CATHERINECABEEN &COMPANYFIRE!THU - SUN | NOV 8 -11, 2013

ON THE BOARDS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Credits......................................2

Curator’s Note..........................3

Interview...................................4

Beginner’s guide.......................8

Saint Phalle examples..............9

Essays by Nancy Stoaks.........10The Fire! dramaturge provides more insight

into Niki de Saint Phalle

Bios...........................................12

photo by Tim Summers

CREDITSCreated by Catherine Cabeen and Company, 2013

Choreographer, Director, Performer: Catherine CabeenComposers: Kane Mathis and Julian MartlewPerformers: Karena Birk, Sarah Lustbader, Ella MahlerPhylicia Roybal, Jana Kincl

Dramaturge: Nancy StoaksLighting Designer: Connie YunCostume Designer: Val MayseNew Media Designer: Susie J LeeDigital Media: Susie J Lee, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Soyoung ShinScenic Designer: Jay McAleerMosaic Designer: Phill CabeenKnitting Loom Conceived by: Lou Cabeen

Catherine Cabeen’s Fire! is sponsored by

Seasonal support for OtB is provided by

This production is sponsored by

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Capezio/Ballet MakersDance Foundation

SPECIAL THANKSEverybody at On the Boards

Middlebury CollegePat Failing

Ariel GlassmanRichard Bresnahan

CURATOR’S NOTEAlso drawing inspiration from the late artist Niki de Saint Phalle, here’s a basic tarot spread for Catherine Cabeen and the premiere of Fire!: three cards from left to right representing the past, present and future.

The first card representing the past (or even the present as it passes by) is the Empress. An elegant woman sits on a cushioned seat surrounded by a field of grain. She’s wearing dance pants and holding a short scepter with a heart-shaped shield bearing a symbol of Venus resting by her side. Snoqualmie Falls is in the background. This is the choreographer, Martha Graham trained and Bill T. Jones schooled, mulling over the second part of her trilogy inspired by three famous artists. After tackling Yves Klein with Into the Void in 2011, she’s moved onto Niki de Saint Phalle with her provocative depictions of violence and gender.

The second card, the present, is the Emperor. A stern dude on a throne embellished with four rams’ heads. He is – authority – but he is upside down, and therefore, selfish and pompous. This the establishment that Saint Phalle similarly turned on its head when she painted the fig leaves on school statutory as a young student and later treated guns and knives in her work. Catherine and all of her marvelous collaborators and friends (represented by the rams) have taken on her charge in a meditation of dance with original composition, video, lighting design, costumes and text. And a mosaic and knitting loom created by her brother and mother respectively.

The Knight of Swords sits to the far right: the future. A young figure – passionate and fearless – rides a horse at top speed into the future with a sword held high. This is Catherine going forward. New York dancer to Northwest choreographer with an MFA in dance to Visiting Associate Professor in dance at Middlebury College in Vermont. Saint Phalle appeared on the cover of French Vogue at nineteen; Catherine seems to be appearing wherever she wants. Both are examples of beauty with substance.

Lane Czaplinski

INTERVIEWwith Nancy Stoaks (Fire! Dramaturge) and Catherine Cabeen

NS: Well it’s good to talk to you today.

CC: Hey, yeah, Nancy good to hear your voice.

NS: Your upcoming work at On the Boards is a piece that is centered around and inspired by the work of a visual artist named Niki de Saint Phalle, so I would love to start off by hearing about what led you to her and what it is about Saint Phalle’s work that initially grabbed you andthen as you delved deeper into it, what aspects became so interesting that you wanted to create this piece.

CC: Yeah, well actually it’s a lot your fault, Nancy, because you came into Pat Failing’s graduate art history seminar —at the University of Washington, I think it was a post World War 2 European artists course—and we were talking about a whole lot of different things, the New Realists being one subject of many, and you came in and talked about Niki de Saint Phalle’s work and I was really captivated by many aspects of your lecture but there were sort of three things in particular. The first one was the Shooting Paintings, which are these incredibly beautiful and violent statements in which [Saint Phalle] covered surfaces with objects including plastic bags filled with paint and then she would cover the whole surface with plaster so that it became a smooth voluptuous surface. Then, [she] would shoot those surfaces with a rifle and cause the plastic bags full of paint to explode.

When I looked at those paintings, I really felt like they looked the way that my body felt at the time, and the way I think every human body is. We are conditioned to polish ourselves so that we are presentable and consistent, but underneath that superficial layer that we all construct for the sake of society there’s all kinds of injury and scars and pain and opinion that can erupt, when either given the right kind of invitation—or maybe the wrong kind—or it can be jostled out—in ways that are for better or worse, I suppose. But I loved that idea that the work had these secrets within it that would erupt as the work was finished.

