Lucifer

performed by Vanessa Skantze

movement, voice, song with sound accompaniment

Sat. March 8, Sat. March 15, Sun. March 16, 2008

Chamber Theater, 915 E. Pine (4th floor), Seattle

$10 - 8 p.m.

SEATTLE WEEKLY review:
"In my three years in Seattle, I have never seen anything that can stand next to this piece, written and performed by Vanessa Skantze. With live soundscapes and a simple set, Lucifer takes Skantze's terrifyingly beautiful presence as its focus. Completely nude except for a layer of white powder, she makes her way onstage, her long dark dreadlocks disappearing into the black behind her, contrasting with the paleness of her skin: from that moment on you belong to the performance. Skantze's exquisite body work produces energy that seeps from every pore on her scarred body, delivered to you through her otherworldly voice. She pulls the audience into her hypnotic world so successfully that when the play ends and the bows have been taken, the only thing you can do is remain seated until your mind catches up to the experience."
-- DYLAN SLADKY, Seattle Weekly

"...With the collaboration of the band, her spoken word is intertwined with a powerful vocal delivery and a voice that shall stain your ears for years to come....Even the recollection of this night is making my skin crawl."
-- JOHN COLE, the Seattle Sinner

LUCIFER performed by VANESSA SKANTZE. Vanessa Skantze recreates the mysteries and covenant of this extraordinary creature informed by nearly six years of intense butoh dance training and performance and voice experimentation. Inflamed by a radical reading of Milton and filtered through the study and experience of spiritual exile, Lucifer embodies the anguish and joy of carnality in its most extreme lucidity-- a light being become flesh, willingly. Within the body is generated a nexus of light and dark--fomenting a dissolution of judgment into a realm of raw sensuality that tears and feeds the soul in each moment and joyously renounces the opium of conceptual heaven.

The piece is a movement/voice work with sound accompaniment, ranging from assaultive to haunting, performed live by celadon and natazatán of In the Deep Museum.

"I perform the piece naked, coming out painted white and dancing my willed fall into a spiral of dirt-- which blackens my body. The essence of the piece which compelled me to return to it is the willing descent into the flesh, which is my chosen instrument as a dancer, simultaneously the exhortation of all who do not plunge into all the possibilities of deep experience the body offers. As a butoh dancer my art is a kind of willed possession, my body constantly transforming into energies/elements/creatures. As a creature, as a light being who desired creaturely experience, Lucifer writhes, undulates, tremors and contorts with delicious abandon, pain and pleasure of incarnation simply different facets of physical intensity, not judged (non-judgment of feeling/experience being a huge facet of butoh dance for me and simultaneously Lucifer's rebellion)."

for more information, contact vanessa@deathposture.org