Studio Series

One Hour Performance (Rest Piece)

Performed by Jasmine Mahmoud 

Inspired by Teaching Hsieh 

Dramaturgs: Amna Farooqi and Rachael Herren

Jasmine Mahmoud is Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at the University of Washington, with affiliate appointments in Art History and Comparative History of Ideas. Mahmoud’s research engages contemporary performance and art practices, and their relationships with race, feminist and queer of color critique, public policy, and geography. She focuses particularly on performance theory, minoritarian aesthetics, performance ethnography, cultural policy, and racial capitalism. She leads UW’s Minoritarian Performance Research Cluster, sponsored by the Simpson Center.

As an arts journalist, scholar, and curator, her goal is to archive work by minoritized artists excluded from archives. She has over 50 articles, essays, interviews, and reviews in academic journals including Modern Drama, Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, and Women & Performance, and in arts and community-centered publications including Canadian Art Review, Crosscut’s Black Arts Legacies series, Howlround, Hyperallergic, LitHub, South Seattle Emerald, and Variable West. An arts advocate, Mahmoud founded the Seattle Arts Voter Guide, and serves as a Gov. Inslee-appointed Washington State Arts Commissioner.

River, River, River

Writer/Performer: Shannon Stewart

Dramaturgs: Iris McCloughan & Jody Kuehner

Teext editors: Amy Lawless & Iris McCloughan 

Lighting Scenic Design: Xotchil Muser

Sound & Video editing support: Adam Sekuler

Shannon Stewart recently joined the Theatre and Dance faculty at the University of Kansas after 18 years of working as an interdisciplinary artist and teacher in Seattle, New Orleans, and Berlin. Shannon’s choreographic research approaches the creative process as a way to understand what is constructed, erased, and reconstituted—revealing subtext, embodied archives, and working for a more active engagement with systemic exclusionary choreographies that exist inside and beyond the studio. This influences the form and feeling of her/their work as it often takes place in unconventional settings, brings dance into conversation with other issues and modalities, and uses choreographic thinking to imagine new possibilities of meaning-making.

In 2022-23, Shannon’s work was presented by the Wasserman Projects (Detroit), Risk/Reward (PDX), Improspekcije Festival (Zagreb), the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Art (Monterrey, Mexico), the Carrol Gallery at Tulane University, and the Front Gallery (New Orleans). Shannon has been the recipient of funding awards from the New England Foundation for the Arts, National Dance Project Production (Finalist), National Performance Network, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and residencies from the UCROSS Foundation, Art Omi, and the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, among others. Planet Detroit published their first submitted poem in July 2023, “The pulled card is the toppling tower.” Shannon has a Masters of Fine Arts from Tulane University in Interdisciplinary Dance Performance and a BA in Urban Design from the University of Washington. She is a core faculty member of ROAR Berlin. 

DADS

Choreography: Elby Brosch & Shane Donohue

Music: Village People, Divine, Chumbawamba, Barry Brosch

Costume: Elby Brosch & Shane Donohue

Props: Elby Brosch & Shane Donohue

Drama Tops was born with the artistic partnership of Elby Brosch and Shane Donohue. They began making work together five years ago with the creation of a solo on two bodies. The dynamic between their trans body and cis body has created beautiful moments of frustration, competition, tenderness, and comedy. Drama Tops blends the worlds of nightlife and concert modern dance to create an interesting and unique blend of accessible, funny modern dance. You may have seen the Drama Tops perform in their smash hit “Boys! Boys! Boys!” presented by Velocity Dance Center’s Made in Seattle program, “BLOW HOLE,” at Seattle Center their self-produced show, “Drama Tops, this is for you," at Washington Hall, at On the Boards in Northwest New Works, at Velocity in Fall Kick Off, at Kremwerk in Family Meal and Catharsis, in Heels! At Cha Cha, Sissy Butch, High F@ggotry, Betty Wetter’s TUSH at Clockout Lounge, and more.

CREW

Technical Director - Nate Tomsheck 

Lighting Designer/Tech Coordinator - LD DeArmon  

Student Run Crew/Board Operators - Avery Ehlers, Kiara Jenkins & Ian Smith