I feel like my work as a choreographer and dancer sort of surveys the body

in a similar way to how Niki shot up her paintings in that I’m constantly finding new inspiration and new colors from memories and experiences that are locked pretty deeply in my muscles, and as I move, those muscles create a friction that often causes that experience to erupt and come into the light in a certain kind of way and thereby colors the dances that I make. I resonated with that body of work right away. And then, Niki de Saint Phalle moved on and started making Nanas, which are these huge, voluptuous, women—usually women—sculptures that are incredibly heavy. They’re often outdoors, they’re concrete and steel and then mosaics covered in glass. But they’re always in these whimsical positions; they’re always in this, sort of, joyous motion.

NS: Right, they’re very exuberant.

CC: Yeah, and as a dancer, the body is one of my mediums, but another one certainly is space. And I’m constantly amazed and saddened by the fact that every time I teach—it doesn’t seem to matter where, I teach all over the country—young men will come into a dance class with sometimes a lot of training, and sometimes little to no training, and they will take up space. And it’s not a problem - they’ve grown up being loud and aggressive and moving and they are happy to take up space. [However,] women, young women, who often have infinitely more training and infinitely more understanding of what their bodies are doing in a dance class still become very small, they stand very close together, they apologize for their movement, they stand towards the back of the room. And it seems that there’s this - sort of - consistent gendered line about who in our society is invited to take up space. Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nanas really seemed to be pushing against that entirely and creating this really fantastic example of voluptuous, feminine, beautiful figures that were just taking up a ton of space. So I wanted to ride with that idea and be able to work with a group of female dancers and show them these images and ask them to be brave and bold enough to take up that kind of space. That’s a really interesting root of the work.

And then the third thing that you let me in on back in—when was that, 2009?— was that Niki de Saint Phalle created the Tarot Garden, which is the largest sculpture park ever created by a woman, and it’s this massive, beautiful sculpture park in Italy where there is a sculpture for every one of the major arcana of the tarot. And I got really excited about that

archetypical space for a sculpture garden. I often feel that my Graham training has really highlighted the fact for me - that a lot of the archetypes in mythology and the occult actually come out of our experience with our body and they come out of our own human desire and the conflict between that and our awareness of morality and mortality. So I’m interested in how archetypes play in the body, and how they exist in a sort of timeless way, and then also how they become conditioned by culture and place and time. So things like the tarot—it’s an old system, and it’s used in a lot of different traditions—allowed me to play with those manifestations of archetypes.

That particular body of work was also really interesting to me because I saw Niki de Saint Phalle, through her long life, as having this really inspiring trajectory. She started out making these really violent Shooting Paintings, and then the work started to dance, literally, with the Nanas, and then the Tarot Garden sculptures (and many of the other sorts of installations she made at the end of her life) are so big that they actually envelop the viewer. So, rather than the viewer looking at the sculptural object, they enter them; they’re rooms that the viewer can enter. And I thought that that trajectory from, sort of violent, exorcism based work, into this really luminous environment was a really inspiring story to tell about what art can do for us in our lifetime in terms of its ability to heal though giving us the capacity to express ourselves. I have to admit though that unfortunately, when I went to visit the Tarot Garden, though it is joyful and luminous and playful in some ways, it is also the product of a level of obsession that made me realize the story didn’t have quite the happy ending that I had thought.

And though, again, it is very beautiful, it’s entirely mosaiced in broken glass, so within that luminous, enveloping environment, there is also ongoing fragmentation and this consistent reminder of things being broken in order to be rebuilt.

NS: Fire! has become the second iteration of the very interdisciplinary approach you’ve had to creating work so I wanted to ask you about how it compares to your previous evening length work which premiered in 2011 at On the Boards. It was called Into the Void, of course, and it was responding and inspired by another visual artist, Yves Klein. How did the process and goals that you had for Fire! compare to what they were for Into the Void?

CC: I am interested in this historic research because it allows me to really

push against my own habits, to continually [pull] myself into these other dialogues of historic artists and it allows me to ask questions about what’s the same and what’s different [when] looking from the sixties to now. Klein’s work and Niki de Saint Phalle’s work are certainly extremely different from one another and it really is true that when you engage yourself in a creative process, when you do it well, the subject matter talks back to you. And I’m certainly finding myself in that position where Into the Void was all about immateriality—Klein’s work was all about embracing the limitless possibilities of energy and intangibility and how it manifests in human life as a sort of potential for inspiring evolution. And, it was this really uplifting experience to do the research, to get closer to his work, to meet the people who were involved in carrying on his legacy in a variety of ways.

