Radioactive Practice
Abby Z and the New Utility
Co-presented by Meany Center for the Performing Arts and On the Boards
Take a dive into the unknown with Abby Z
RADIOACTIVE PRACTICE is the newest evening-length work by New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award-winning choreographer Abby Zbikowski and her company Abby Z and the New Utility. The genre-bending work brings together a group of dancers to redefine purpose for themselves as they labor their way through complex, demanding, and often perplexing physicality as a means to confront expectations and dive into the unknown head-on.
Performances will be held at the Meany Hall - Studio Theatre
Thursday, October 27, 8pm
Friday, October 28, 8pm
Saturday, October 29, 8pm
More About This Piece
RADIOACTIVE PRACTICE, the newest evening-length work by New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award-winning choreographer Abby Zbikowski and her company Abby Z and the New Utility. The genre-bending work brings together a mosaic group of dancers to redefine purpose for themselves as they labor their way through complex, demanding, and often perplexing physicality as a means to confront expectations and dive into the unknown head on.
Utilizing the skills they have honed through their practices in movement traditions including (but not limited to) street dance, post-modern dance, contemporary African forms, tap, synchronized swimming, soccer, and martial arts, Zbikowski and cast draw from an arsenal of physical possibility to shatter assumptions of established forms and test the group’s own physical and mental limits. Working with Senegalese dance artist Momar Ndiaye as dramaturge, this work embodies the amalgam of contemporary living, chock full of cultural collisions, unlikely relationships, minor to major misunderstandings, a desire for logic, and being hard-wired to survive.
The cast features Alex Gossen, Kashia Kancey, Fiona Lundie, Jennifer Meckley, Benjamin Roach, and Jinsei Sato.
Radioactive Practice is commissioned and presented by The Live Arts Live Feed creative residency program, which is a laboratory for the development of new commissioned work directed toward the Live Arts theater. The Live Feed program is supported in part by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and Partners for New Performance. Radioactive Practice is a National Performance Network/Visual Artist Network (NPN/VAN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by New York Live Arts, Dance Place, American Dance Festival, Wexner Center for the Performing Arts and NPN/VAN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org.
Radioactive Practice is commissioned by ADF with support from the Doris Duke/SHS Foundations Award for New Works and The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. Additional commissioning funds provided by the Caroline Hearst Choreographer-In-Residence Program at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Dance Umbrella’s Four by Four program, United States Artists Fellowship, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.
More About This Partnership
Abby Z and the New Utility’s Radioactive Practice, is co-presented by Meany Center for the Performing Arts and On the Boards. This co-presentation represents a deeper engagement with Bill T. Jones as 2022-23 Meany Center guest Artistic Associate, to increase artist engagement, support new work, amplify diverse voices, and further expand and diversify audiences for contemporary performance in Seattle, including increasing access to new generations of artists and audiences.
Photos by Yukina Sato
About the Artists
