ft studio apartment, and their conversations with an AI language model. They talk of consciousness, power, will, sentience, and the meaning of life. This piece yearns to find humanity in our surveillant and technology-dependent reality.

Obsidian yearns to find humanity in our surveillant and technology-dependent reality. It begs us to question if our relationships with the internet are some of our closest and most dear.

Amaya Zhané(she/her) is a Florida-born, Seattle-based director and mixed-media artist. As a recent graduate of Cornish College of the Arts’ Original Works Program for playwrights and directors, she has directed Desdemona’s Child (blood cry) at Cornish Playhouse, assistant directed Seattle Rep’s Fat Ham, and directed/produced the new work PHAT. One of Amaya’s goals in writing and producing work with black characters is to not exclusively focus on black trauma. She wants to see investigative and unfiltered realism based on black experiences in everyday life. This includes black joy! Physically, she is very interested in elemental work through choreography and gestural movement. She is particularly interested in repetition and excessive duration, as well as substituting props and set dressing with object-specific sound design and pantomime. Technically, she explores digital life through projection mapping, as well as the integration of live sound mixing and recorded sound with theater performance.

She finds New Age and non-traditional methods of live performance incredibly generative in her creative practice. Amaya is an emerging director, so her large-scale goals are still green and malleable. However, something she is always moving towards in the micro, is specificity and authenticity in her work. Collaboration is one of her favorite parts of the directing/producing process.

Fox Whitney (he/him) is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of dance, music, film+video, theater, writing, and visual art. Fox is obsessed with the surreal nature of transformation, how we identify ourselves and how personal and collective identity is an ever-shifting and evolving landscape. His projects center his queer and transgender point of view. He founded the QT interdisciplinary performance project Gender Tender in 2012. He also fronts the trans-futurist psych band Light Aloud that grew from his ongoing series of performances and workshops called MELTED RIOT. MELTED RIOT is a surreal protest song, a queer meditation, a psychedelic research project, a punk prayer.

Fox’s work has been commissioned and produced by the Henry Art Gallery, On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, Seattle International Dance Festival, Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival, and was selected for the inaugural season of Seattle’s Gay City Arts. Light Aloud has played at Trans Pride Seattle, Capitol Hill Block Party, and the Seattle Art Fair. He has performed in works by Meg Foley, Will Rawls, keyon gaskin, Morgan Thorson, Andrew Schneider, CommonForm Dance Project, Malic Amalya, and Gabrielle Civil. He got his MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited his short films and visual art nationally. Fox is also a yoga and meditation teacher, movement teaching artist, and arts journalist currently writing for SeattleDances and Variable West. He was the Artistic Director of Velocity Dance Center from 2020-2022.

Instagram: @fox_whitney_‍ ‍@lightaloud @gendertenderforever