Niki de Saint Phalle’s work is infinitely more tortured. Her life was longer and in some ways more successful, but also a lot more painful and that’s a lot of what her work is about. So where with Into the Void, I was in dialogue with Klein’s extreme ambition and his very childlike sense of wonder and faith in what he was doing, with Niki de Saint Phalle, I’m having to wrestle with all of her insecurities, all of her pain, all of the scars and memories and experience that exist within her body that I think in many ways she was also shooting at. There’s a lot more dark viscera in this piece compared to Into the Void, and that’s making for a lot of differences in how the piece is going to look.

There are some things that are similar. One of the things I was really excited about with Klein’s work, is that International Klein Blue pigment, which is the color of paint that he copy wrote, is created by suspending whole pieces of pigment in resin, so he was able to, within his visual art, embody a manifestation of both individuality and unity because these whole pieces of pigment would be suspended in his monochrome paintings rather than ground up (in traditional painting you would grind up the pigment into oil so that it would dissolve and become one thing). And similarly, Niki de Saint Phalle worked very consistently in mosaics. Mosaics also have this sense of fragmentation, but within that, a sense that each individual piece is required to create the whole.

And as a female choreographer who is trying to run a dance company, that’s a really important thing to me. It’s very important to me that my dancers can maintain their individuality and can be their whole self, their whole

beautiful, full, powerful, intelligent selves, and also that we can all collaborate in something that is larger than our self. And I think for me as a performer that was one of the best things about being in a dance company—that I was able to participate in something that was larger than myself. And I want to provide that opportunity, but I certainly don’t want to do that by dissolving the individuality of my performers. So it’s interesting to see the visual art comparison of individuality and unity, or fragmentation and community because I’m interested in those things not being mutually exclusive but actually being two sides of the same coin. And Klein and Saint Phalle both do that in their own ways.

One other thing that I think that they have in common that I find amusing is that they both seem to have this real aversion to lines. With Klein it took form in that he was really trying to dissolve or get rid of all foreground and background and all figures, and the line is sort of the beginning of the figure, so he was trying to get rid of that line and dissolve it into this completely open, empty, luminous space.

Niki de Saint Phalle seems to be pushing against lines and hard angles as well, but she does so by taking those lines and angles and just twisting and tangling and curving them into these wild knots and nooses. I find that really interesting because as a classically trained dancer, line is something that I’ve worked very hard to achieve in my body, and I’ve trained very rigorously and specifically to create very specific lines with my body and I love them, I think they are beautiful; I am unapologetically a formal, neo-classical choreographer and I am very interested in a lot of classical ideas about beauty. But again, this historic research gives me these great opportunities to push against what I find beautiful and I think that that’s a very healthy thing for me as an artist—to constantly find ways to push against my own predilections and habits. So whereas with Klein, I was trying to find ways of making lines and then, sort of, exploding them and having the body expand into space, with this [new] work, I’m trying to assert those same lines and then literally twist, tangle, and invert and fragment them. It’s asking me to look at my own movement vocabulary in a very different way, and that’s a great learning experience, certainly.

So they’re definitely very different pieces, they have a very different feel, and I’m humbled by that. I’m humbled by the fact that my subject matter is so much in control of these processes, rather than me being in control

of them. It’s humbling. But I do think it’s also good; I don’t really have any interest in doing the same thing over and over, though I do like to thoroughly explore an idea.

NS: One interesting thing that ties them together is the fact that both Saint Phalle and Klein were a part of this 1960’s group in Paris called The New Realists. I was wondering if there was something in particular that draws you to that time and that particular group.

CC: There are a couple different things that draw me to the New Realists and that time period in art history. The main one is that the art historical narrative as I was taught it really frames that time period, and the New Realists in particular, as being some of the first visual artists who started to explore the fact that experience could be art and that perhaps not all art should be framed and on the back of your couch, but that there’s this whole other thing that we share as humans, which is time—instead of just space and material. And that art can exist in time and through exchange, through human exchange. I remember sitting in an art history class and thinking, well yes, but dancers have been doing that forever.

I have an on-going fascination with the fact that art history includes very little dance and dance history is taught as this entirely separate silo, this entirely separate cannon. And I think that that is essential if you are going to say that framing experience as art was a new thing that started in the late 50s. I’m trying to use dance to look at that time period to point out the fact that we’ve been at this for a while, and also to turn those tables because dance is funded so much less than any of the visual arts, than music, than theater; it’s really the poor little child of the arts in terms of funding. So by looking at the validity that visual arts are given in our culture and pointing out the similarities between certain time periods in visual art and what dance has always offered, I hope will help to sort of raise dance up into being considered in a different way and more as a time based visual art than this entertainment thing that people like to brush it off as.

