HEARTS BEAT AT BOOST

In the curtain speech, producer Marlo Martin tells the story of how BOOST Dance Festival started. A few decades ago and new to the city, Martin wanted to make work, but after a series of rejections, decided to make her own opportunities. Inviting her mentors in the community to present work alongside herself, she found a recipe that helped her and other emerging artists get a foothold in the Seattle scene. Now Martin is a mentor, and this marks the 10th (non-consecutive) season of BOOST dance festival. With seven works presented in an evening, it can be an excellent way to get your finger on the pulse of what’s happening. BOOST 2025 didn’t fail to deliver on a selection of exciting and meaningful works that introduced me to artists I hadn’t seen, and got me excited about the current state of dance artists making in Seattle.

Sean O’Bryan’s Find me in the shallows is a witchy start to the evening. Lights pop onto five dancers (Carol Davis, Eva Crystal, Hayley Keller, Madison Mayfield, Roni Witbeck) executing rapid percussive gestures in time to sharp percussive beats. With hair flying and long black skirts swirling, one dancer emerges from the maelstrom, and with a dramatic gesture seems to conjure the others into a cascade of phrasework. High legs, arched spines, sweeps of the arms. What I notice right away is how in sync these dancers are. Uniformity is not always the ideal, but it can be special to see and difficult to achieve. The angle of every arm, the timing of every jump, the exactitude to which these dancers release their spines, all perfectly rehearsed. The ensemble unity gives the impression that this is all one person, their fiery internal experience made visible through these five bodies. As the music shifts to emotional strings, there is a continued theme of one dancer diverging from the group, and returning to be embraced or rejected. I am only taken out by the dancers’ occasional looks to the audience. Who are we in all this? What does it mean for the dancer to see us versus asking us to lean into their internally developed world?

As if to answer my question, Maisy Neill’s Tether presents an entrancing duet between Amanda Winterbauer and Sydney Ngyuen who are, quite literally, wrapped up in each other. Nguyen, like a panther ready to pounce, hovers above a languid Winterbauer, who sits like a mermaid on the floor. Between them a wide flat band ties their two centers together. Nguyen ripples with a kind of threatening aliveness, haunches drawn and powerful. It’s hard to take my eyes off her, but when I do, the initial delicacy of Winterbauer belies a strong and exacting dancer. The two of them face off, wrapping and unwrapping each other in a whirlwind of power and negotiation. Athletic movement—crawling and pushing—is peppered with articulate muscular isolations and rapid rhythmic hits that suggests club dance influence. Both dancers and choreographer are coming out of the UW dance department, and their skills here speak highly of that program.

Another ensemble work, Collective Echo, by Sam Fabrikant, features six dancers in muted pinstripe pajamas. Like O’Bryan’s work, it plays with one dancer on the outside. An initial tableau, posing cooly as if for a fashion magazine, is interrupted as Victoria Perez scootches in, sidestepping with their butt humorously toward the audience. But the minute she arrives the tableau dissolves. This theme repeats throughout; from abstract dance phrases, girl gang tableaus coalesce and break apart, with a moment of theatrical humor interrupting the otherwise serious piece. Most of the time the dancers seem to be creating an architectural landscape in which duets and small groups break into gooey slow motion body puzzles, entwined in one another and constantly transforming. It has the energy of people invested in a group project, especially when the whole group creates a mountain with their bodies, taking turns helping Carol Davis to walk across the ever-moving landscape of backs and shoulders. They seem to be searching, but for what? The unpredictability of this piece kept me searching too, but in a good way. 

Continuing the mystery is maia melene d’urfé’s endlessly circling, your mind finds out. Crossing the stage, they drag a cloth full of glittering rocks that spill out behind them, leaving a thick, sharp-looking slug trail. From stillness, d’urfé suddenly and unexpectedly falls, catching themself on the glittering gravel. This begins an embodied and patient exploration of expanding time an undercutting expectation. Moments slow and suspended interrupted with a quick shifts, disjointed isolations—arm, eyes, ribs, foot—I never knew when or where they would move next. In one particularly thrilling moment d’urfé walks on their hands as their feet drag behind them with eerie smoothness. In another, they reveal impressive flexibility in a twisty thrash dance of switching limbs. They hit the rock pile and the gems scatter noisily. After a while their body seems less in control, as if influenced by an outside force, spinning them across their back. They rise to pull from off stage an oversized black blazer studded with the shining rocks. Bathed in intimate lighting by Becca Blackwell, d’urfé glimmers like a human disco ball. Walking backwards they close their eyes, palms open.

While the first half of the show tended toward heart-pounding intensity, the second half of the program pulls our hearts in different ways. Gabrielle Nomura Gainor’ moving work Kintsugi responds to the Hiroshima bombing. An intergenerational cast of ten bring on glowing paper lanterns and group behind veteran Seattle dancer Fumi Murakami, fanning outward like a family tree. Audio interviews with survivors of the Hiroshima bomb and its aftermath weave in and out of music by Kishi Bashi as the group takes proud, sure steps forward. Then the group flood past Murakami like a river, caught in the eddies of the movement. Each person seems to become a pillar in a monument, a tree in a forest, while individuals and duets momentarily spring to action like a snapshot of memory. The moments that stay with me are those grounded in image—I remember someone moving as if hanging pictures on a wall—and then Kaylyn Ready, who draws her hands down out of the sky with quick angular pulls as if describing lightning. While grounded in a story of great loss, this work tells a story of resilience. When Murakami duets with Ready, who is her young adult daughter, the ancestral continuity is part of this work too. The bombing of Hiroshima is always worth remembering, and feels more relevant than ever, given this week’s escalation of US bombs used on the civilian populations in Gaza. “If we forget that history, that history will repeat again,” says one of the interviewees. When the dancers look out to the audience, I know why. 

Natalie Grant’s solo Beginning(s) takes a more personal and theatrical turn. Sitting before a projection on the back wall, Grant watches clips of dancers casually noodling in different dance studios. Gradually she begins to mimic the on-screen movements, taking on each person’s physicalities and idiosyncrasies, pulling her from her chair with larger and larger movement. Abruptly the music cuts and the work lights pop on—Grant freezes as if caught—“Do I need to start over?” she asks towards to the tech booth. She plays it dramatically, so there’s no way anyone thinks this is actually a tech mix up and not planned, and at first I am put off by this gimmick. But then Grant commits to a stammering monologue of questions that leans into an anxiety ridden physicality of tension and fidgeting. “Did any of this count?” she asks. It becomes apparent that she is asking about something much bigger than this particular piece, a satisfying transformation from one meaning to another. “How far back do I have to go?” she says as she strips back warm up sweats to reveal tights and a leotard, touching her head with her fingertips like a 4 year old imitating ballet. Grant, who relocated to Seattle only a few years ago, appears to be talking about her career, and what it takes (and what you loose) when starting over in a new city. 

The final work on the program is from Martin and her company badmarmarDANCE. We Meet Again is hard-hitting, full bodied ensemble work of stage-traversing movement, an excerpt of their recent evening length work, VESSEL. This publication already reviewed the work, I won’t re-review it here, except to point out a special aspect of this particular performance. Attending on closing night, the dancers exuded a playfulness and warmth I didn’t remember from the original show, looking at one another with loving smiles and authentic connections. It was clear that this was the last time they would do this piece together and the dancers were celebrating each other from the inside, and letting us be witness. There love for one another was palpable—sometimes it’s more than just the planned choreography that makes for a moving performance. 

Boost Dance Festival ran March 14-16 at NOD Theater.