Montana Rep's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, January 29

Three of Seattle's most promising choreographers will create three brand new works for Velocity's Bridge Project 2020, which will premiere at Velocity's Founder's theater from February 6-9. This year's Bridge will feature exciting new work from three emerging dance artists: Alyssa Boone, Lucille Jun, and Peter Kohring.

The Bridge Project epitomizes Velocity's relentless commitment to supporting new generations of dance artists. Each choreographer receives the artistic, financial and administrative support they need to develop their work, in addition to a cast of dancers and artistic mentorship. In programming The Bridge Project, Velocity aims to enhance the artistic growth of the choreographers, and provide an entry point into the local performance scene for dance artists new to the community.

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Inspired by her own experiences as an Asian-American in the Pacific Northwest, Federal Way based choreographer Lucille Jun will work with her dancers to explore the privileges and limitations of the "abstract body." Looking at how difference is read across the bodies of others, Jun will use dance to unpack and challenge audience assumptions about the roles of and signifiers of different bodies, and how our perceptions can evolve and shift over time.

Alyssa Boone, a recent Seattle transplant and Strictly Seattle alumna from 2019, will be presenting a new work deconstructing psychological processes and associations through a visceral engagement with the senses. Though audiences may remember Boone for her jaw-dropping solo at the beginning of Kate Wallich's Strictly re-staging of Industrial Ballet, Boone brings a sophisticated and keen intellect to her choreographic process. Drawing on her own experience as a synesthete, Boone will explore what it would be like to unravel the human mind: creating atmosphere through a deconstruction of the fundamental psychological process of association. This piece will challenge and expose established assumptions, offering the idea that all we perceive is not necessarily real, true, or correct.

Peter Kohring's "mollie the depressed dolly and other sad stories" looks closely at the diverse experiences with mental illness through a dance that unfolds between a collection of dolls. This work has come out of Kohring's own lived experience with mental illness. In the development of the piece, they have used props, movement and narrative to abstract concrete events from their own life. This performance will be a deeper exploration of an iteration that was shown at the Converge Festival of 2019, but that Peter began developing while still in school at the University of Washington. As each doll takes on stereotypes and misconceptions of mental illness one by one, offering community and collective support as a remedy to isolation and ostracization.

While diverse in content, all three choreographers tackle societal expectations and projections, and liberating both the individual and the collective imagination from these constraints through dance. From mental illness to race to our most intuitive psychological associations, this year's Bridge Project artists are all about breaking down desiccated, outdated, and even oppressive structures to pave way for the new.

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