Similarly, one of the other things that started happening after WWII—and one of the things a lot of the New Realists were involved in—was this idea that the artist’s body was a part of the work and that the actual physical creator and the piece that was being created were in many ways connected and in some ways inseparable. Certainly as a choreographer who performs

in her own work, I am inseparable from my work at this point and so I feel a lot of resonance with that time period. It’s sort of framed as one of the problematics of dance—that the body is inherently a part of it, and that all of the politics of the body are then inherently a part of dance—dance history and dance in the present. I’m trying to point out the fact that by saying this was a big move in visual art history, and suddenly all these people are writing about it and where the body fits into art making—the role of the artist’s body...

I’m trying to pull that curtain away and point out the fact that modern dance, which is an incredible field that I’m really honored to be a part of, has been asking a lot of these questions for a long time (sort of under the radar because, for a number of reasons, dance isn’t written about the same way visual arts are). It hasn’t been documented in the same way the visual arts have been, and a lot of it is because it doesn’t actually exist. [However,] I think that the New Realists point out that that non-existence is something that makes it incredibly valuable, actually, because it does only exist in the exchange between the performers and the audience. It’s this thing that happens and then it’s gone.

And I think that trying to value experience was something that was really important right after WWII because there was suddenly so much mass production that came out in that time period. And right now, our poor earth is totally drowning in our obsession with material goods. So I think there are new and contemporary reasons to look at a lot of those issues again, and certainly to look at where we value experience in relation to tangible objects and material goods, I think that this is a really important time to revisit a lot of those questions.

NS: Absolutely, thank you so much!

BEGINNER’S GUIDE TOCATHERINE CABEEN1. Catherine Cabeen is the second artist this season - the first being Gob Squad and their live video homage to Andy Warhol’s films - who is looking back and drawing inspiration from a visual artist from the 1960’s. In Fire! Catherine reflects on the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, the only female member of French New Realism, a movement founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany and painter Yves Klein. The members were banded by the search for ‘new perceptual approaches to reality’; the ‘realism’ of their title referenced the Realist movement of the mid-19th century where art was to represent life faithful and empirically, whereas ‘new’ signaled a shift in how ‘reality’ could be defined and represented.

The movement was Europe’s answer to the same issues Pop Art was addressing in America—a response to a consumerist, mass-producing, industrial culture. It was also strongly influenced by the Dada movement.

Cabeen talks about being drawn to the New Realists because—recoiling from the post-WWII ‘art stars’ of Abstract Expressionism—they made experiential, collaborative, and chance based work which, at times, incorporated performance. Their art gave value to experience and tried to capture physical action, acknowledging the artist’s physical body as inseparable from their work. Cabeen believes the New Realists work was a pivotal in how visual art was conceptualized; a shift which caused the motives of visual art and dance to approach one another.

2. Cabeen finds particular interest in three different bodies of work within the trajectory of Saint Phalle’s career: Saint Phalle’s Shooting Paintings, which are paintings made by shooting at a plaster surface covering buried pockets of paint which would explode as she shot at the work, her Nanas, which are giant, voluptuous, mosaic covered sculptures of women-like figures in

exuberant, dancing, poses, and her huge installation pieces like Tarot Garden, a garden filled with massive sculptures of each of the major arcana in the tarot deck, each covered by intricate mirror and tile mosaics.

3. This will be the fourth time of Catherine has shown work at On the Boards. She presented the precursor to Fire!, titled Ready Aim . . . at NW New Works Festival 2012. In the piece, Catherine performed a poignant and funny lecture/dance that became an audience-interactive feminist critique of how the female body is represented in choreography (Catherine has a MFA in Dance from the University of Washington with an emphasis in 20th Century History and Feminist Theory). She also created Into the Void in the 2011 season, a dance piece reflecting on the work of Yves Klein, another New Realist. Finally, she performed in The A.W.A.R.D Show! in 2009.

4. Catherine Cabeen and Company was founded in 2009 in Seattle and has toured internationally and nationally. A few of Catherine’s accolades include being a finalist in the 2009 The A.W.A.R.D. Show! Seattle and being named Emerging Choreographer at the Bates Dance Festival in 2011.

5. Formerly a dancer in both the Martha Graham Dance Company and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Catherine has a diverse resume as a modern dancer. The contrast between Bill T. Jones’ testosterone-filled solos and dancing Martha Graham’s archetypical female characters in long flowing dresses helped her understand how gender can be represented in choreography and fostered her interest in feminist history and theory. Her choreography shows traces of influence from these two legends, but undeniably, she has her own thoughtfully crafted voice.

