Bridge Project, 2026

For over 20 years, Velocity Dance Center’s Bridge Project has been incubating the works of Seattle’s emerging dance artists. It gives the chosen choreographers the necessary means (time/space/money) to flesh out a new idea and show the results to an audience who are invited to provide feedback. In my experience it’s not quite a ‘work in progress’ showing – the presence of costumes, professional lighting design, high quality sound ensures the performances look ready for consumption rather than half-baked. And yet, the audience is reminded that these pieces are necessarily ‘unfinished’ through each choreographer’s questions requesting certain kinds of feedback for their work. Stubby pencils and note-cards are provided for jotting ideas (to the Jeopardy theme-tune) after each 20-minute new work. 

 

Olivia Anderson’s solo Future Pasture lingers with me. If I could afford to return to the theater today, I’d watch it again at the matinée and then a third time at the evening performance. Under the orange light of a polluted sun she begins moving almost imperceptibly slowly, a gradual turn of the head developing into a series of creeping pivots while her torso flexes and torques, her hands grasp, her shoulders slowly quake. She’s dressed like a woman in a Greek tragedy, draped in black, with luminous white skin and brunette hair gleaming in the light. I feel the leashed force of internal tension in her body as she grasps her own hands, feels for her face. Undeniably, there are echoes of Butoh here but it doesn’t strike me as derivative.  In Future Pasture the force of collaboration is evident. Great dance is never just about the movement.  It requires the synthesis, or the radical juxtaposition, of all the visual, aural, and kinaesthetic components.  Anna Shih’s lighting design—stark, restrained—amplifies and sculpts the visual impact of Anderson’s equally stark and restrained dancing. Keyes Wiley created a dynamic sound score which was haunting and direct. Towards the end of the piece the entire space is ripped from meditative half-light into a dazzlingly cold white glare as the music exhorts us to “Let the Sunshine In.” Anderson has been bent backwards, processing slowly in standing backbend, throat distended, vulnerable.  Now she absorbs the light. Or it absorbs her as again, almost imperceptibly, the lights darken and it ends. 

 

 

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Additional thoughts...
 

In watching dance, I don’t choose a quest for meaning. I’m not motivated to work hard to try to figure out what the choreographer is trying to say. Instead, I try to give myself over to conscious perception. And often—perhaps as a direct effect but perhaps as a failure to stay with that pure intention—my thoughts unspool. 

As a side note, this might be a compelling new reason why people should go to watch experimental contemporary dance. New research suggests that what I will term ‘blank time’ and the scholars call boredom is essential for mental health. It’s a time to sit with your thoughts, wrestle with the big questions in your life/about life. 

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While Anderson’s work felt as complete as almost anything I’ve seen in the theater in the past year, the works by Almario and Jobaris more closely approximated what I would expect at the Bridge Project. Tantalizing nuggets of movement—a phrase I steal from my first ever choreography teacher; provocative ideas; glimmers of something that might become great but isn’t there yet.