Powerful. Fearless. Innovative. So many authoritative adjectives have been ascribed to choreographer Pat Graney’s works in her thirty-odd year career, and countless more will join them as she continues to create. But words are only so much, and Graney’s work belongs to the curious and transcendent rank of art that is not so much described as it is viscerally and soul-rendingly felt.
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Vanguard Seattle | Art, Fashion and Culture
October 8, 2015
RAGE AND FEMININITY IGNITE IN PAT GRANEY’S “GIRL GODS”
The Mind Of Pat Graney
Over the years I’ve spent a fair amount of time navigating the rich pathways of Pat Graney’s mind.
It’s always an amazing journey.
Graney has been making dances in Seattle for more than two decades. Love them or hate them, they are always fascinating.
The Seattle Times
October 2, 2015
Pat Graney’s ‘Girl Gods’ explores women’s image and anger
Pat Graney’s new dance-performance piece “Girl Gods” begins with a young woman in a tight black mini-dress and heels, a cup of tea carried precariously in one hand.
As she slowly totters and steadies herself along a tall, wide wall of irregular white bricks, the cup clinks against the saucer. As tension mounts, can she keep her balance?
This is a potent opening image in a full-length work that ruminates on socially constructed standards of female attractiveness. Women’s repressed anger about these rigid codes also finds an outlet in “Girl Gods.”
Dance Magazine
October 1, 2015
Girl Power
Seattle’s beacon of feminism in dance, Pat Graney, mixes serious issues with absurdism. Like Pina Bausch, she offers surreal imagery, though less glamorous and more grounded. Her newest premiere, Girl Gods, explores themes of family history and the rage many women feel toward society. To underline the contrast between good behavior and the tumult within, her five dancers don cocktail dresses and dance on a blanket of dirt.
Seattle Magazine
October 1, 2015
Pat Graney's 'Girl Gods' Explores Suppressed Rage Through Dance
Define rage. Have you ever experienced pure rage? How did you express it? How was anger expressed in your family? These are the questions longtime local choreographer Pat Graney is asking five female dancers to explore in her new piece, Girl Gods. Even more daringly, she’s requesting that they ask the same questions of their mothers—and record the answers, which will be used in the score (by acclaimed Seattle composer Amy Denio). In early August, 24 weeks into the 32-week rehearsal schedule, none of the dancers had initiated those maternal conversations yet.
Crosscut
September 29, 2015
Pat Graney is angry, and it’s a beautiful thing
During a recent afternoon rehearsal with her five dancers, choreographer Pat Graney was discussing timing, dresses, and poultry–specifically where one might procure a Cornish game hen.
This was Graney, one of Seattle’s most admired and respected dance makers, finessing her first full-length work in seven years. Girl Gods premieres this week at On The Boards and if a peek at the work in progress is a good indicator, it promises to be both aesthetically memorable and emotionally challenging. In other words: classic Graney.
The work focuses on a favorite Graney subject—women—but this time it’s women and the idea of rage. (The poultry, for example, serves as a prop in a segment about the ritual of domestic work but it’s slated to be anything but cutesy).
Graney, 59, has received some of the highest accolades locally and nationally for her work. Her contemporary dance pieces have included large-scale installations as well as performance workshops for incarcerated women and girls. In conversations after rehearsal one recent Saturday at On The Boards and then over the phone, Graney weighed in on stuffing one’s emotions, the radical act of unleashing rage, and the insecurity she still feels even though she’s in her 36th year of creating work...
The Stranger
September 17, 2015
Pat Graney: Girl Gods
"Choreographer" doesn't feel substantive enough to describe what Pat Graney does. She's a dance auteur who creates affecting and sometimes humorous spectacles: installations that immerse her audience in an exaggerated dreamworld, or women dancing in Judy Jetson dresses that are wired to turn their smallest movements into sound, or 130 female martial artists spread across a landscape. In Girl Gods, Graney explores "feminine rage" with a littered stage, cocktail dresses, and "uneasy vaudeville married to explosive physicality." Starring dancers Sara Jinks, Sruti Desai, Cheryl Delostrinos, Jenny May Peterson, and Jody Kuehner (aka Cherdonna Shinatra, who won this year's Stranger Genius Award for performance).
Seattle Weekly
September 15, 2015
Fall Arts: How Pat Graney Builds Her Choreography, By excavating memory and emotion as a form of research.
Seattle has a tendency to produce choreographers who aren’t like anyone who came before them. Merce Cunningham and Mark Morris are probably the best known, but Pat Graney isn’t far behind. She’s been making dances since the 1970s; and in the dance world, where generations fly by like gnats, that’s a very long time.
Coming to Seattle in 1979, Graney landed in a dance community that was full of activity, with all kinds of newcomers bringing the energy of the dance boom with them. She found her cohort in the experimentalists who established On the Boards, which has offered a home for her work ever since. Like most young artists, she tried on multiple ideas, but some of her early interests still thread through her current work. Her primary values include language (both spoken and gestural communication), ritual activities, a keen eye for design, and a fondness for the unusual. You’ll see these all reflected in Girl Gods, which premieres next month.
City Arts
August 26, 2015
Girl Gods: Pat Graney’s latest work returns to women, family and repressed rage.
In 2010, Seattle-based choreographer Pat Graney presented Faith Triptych, a remount of three works she had created for On the Boards between 1991 and 2001. For those who had followed Graney’s work since she emerged as a major figure here in the 1980s, the three dances—Faith (1991), Sleep* (1997) and Tattoo (2001)—were a reminder about how powerful her straightforward and deeply emotional movement could be. These pieces were long and unfolded slowly, gradually accruing strength and significance as the dancers established behavioral patterns and intimate relationships.
Graney’s direct methods were, like the waves of feminism that accompanied them, something of a revelation. It was striking to see work unencumbered by the conceptual frameworks or persona-based modes of expression that are so common among younger choreographers. Graney’s art was confident enough to just be what it was.
Vanguard Seattle | Art, Fashion and Culture
August 8, 2015
IDENTITY THROUGH MOTION: VELOCITY DANCE CENTER’S STRICTLY SEATTLE 2015
Pat Graney’s A Study for Girl Gods was choreographed as a sort of preamble to her upcoming work Girl Gods,which premieres in October at On the Boards. Staying true to her usual interplay with social commentary, her piece for Strictly Seattle engaged with images of femininity and the pressures of being confined to project a society-approved look. Parades of women with their hair loose, pencil skirts tight, and heels tall was almost as disconcerting as the false plastic smiles—as much a part of the choreography as their steps. Confined and cutesy duets provided a vast contrast to the unnerving backdrop: soloists writhing on the floor, full of rage, out of control and violent.