Projects

Red Shoes Project

M Street Market, St. James Cathedral, Frye Art Museum

Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: May 12, 19, 26, 2011

Red Shoes Project Poster

Poster Photography © 2011 Steven Miller

Degenerate Art Ensemble's latest site-specific performance, entitled Red Shoes, is an ambitious work that has emerged from the artists' deep relationship with Seattle, as residents, creators, and influencers of its cultural landscape. It is, in many ways, a love letter to the city in which DAE was established, nurtured and continues to flourish. Red Shoes emerged in a year-long series of impromptu solo performances by Haruko Nishimura in Seattle's streets, city parks and neighborhoods. Incubated by the full DAE company in a Frye Art Museum residency and tested by the group at a residency at The Watermill Center: A Laboratory for Performance, Red Shoes was nurtured and produced in the embrace of an unprecedented First Hill neighborhood partnership that includes the Frye Art Museum and St. James Cathedral. This evening-length performance brings together for the first time Frye Art Museum staff, members and visitors, neighborhood homeowners and residents, staffs of Harborview Medical Center and Swedish Hospital, Sorrento Hotel guests, St. James Cathedral parishioners, along with other neighborhood stakeholders, weaving them into DAE's large Seattle fan base from the music, dance and art worlds.

The extraordinary performance is an adaption of Hans Christian Andersen's tale of a girl who is cursed to dance herself to death for following her creative desires. DAE's interpretation of this beloved fairy tale/ horror story is a rich drama of dreams, passion, discipline, desire, trauma, transformation, and reinvention, danced through mountains and forests, across rivers, through time. Beginning in the Frye Art Museum galleries and spilling onto the streets, Red Shoes features work by well-known Seattle creators: sets by Jason Puccinelli, sound design by Robb Kunz, video by Leo Mayberry, costumes by Christine Tchirgi, sculpture by Colin Ernst and Ela Lamblin, music by Jherek Bischoff, Joshua Kohl and Susie Kozawa, and choreography and dance by Haruko Nishimura. Special guests include vocalist/percussionist Dohee Lee, a marching band, a string quartet, the 60-member choir of the St. James Cathedral, and the public. Red Shoes soundscape includes the bells ringing from the St. James Cathedral Bell Tower. The performance will be presented four times for limited audiences on consecutive Thursday evenings: May 12, 19, and 26, 2011.

The Forest

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Procession

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The Village

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The Swan

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Amputation

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Fire

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Red Shoes Project Performance Photography © 2011 Bruce Clayton Tom

Video Excerpt


Degenerate Art Ensemble's Red Shoes Project from Ian Lucero on Vimeo.

 

 

Degenerate Art Ensemble Exhibition

Frye Art Museum

Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: March 19-June 19, 2011

Degenerate Art Ensemble Exhibition Postcard

Photography and Design © 2007, 2011 Bruce Clayton Tom

Degenerate Art Ensemble has been known for ambitious collaborative projects with the most inventive interdisciplinary minds anywhere. This year's collaboration with the Frye Art Museum represent a foray in to an entirely new territory.

The first art exhibition and museum project showcasing Degenerate Art Ensemble was the culmination of a year-long dialogue between Frye Art Museum curator Robin Held and the artists of DAE. The survey of the group's work filled the entire museum, featuring 14 artists and five large scale works inspired by the ambitious all-sensory productions the group is known for creating: a Weeble Wobble princess that battles ninjas, a surgery ice cream truck, a tuning nest in a listening forest, and the Slug Princess that devours cabbages in a microscopic world.

For many, Degenerate Art Ensemble is a performance group that has been elusive, performing one-night huge extravaganzas packed into a two-balcony theater or sometimes an undisclosed location. This was an opportunity to see Degenerate Art Ensemble as no one, newcomer or long time follower, has ever seen them before. The first showing of this exhibition ran for three months at the Frye Museum.

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Degenerate Art Ensemble Exhibition Photography © 2009 Bruce Clayton Tom

 

 

Sonic Tales

The Moore Theatre

Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: October 30-31. 2009

Sonic Tales Poster

Poster photography © 2009 Steven Miller

Sonic Tales sets DAE's surrealist dance theater style and hallucinatory visuals against fierce music that ranges from driving rocking rhythm to rich soaring melodies to far out atmospheric soundscapes — telling interwoven short stories in the form of bizarre invented fairy tales. Sonic Tales is both music concert and dance spectacle — video projection and breathtaking costumes enhance this totally one of a kind experience.

Aesthetically extreme, influenced by punk, protest, cartoons, ghost stories and nightmares, DAE takes the viewer into otherworldly landscapes — full of compelling characters and music that doesn't just accompany the action, but defines the mental state and reveals secrets to the audience that the characters on stage will never know.

Sonic Tales resembles a modern fairy tale — exploring the inner workings of a mind and the varied characters that inhabit it. An appetite girl, a ninja-battling weeble wobble princess, and a slug princess people this surreal dreamscape.

 

"With a lead singer who sings like Björk, a penchant for the quirky and light overtones of Pina Bauch — inspired dance theater, Degenerate Art Ensemble could be grouped in a genre I call 'whimsically disturbing performance art.' The group's particular blend of media and performance modes, which integrates original instrumental and vocal music, video and percussion dance a la Stomp, appeared unique in a preview they gave last week at the New Museum for Sonic Tales...in this work in progress, the performers are so refined that they leave no doubts about the show's future success."

David Levitz, TimeOut, New York

"Degenerate Art Ensemble's 'Sonic Tales' is weird, wild, surreal — DAE's Sonic Tales uses every means at its disposal — movement, music, sound collage, video projection, shape-shifting sets, fantastical costumes — to take its audience deep into the realms of the unconscious. We're not just talking content pushed to the edge of narrative logic. What we have here is dream imagery free-floating on a sea of surreality."

Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times, Seattle

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Sonic Tales Photography © 2009 Bruce Clayton Tom

 

 

Cuckoo Crow

Cuckoo Crow Poster

Poster photography © 2006 Steven Miller

"REDCAT (Roy & Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) is known for pushing the artistic envelope. DAE, however, may turn that push into a full-force kick. DAE treats contemporary performance like a rubber band... always expanding, contracting, snapping, always helping us to listen and look at life with curious dynamics."

Downtown News, Los Angeles

REDCAT Theater

Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: November 29-December 2, 2007

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Bumbershoot, Bagley Wright Theater

Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: September 3, 2006

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The Moore Theatre

Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: March 16, 2006

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Cuckoo Crow Photography © 2006, 2007 Bruce Clayton Tom