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLEEXAMPLES

Nanas

Shooting paintings in action

Shooting paintings

ESSAYSby Nancy Stoaks

One of the major points of inspiration for Catherine Cabeen and Company’s upcoming production, Fire!, has been Niki de Saint Phalle’s first major body of work, the provocative Shooting Paintings. In these works, produced between 1961 and 1963, painting was accomplished with a .22-caliber rifle. When Saint Phalle and others took aim at these works, the gun’s bullets would penetrate a plaster surface, finding bags of paint and other items that had been embedded beneath. Once pierced, these contents erupted and fell unpredictably down the work’s surface. As Saint Phalle described it, it was creation through destruction.

Positioned in opposition to postwar expressionism and the notion of an artist-genius, the Shooting Paintings were aligned with a number of early 1960s strategies aimed at a critique of authorship. These included the use of found and mass-produced objects, as well as compositional methods embracing chance and collaboration. In these respects, the Shooting Paintings were closely tied to the production of Saint Phalle’s fellow New Realists, a label that brought together a diverse group of artists, among them Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely.

Saint Phalle, however, was the only female member of the New Realists, and in this body of work there was also a forceful proto-feminist element. The artist’s aggressive act was not only a way to comment on the violence of the times, but a personal assertion of power. With gun poised, she became the ultimate phallic woman. The use of the gun was of course ironic (a caricature of abstract expressionism, much like Tinguely’s metamatic machines), but it was also done with sincerity and urgency. The Shooting Paintings eventually took the form of distinct targets, religion and men in particular. Saint Phalle expressed a desire to “trespass into the world of men”--to experience their power and free-dom.* With gun in hand, she not only trespassed into their world, but also played a part in their destruction.

Saint Phalle was captivated by the power that the gun gave her--by the transformation it created (she called it exciting, sexy, and tragic all at once), and also by the attention it focused on her. Between June and September of 1961, more than fifty international newspapers and magazines had reported on the scandal of her Shooting Paintings. In the press, she became an Amazon, a vampire, and an ardent women’s rights activist.

Today we view these works fifty years after they were made. Many things have changed, although inequalities and double standards persist. How, where, and when do women assume power in today’s world, and what happens when they do? Fire! urges us to ask.

*More of Saint Phalle’s commentary on this subject can be seen in “Letters,” in Niki de Saint Phalle, ed. Pontus Hultén (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1992).

THE BODY AS A TARGET

Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Paintings became increasingly performative in their second year. Capitalizing on a background in both theater and modeling (she had graced the covers of Life and Vogue as a teenager in the late 1940s), the artist was well positioned to add even more bite to already-provocative works.

Saint Phalle began to engage in a highly orchestrated performance of her public self, aided in no small part by her new “shooting costume”--a form-fitting white body suit that became the defining garment for all shooting sessions. In her white suit and black boots, Saint Phalle was the exaggeration of femininity--virginal yet simultaneously sexualized. The femme fatale aspect of her public persona, meanwhile, was often heightened in staged photographs in which the artist, with bright red lips, aimed her gun directly at the viewer. Speaking of the Shooting Paintings in a 1966 Vogue interview, she acknowledged this manner of dressing as a deliberate strategy and went so far as to call her body a constructed visual creation like her sculpture.

The spectacle of her body became a dominant component of the work.

Comments in the popular press and arts journals revealed the extent to which the artist’s beauty was a central preoccupation: “Miss Saint Phalle cut a sharp figure in her ‘shooting’ bit” (Art News); “Through the room stalked the attractive white-suited figure of Niki de Saint Phalle, booted, paint-flecked (perfectly)” (Arts Magazine); and “Pow, Bam-Bang, Zip, went the beer and pressurized paint cans as comely virgin-garbed Niki de Saint Phalle pulled the trigger...[in her] calculated discreetly feminine shots” (Beverly Hills Times, also featuring an image with the revealing caption “Niki de Saint Phalle creating (sic)”).

While Saint Phalle indeed capitalized on her body in a way that some later feminist artists reacted against, Saint Phalle celebrated it, using the clash between her beauty and the violence of the Shooting Paintings to confront accepted notions of femininity. As Saint Phalle moved on from the Shooting Paintings, women’s bodies continued to be an interest for her, but her focus shifted away that of her own body and towards rotund, mid-frolic sculptural figures she called the Nanas. Her work calls attention to the troubling aspects of beauty and sexuality, tied as they are with power and the pressure to conform to certain societal ideals.

Fire! gives us an opportunity to contemplate the links between this historical body and body-of-work and the world of dance, where criticism continues to have a particular interest in the body and beauty of the performer.

Creation Fund, Washington States Arts Commission, Joyce Theater, The Bernstein Foundation, and generous individual donors.For more information see catherinecabeen.com.

