"A troupe of great promise."
-- Seattle Times
"OMG! Manifold Motion is Awesome!"
-- Seattlest.com
"What they [Manifold Motion] do is everything that I like about the arts community."
-- Randy Engstrom, Founding Director, Youngstown Cultural Arts Center
About the Company
Manifold Motion has been producing its experimental blend of multidisciplinary performance since 2005. Based in Seattle, WA, the company works and performs with artists at home and throughout the country. To date, Manifold Motion has collaborated with over 30 dancers, musicians, writers, technologists and visual artists.
Each group of artists works in a highly collaborative process to create a fully interdisciplinary experience where every element supports and enhances the others. In the process we encourage collaborating artists to push their own artistic limits and to expand into other disciplines.
In addition to evening-length productions, Manifold Motion holds classes and produces a showcase series (Miscellanea) featuring the individual work of past collaborators.
Manifold Motion has been featured at local events including ArtsLaunch, Artopia and Untitled [Intersection].
Manifold Motion is a partner artist of Shunpike.
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Founding Artistic Director
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photo: Carolyn Isaak
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Keely Isaak Meehan, CMA
Keely is a dancer, choreographer, director, video artist, and Certified Movement Analyst (CMA). Her interest and dedication to collaborative process and interdisciplinary performance led her to found Manifold Motion as an incubator for large-scale experimental productions.
Dancing since she was a child, Keely has trained extensively in ballet, contemporary, improvisation, Dunham Technique, Skinner Releasing, Laban Movement Analysis and Bartenieff Fundamentals. She has studied at Oberlin College (BA, Dance), LABAN (Professional Diploma, Dance Studies), University of Washington (Certificate, Arts Management) and Laban/Bartenieff & Somatic Studies International (Certification in Movement Analysis and BodyMind Practice).
Other companies Keely has performed with include The Asterisk Project, Kate Watson-Wallace/anonymous bodies, Degenerate Art Ensemble and ZIA Dance. As a solo artist she performed most recently at the WPA Poetry Festival and 12 Minutes Max at On the Boards.
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Company Members
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| photo: Divide |
Chaya Eastwood Jones
Chaya is a maker of things, many of them wearable. She has been sewing since she was a little girl, and spent a few years dressing up the dotcom bubble in San Francisco as well as subverting the wedding industry by making custom-designed bridal gowns in every color but white.
She has been working on costume design with Manifold Motion since In Fere, and very much enjoys the challenges of keeping the dancers clothed and beautiful. Manifold Motion's show Woolgatherer marked her performance debut.
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Ariel Rogoff Flavin
Ariel began performing at an early age in the companies of Melanie Slater, Tamar Rogoff and Wendy Perron, as well as having the honor of dancing with many other choreographers. She choreographed at Oberlin College where she majored in Dance and Art History, graduating in 2000. She is a recent graduate of the NYU school of Social Work, and currently works as a psychiatric social worker. She is also a dancer with MayDance, and performed in Edith & Jenny, by Tamar Rogoff. She recently performed a duet with her son -- his performance debut -- as a part of Alice Farley's work.
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photo:
Carolyn Isaak
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Bridget Gunning
Bridget is a dancer, aerialist, yogini and teacher with a lifetime of movement experience. Coming from an active and artistic family she began as a competitive swimmer, moved into track and field, then started taking classical ballet in 1996, thus beginning her focus on dance and performance. She draws upon Skinner Releasing, Laban and Bartinieff Fundamentals, ballet, contemporary modern dance, hip-hop, acrobatics and improvisation. Bridget holds a BA in Sociology from The University of Arizona and is a Registered Yoga Teacher. She performs in Seattle with Manifold Motion, Stimulate Dance and TickTock Dance. Bridget celebrates her third season with Manifold Motion.
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Mike McCracken
With a past heavily involved in music and software, Mike is exploring new elements of his medium, as well as branching into new media. As technology's malleability continues to increase dramatically, new avenues of artistic pursuit emerge and develop. Mike strives to harness these newly opened areas with fascinating possibility for potency to create things of intrigue, beauty and reflection.
