Joan Laage // Alan Sutherland // Sheri Brown
Joan Laage // Alan Sutherland // Sheri Brown
We are sorry to say we are cancelling this weekend's Performance with Joan Laage, Sheri Brown and Alan Sutherland and will be refunding all tickets/workshop registrations. We are committed to prioritizing the health of our artists, staff, volunteers, faculty, students, and all of our community members.
We will reschedule this event in the future! Stay safe and healthy out there!
ONE NIGHT ONLY: March 14th, 8pm Cancelled
Sliding Scale $12-25
Please join us for a very special evening of Seattle butoh artists Joan Laage, Alan Sutherland, and Sheri Brown.
RIVERS OF INDUSTRY
Created & performed by Sheri Brown & Alan Sutherland with original Music by Jane Maybrysmith.
“We show a world full of humans and other animals trying to find peace in the clatter of machines and the stink of factories and intend this dance to make positive outcomes more likely.”—Alan Sutherland
RIVERS RUNNING RED
Joan Laage solo performance
“Rivers Running Red” is a new performance that pays homage to the female body and menstruation. The piece is greatly inspired by an article exposing the practice in certain traditional societies of sending women off to the mountains to remain in huts and, all too often not surviving the harsh conditions, fueled by the belief that women are unclean while menstruating. The piece is also a reflection on this monthly cycle being celebrated as a sacred passage in other cultures with a haunting original score by Seattle musicians Michael Shannon and Joey Largent. RRR was first performed as a duet in Milan, Italy, then as a solo in Pontedera, Italy and Frankfurt, Germany while Joan was on her annual European tour. In April a new duet version will be performed in Seattle with Katrina Wolfe.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Joan Laage
Joan Laage (Kogut) studied under butoh masters Kazuo Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa and performed with Ashikawa’s group Gnome in Japan in the late 80s. After settling in Seattle in 1990, she formed Dappin’ Butoh, a company known for its appearances in Seattle’s fringe theater and dance festivals. Joan has performed and taught at national and international butoh and dance festivals, and was a featured artist at the UCLA Butoh Symposium in May 2011, and has been an adjunct faculty at Cornish College of The Arts (Seattle). She is featured in Dancing Into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, And Japan and Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy by Sondra Horton Fraleigh. She performs frequently at the Seattle Japanese Garden where she is a docent. Joan is a founding member of DAIPANbutoh Collective which produces an annual butoh festival in Seattle.
Alan Sutherland
Alan Sutherland first experienced Butoh in 1991 while attending Dappin Butoh shows to support his friend Helen Thorsen who was a founding member of that troupe. His first performance was in 1996 when he was 42,after studying with Hel. He first met Sheri when she came to classes he was leading in 2000. Since then they've performed together in Korea and Japan and San Francisco and seemingly every single theater in Seattle.
Sheri Brown
Sheri Brown, Artistic Director of DAIPANbutoh Collective, began dancing butoh 20 years ago when she saw Alan Sutherland and a few other soul- engaging butoh artists perform in the Seattle Butoh Festival that Joan Laage/Dappin' Butoh put on at On the Boards. She is deeply grateful to have since developed not only a deep relationship to these two key individuals in the butoh world, but also the larger, uniquely special community of butoh dancers locally, nationally and globally through her intense and continued two decades of engagement with the butoh dance-theater art form.