Catherine Cabeen (Choreographer, Director, Performer) has received choreographic commissions from On the Boards, Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater, the Visa2Dance Festival in Dar Es Salaam, Alsarab Dance Troupe and the Lebanese American University in Byblos Lebanon, Moving People Dance Theater, Pig Iron Theater Company, Arc Dance Company, Lehua Dance Company, Dance Company of Middlebury, and the Cabiri, among others.

Cabeen currently performs in her own work, and with Richard Move. She is a former member of the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (1997-2005), and was Jones’ Assistant Choreographer on the original production of Spring Awakening at the Atlantic Theater. She is also a former member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Pearl Lang Dance Theater among others.

In Seattle, where Cabeen has been based since 2006, she has performed as a guest artist with Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater, the Chamber Dance Company, and Acorn Dance. Cabeen has received generous support for her solo work from the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs. She has had the pleasure of participating in Here/Now and has created numerous Senior Solos for graduating Cornish and WWU students as well as choreographing and performing in numerous works through Catherine Cabeen and Company. Cabeen holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Washington and a BFA from Cornish College’s Professional Dancer’s Program.

During the summer of 2011, Cabeen was Emerging Choreographer at Bates Dance Festival. Following this experience in the Fall of 2012, she was invited to begin a three-year position at Middlebury College in VT as a Visiting Associate Professor. Cabeen teaches internationally; contemporary dance technique and composition, 20th century dance history, Ethics/Aesthetics/and the Body, Anatomy/Kinesiology, and workshops based on movement and gender. Cabeen is also an OM certified yoga instructor and teaches for the Bill T Jones/ Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Education Outreach Department. For more

BIOSCatherine Cabeen & CompanyCabeen founded Catherine Cabeen and Company (CCC) in 2009, to explore how interdisciplinary research and collaboration can be used to build new movement vocabularies. In the last four years CCC has engaged 30 interdisciplinary artists and created over 22 collaborative works including CCC’s 2011 evening-length Into the Void.

Into the Void was commissioned by On the Boards in Seattle, and wasselected to be broadcast live around the world on its opening night, via Lowlives.net. Into the Void was also documented for On the Boards’ on-line performing arts library. The full work can be seen at ontheboards.tv. Into the Void and Fire! are the first and second works in what will be a trilogy dedicated to New Realist Artists. These interdisciplinary performance works combine historic scholarship and contemporary collaboration. The trilogy is dedicated to connecting visual and performance art histories, and to honoring the value of ephemeral experiences.

CCC’s repertory program Hyphen continues to evolve and tour both nationally and internationally. The New York Times called CCC’s Hyphen, “highly kinetic, complex... visually exquisite,” and “beautifully performed.” Hyphen was most recently performed at Velocity Dance Center in Seattle and will next be performed at Queens University in Belfast.

CCC has presented work at numerous Seattle area festivals including the Chop Shop, Arts Launch, NW New Works Festival, 12 Minutes Max, Boost, SAM Remix, and was a finalist in The A.W.A.R.D. Show! Seattle: 2009. CCC has had the honor of sharing full evenings of work with Seattle audiences at the Olympic Sculpture Park, Velocity Dance Center, The Seattle Changing Room, and On the Boards. CCC has performed at the Visa2Dance Festival in Dar Es Salaam and the International Dance Day Festival in Byblos Lebanon as well as at numerous colleges, universities, and theaters across the United States.

Catherine Cabeen and Company is an Associate Artist of Shunpike. CCC has been supported by 4 Culture, the National Performing Network

information see catherinecabeen.com.

Karena Birk (Performer) received her MFA in Dance from The Ohio State University with a focus on performance, notation, history, and pedagogy. Her early training was at the Cornish Preparatory Program, Richmond Ballet, and the University of Washington. She has danced professionally with the Colorado Ballet, Lehua Dance Theatre, ARC Dance, Redd Legg, and oaklanDrive Dance Company. She has been privileged to dance works of many choreographers, including Trisha Brown, Anna Sokolow, Antony Tudor, George Balanchine, Fanny Elssler, Wade Madsen, Deborah Wolf, and Hannah Wiley. She currently teaches modern and ballet at Bainbridge Dance Center, and has also taught at Cornish, Dance Fremont, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and The Ohio State University, among others. Karena and Catherine Cabeen met dancing in the Cornish Preparatory Dance Program in 1993. Karena has performed with CCC since 2010.