Mike McCracken graduated with a BS in Computer Science from Evergreen, focusing on musical applications of computers. He is a percussionist with the Lake Union Civic Orchestra and creates installations, performs and does production management as a member of Manifold Motion. His installation, "Audible Avatar," was presented at 911 Media in December, 2007 as a part Dorkbot's "People Doing Strange Things with Electricity" exhibit.
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Leo Mayberry
Leo Mayberry has been composing, coordinating and performing live video for the last eight years as KillingFrenzy Visuals. Projects have varied from improvisational explorations with Steve Fisk and Greg Gilmore to complicated theater performance with the Degenerate Art Ensemble. Developing custom applications in Max/MSP/Jitter, and amassing an eclectic catalog of material to draw from has developed the flexibility necessary to thrive in environments from gothic ambience to breakcore meltdown. Use of mirrors, motors, and non-standard screen compositions are all ways he's working to shatter the screen and release the image.
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| photo: Joris Kamma |
Luara Moore
Lue is a graphic designer, visual artist and musician. She currently lives in Utrecht, The Netherlands and designs Manifold Motion's promotional materials. She has, and continues to work in both the artistic and administrative aspects of Manifold Motion as a creator, performer, designer and publicist.
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Kate Watson-Wallace
Kate, a 2007 Pew Fellow in the arts in choreography, is a dancer, choreographer and director based in Philadelphia. Her work has been funded by the Rockefeller Map Fund, Dance Advance, The Independence Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She is a resident choreographer at Susan Hess and has been a guest artist at Drexel University, the University of the Arts, Franklin and Marshall College, Temple University and Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her dancing, choreography and study have taken her throughout Europe, and across the U.S. Internationally, she has worked with Bulgarian physical theater director Petar Todorov on American Silences, and with British choreographer Carol Brown. As a dancer she has performed and toured extensively with Headlong Dance Theater, Group Motion and Myra Bazell/Scrap. In 2008 she was featured as a "Person to Watch in 2008," and voted a "Best of Philly" in the Philadelphia City Paper.
She directs Kate Watson-Wallace/anonymous bodies, an interdisciplinary performance company whose movement installations have taken place in a car (CAR), a row home (HOUSE), a machine shop and church (The Mentalist), a nightclub and bar (Gone), and for the concert stage (Living Rooms).
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Recent Collaborators
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| photo: Tamara Weikel |
Randy Jones
Randy Jones is a composer, improviser and software designer who combines sounds and images in live performance. His shows combine a scientific outlook with a cosmic cinematic language. He has performed at festivals including Technicolor (Berlin), Mœsica Electroacœstica (Havana), Spark (Minneapolis), MUTEK (Montreal), Decibel (Seattle) and New Forms (Vancouver), and been a repeated guest at the Northwest Film Forum's Visual Music Festival and Cinema by Design series in his home city of Seattle.
Other projects have included motion visual design for a permanent installation at the Seattle Public Library, tour visuals for Radiohead, and an installation for Seattle's aro.space. From 2000-2004 he worked with Cycling '74 to create Jitter, a graphics and matrix-processing addition to Max/MSP. Jones has also had a long-time interest in electronic dance music; his main outlet for this work is the Orac Records label which he co-founded with Konstantin Gabbro. His debut album, "The Return of Caro," was released on the label in the Spring of 2005.
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Nicole Sasala
Nicole is a performer, choreographer, and educator from Pittsburgh, PA. She holds a BFA in Dance from Ohio University and currently resides in Seattle, WA. In 2007, she started The Asterisk Project, a modern dance and aerial performance group that focuses on combining aspects of improvisation, site-specific work, aerial dance and collaboration with artists of other disciplines. The rest of her time in Seattle is spent teaching dance and yoga, playing on trapezes, and exploring the Northwest outdoors. Nicole has been a member of Attack Theatre, Junction Dance Theatre, OTO Dance, Locate Peformance Group and, of course, Manifold Motion, as well as shown her own work throughout the continental US, Hawaii, and Ecuador.
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Partners
Shunpike
 Manifold Motion is a partner artist of Shunpike. Shunpike strengthens the Seattle arts community by partnering with artists to more effectively present and distribute their work.
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