GEOGRAPHY
Geography is a 65 minute piece exploring visceral means of mapping and navigating changing and challenging internal and external worlds. Choreographer Scott expands her research of active words with physical outcomes - lifted, climb, broken, pushed, pressed - through diverse physical manipulations, including the use of harnesses to expand the dramatic potential of the body within the parameters of gravity and weight. In Geography we see Scott's interest in images that are surrounded, contained - images with constraints and rules that become obstacles and challenge the body’s ability to achieve the choreography. Composer Powell's score includes delicate sound textures that are sometimes partly created by the dancers themselves, as well as electroacoustic music that ranges from the gentle and mysterious to the threatening and percussive.
"Slightly more than an hour long, Geography is delivered in three color-coded phases, going from green to brown to black. It oscillates between striking solo passagework and teeming ensemble skirmishes as it weighs the geography of the body against the geography of environment. Patterns emerge, fugue-like, from the chaos and then recede, as Scott's fast-changing, fragmented lexicon of moves embraces everything from finger flutters to sensual swivels to silent screams." - Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times (Nov. 16, 2007)
"It's not too difficult to spot the genuine article. This is the case with choreographer Mary Sheldon Scott and composer Jarred Powell's most recent modern dance piece, Geography. The veteran Seattle-based performance group shows no signs of slowing its creative output, even after several consecutive seasons of new works and national touring. Geography is a visual and intellectual feast, a work that, like life itself, contains moments of piercing beauty and suggestions of violent horror." - Stacey Levine, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Nov. 16, 2007)
Read full reviews: Seattle Times, Seattle Post Intelligencer
Premiere: On the Boards, Seattle – November 15-17, 2007
Tour sites: Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents – February 1, 2008;
The Southern Theater, Minneapolis – February 22-23, 2008;
Velocity Theater, Seattle – May 9-10, 2008
Choreographer: Mary Sheldon Scott
Composer: Jarrad Powell
Visual Artist: Robert Campbell
Lighting Design: Julianne Keenan
Costume Design: Mark Zappone
Performed by: Alice de Muizon, Beth Graczyk, Mikhail Kaschock, Jim Kent, Jess Klein, Sean Ryan, Ellie Sandstrom.
Geography was a National Performance Network Creation Fund Project
co-commissioned by the Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents in partnership with On the Boards and the National Performance Network. NPN and the NPN
Creation Fund are sponsored by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford
Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Altria, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency).
Additional funding for Geography was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, 4Culture, and the Mayor’s
Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs/City of Seattle. Scott/Powell Performance
is a project of Gamelan Pacifica (501c3).