Lou Cabeen (Visual Artist) lives and works in Seattle where she balances her working life as an artist with her working life as an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Washington. In both arenas she is a passionate advocate of the tactile joys of fiber and textiles, especially stitching. For the past several years she has been combining this passion with an equally avid attention to maps, map-making and the book arts. Making art you can play with is the common thread running through these interests, and her opportunity to work with the Fire! team of artists has been a joy. Catherine and Lou first collaborated professionally on Earth/Pool a dance for the camera project in 2002, and have subsequently collaborated on several performance installations based on Lou’s 2002 Groundwork.

Phill Cabeen (Designer) is a Chicago-based visual-arts jack-of-all-trades, Phill trained in Photo and Film, and in Art History. He has enjoyed collaborating with Catherine Cabeen and Company as a graphic designer, creating the company website, and producing the poster images for Into The Void and Fire!. He was pleased to also contribute to the set design for Fire!, designing and managing production of the mylar mosaic pool component. Aside from his art and design projects, Phill is a House

Manager at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and instructs German language at Columbia College Chicago.

Jana Kincl (Performer) has been based in Seattle for the last 10 years, where she hikes, travels, sails, snowboards and balances many part time jobs! She has danced with Veronica Mendonca/VAM, Michele Miller, Alana O’Farrell Rogers, Jason Ohlberg, Pablo Cornejo, Danny Herter and the Invasive Species, Zoe Scofield, Lily Verlaine, Jasper McCann, Maya Soto and ARC Dance Productions. Jana met Catherine Cabeen in 2001 when Cabeen was setting work on ARC Dance. She first performed with Catherine Cabeen and Company in 2012.

Alex Harding (Stage Manager), a graduate of the University of Washington, has been stage managing dance for four years. She got her start on the technical crew for dance productions for the University of Washington’s Dance Department under Peter Bracilano and progressed to stage managing dance performances there. She has previously worked with the Chamber Dance Company, Seattle Dance Project and Whim W’him. She is thrilled to be working with Catherine Cabeen and Co. again!

Shortly after completing her Master of Fine Arts, Susie J Lee (New Media Designer) was recognized by the Seattle Weekly as the “Emerging Artist of the Year” for the “intelligence, emotion and sensuality” of her time-based sculptures. Following her first solo exhibition at Lawrimore Project, she was named “An Artist to Watch” by Jori Finkel in Artnews. Lee’s work has been exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, Tacoma Art Museum, and internationally in Salerno, Italy and at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul, Korea. In 2012 she had her first solo museum exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, “Of Breath and Rain,” which was named best new media art exhibition by Seattle Magazine. She was awarded the Stranger Visual Art Genius Award, the Northwest Contemporary Art Award, and was part of the Northwest Biennial. Lee has worked recently as visual designer with Stephen Stubbs in the baroque opera, Venus and Adonis and in 2013, will be merging live performance and material decay at Castel Sant ‘Elmo in Naples, Italy.

Originally from Santa Fe, NM, Sarah Lustbader (Performer) migrated to the Northwest to attend Cornish College of the Arts, where she graduated with a BFA in Dance. There she had the opportunity to work with renowned choreographers including Robert Battle, Donald McKayle, Deborah Wolf, Michael Rioux, Timothy Lynch, and KT Niehoff. Sarah has been collaborating with Catherine Cabeen since 2006, and has had the pleasure of performing professionally throughout the U.S. with Catherine Cabeen and Company, as well as with artists such as Moving People Dance Theatre, Corrie Befort, JD/Dansfolk, and Lingo Productions. Sarah is a certified GYROTONIC® and GYROKINESIS® trainer and teaches at GYROTONIC® Movement Center in Seattle.

Ella Mahler (Performer) is a Pacific Northwest Native, and a graduate of Western Washington University, with a BFA in Dance Performance/Choreography. Ella began working with Catherine Cabeen in 2009, and is also a member of Bellingham Repertory Dance and Kuntz and Company. She has had the pleasure of working with choreographers such as Monica Bill Barnes, Joshua Beamish, Amelia Reeber, Deborah Wolf, Andy Noble, among others. As an independent artist, Ella has presented and performed her own work in Bellingham, Seattle, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Ella currently lives in Seattle and serves as the Development Director of Strawberry Theatre Workshop. Through these avenues, Ella explores the many entry points in which dance and theatre can intersect with different mediums, environments, and communities.

Julian Martlew (Composer) is a musician, sound engineer, and com-poser from Nassau, Bahamas. He currently works in Seattle for On The Boards Theater, KEXP radio, and Gravelvoice Studios doing live sound, sound design, recording, and mixing. Julian first collaborated with Ca-been in 2010. He is honored to be a part of Fire!.

Kane Mathis (Composer) began his musical career at age 16 playing blues clubs in Chicago before going to The Lawrence Conservatory to study jazz and classical guitar. Simultaneously Kane Began making trips to The Gambia, Africa to live with a family of hereditary musicians which he has done for the past 15 years. Kane

holds a diploma from The Tiramang Traditional music school in The Gambia and has performed for the President of The Gambia, the American Ambassador to The Gambia, and he has appeared on Gambian National Radio and Television. In 2011 Kane became the first non-African to be endorsed by the countries National Center For Arts and Culture. Kane is also one of the leading interpreters of Ottoman classical music having studied at Istanbul’s I.T.U. conservatory before a 5-year apprenticeship with Oud virtuoso Münir Beken. Kane is regularly commissioned to create original works for dance, theater, and instrumental ensembles. Kane has created works for dance over the past 10 years with newer works focused on electronic fixed media. Kane is a 2010 Earshot Jazz album of the year winner and a recipient of the 2012 Camber Music America grant. Mathis and Cabeen first collaborated in 2009. Since that time they have created 12 collaborative works including the evening-length Into the Void.

Val Mayse (Costume Designer) This is Val’s first time designing costumes for Catherine Cabeen and On the Boards. For the past five years, she has designed for the Chamber Dance Company, including original designs for Wade Madsen’s Embrace and Helen Tamaris’s Negro Spirituals. An expert in flamenco dresses; Val is the costume designer for Sara de Luis and her company, and for Savannah Fuentes. Val has made costumes for most of the major companies in the Seattle area, including Seattle Opera, Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Intiman, and the Seattle Rep, where she was head dressmaker for eighteen years. She now teaches pattern making and construction at the University of Washington and for IATSI 887, the costumers’ union.

Jay McAleer (Scenic Designer) is a writer, designer and theatrical technician based in Seattle Washington. He has worked extensively in theatre, opera and dance and has toured with various performance companies in the Unites States, Europe and Asia. Jay has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Centrum Arts foundation. McAleer and Cabeen first worked together in 2007.

Phylicia Roybal (Performer) is a native of Santa Fe, New Mexico. She recently achieved her Bachelor degree in Fine Arts at the University

of Arizona. She has had the privilege of touring and working with Moving People Dance Company and Arcos Dance Company. She has had the opportunity to work with artists such as Donald Mckayle, Gail Gilbert, Kevin Iega Jeff, Ronn Stewart, and Bobby Mc Ferrin. She recently studied in Kibbutz Ga’aton with the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company as well as performed works by Rami Be’er. She continues to find inspiration through experimental movement and improvisation. Phylicia and Catherine met in Santa Fe 2007. She first performed with CCC in 2012.

Soyoung Shin is a Seattle born, Los Angeles based interdisciplinary artist. She holds a BS in Computer Science with a focus in art and new media from the University of Washington. She has exhibited collaborative works in Bolivia. She is a key contributor to Sanctum, an upcoming new media installation at the Henry Art Gallery. Soyoung performed in Strictly Seattle in 2012 and was a mentor at Reel Grrls.

Nancy Stoaks (Dramaturge) holds a M.A. in Art History from the University of Washington, where she received the Parnassus Graduating with Excellence Award. Interested in twentieth-century European and American art, her research focused on Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Paintings of the early 1960s, and she has lectured on this topic at universities, conferences, and museums, including at the Tate Liverpool during their 2008 Saint Phalle retrospective. She has worked as a curatorial research associate at the Frye Art Museum and as associate director of James Harris Gallery and Howard House Contemporary Art, and currently works as the curator of the Swedish Medical Center art collection.

Rodrigo Valenzuela (Digital Media collaborator) is a Chilean-born, Seattle-base artist. He holds a BFA/ Photography from University of Chile. a BA/ Aesthetics from the evergreen State College and a MFA from University of Washington. Rodrigo is a freelance filmmaker and a teacher in the photography department and at the Comparative history of Ideas (CHID) department at UW.

Connie Yun (lighting designer) is a freelance lighting designer for

dance, opera and theatre based out of Seattle. Most recently, her designs have been seen at Seattle Opera, Cornish College, Kentucky Opera and On The Boards. Locally, she has also designed for Pacific Musicworks, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Empty Space Theatre, Tacoma Opera, Portland Opera’s Studio Artists Program, Bellevue College, and University of Puget Sound. Nationally, her work has also been seen at Arizona Opera, Music Academy of the West, and Alabama Dance Theatre. After receiving her BA in English Literature from University of Virginia, Connie was the Allen Lee Hughes Fellow in Lighting at Arena Stage for their 1996-1997 season. Connie has been collaborating with Catherine Cabeen since the fall of 2009. Upcoming projects include a new production of Don Giovanni for Kentucky Opera, Wayward Sisters for Pacific Musicworks and Seattle Dance Project, and La Voix Humaine / Suor Angelica for Seattle Opera.