My private introduction to Peggy Piacenza in efficiency was Dayna Hanson’s 2013 manufacturing The Clay Duke. I nonetheless bear in mind Piacenza, stage left at On the Boards, methodically eradicating and naming every merchandise in her purse, from the anticipated—a lipstick—to the absurd—a clown masks. Of course it was me who was new to Seattle on the time, not Piacenza, who has been performing and making work right here for the reason that early 90s. Since The Clay Duke I’ve tried to catch each creation and efficiency of Piacenza I can, and every reveals itself to be simply as haunting and memorable as that first introduction.
Full of aesthetic storytelling and off-beat characters, Piacenza’s work appears like a strategy of transformation: for the area, for the dancers, for the viewers. Her solo present, 2014’s Touch Me Here, staged at Washington Hall after which once more at Velocity, flipped between an array of personas with humor and intimacy, ultimately constructing to a wild and highly effective climax. Piacenza thrashing her limbs and howling an ecstatic melody right into a microphone is completely etched on my reminiscence. A number of earlier performances with 33 Fainting Spells and Dayna Hanson nonetheless exist on-line, equally showcasing how she will be able to go from understated to wild like a change flipping. Her idiosyncratic and unpredictable physicality command your consideration.
Her 2017 present The Event featured a forged of beloved Seattle dancers in a cotton sweet cloud world, an aesthetic atmosphere developed even additional for video, set up, and efficiency work candy rotten candy in 2019, which showcased Piacenza’s artistry in a number of mediums. These main choreographic works reveal a depth that comes from a multi-year course of and producing a number of iterations, in addition to a lineage of working with revered artists of Seattle and past.
Like many dancers, Piacenza began at a studio native to her Illinois hometown. Lucky for her, Carol Walker ran the studio, who would later develop into the dance division chair at SUNY Purchase. Through this high quality studio, Piacenza was uncovered to many types of dance at a younger age, together with improvisation. “I remember improvising,” she recollects, “this image of jumping on a chair and kind of gesturing and waving my hands. This is where my love for improvisation began. I was hooked. I have my parents to thank for this. They supported me while making their own sacrifices in order to pay for my classes. These were the beginnings of a life pointing towards the body, towards dance.”
This is to not say that Piacenza didn’t ever take breaks from the dance world. Describing the trajectory of her profession, Piacenza typically refers to durations of burnout that punctuate her relationship to the artform. After learning on the Academy of Performing Arts High School in Chicago she attended North Carolina School of the Arts, the place Piacenza describes a rigorous and poisonous studying atmosphere. “The model at UNCSA was to break you down in order to build you up, to be the dancer they wanted you to be. I did get broken down. I lost perspective of why I was dancing. My choice to leave was of my own accord and it was a difficult decision to make.” Several of her classmates have not too long ago come ahead in sexual assault allegations in opposition to lecturers at UNSCA, a truth which doesn’t shock Piacenza and her expertise of a “highly sexualized environment.”
She stop—leaving dance solely for 2 years and toggling backwards and forwards between dwelling in North Carolina, Seattle, and New York. She discovered reentry into dance via courses with Erin Matthiessen at UW, after which got here the second that leap began her profession and cemented her firmly in Seattle—an audition for the Pat Graney Company.
Piacenza was amongst a cohort who joined the Pat Graney Company within the early 90s who would develop into movers and shakers within the Seattle scene. “I was working with a collective group of stellar women, I was learning about the creative process. I was learning about what it is to experiment, take risks and to be in dialogue with complex ideas, and then implement those ideas into a fully realized work. I attribute getting into Pat’s company as the start of it all.”
Piacenza was additionally one in every of 9 founding members of D9 Dance Collective, which commissioned works from choreographers like Bebe Miller, Wade Madsen, Stephanie Skura, Jim Coleman and Terese Freedman. In the second half of the 90s she grew to become a performer and artistic collaborator with Dayna Hanson and Gaelen Hanson’s firm 33 Fainting Spells. “I felt fortunate to finally feel like I had a community of people to dance with, and to this day feel incredibly grateful for that.”
Pat Graney and 33 Fainting Spell’s type of dance theater helped Piacenza perceive her strengths and pursuits as a theatrical performer quite than a classical one. Other mentors embody Bebe Miller, Stephanie Skura, Karen Nelson, and Daniel Nagrin, whose strategy Piacenza used diligently to research the who, what, the place, why, and when of every position. “Every role that I took on, I would spend in-depth time exploring how to manifest this performance.” Her later work touring with Deborah Hay (in 2006 and 2007) pushed her to consider being obtainable to the second, presence and welcoming being seen. “Working with Deborah turned the notion of ‘performance’ upside down for me. It was one of the hardest and best experiences as a performer that I have had. I wasn’t able to rely on previous performative methods—I had to begin to trust whatever was happening in the moment and respond to it instantaneously. It was all so psychological, but so good. I failed over and over.”
This historical past of curiosity, analysis, and intention could also be chargeable for the depth that comes via in Piacenza’s performances. Her course of continues to evolve, and as of late, meditation, stillness, and quiet play an enormous position. “That’s my somatic practice right now…sitting, walking, and settling the body in stillness. This process starts to melt the armor surrounding my heart and in turn creates the space to experience the joys of daily life. All my anxieties, fears, and exhausting destructive habits are seen for what they are. Ancestral patternings. It’s not easy. This is the daily practice I’m committed to.”
Perhaps these practices are what hold her performances feeling so intimate, although Piacenza is commonly taking part in characters. When I ask Piacenza in regards to the relation of the self to the efficiency self, she responds, “I think they are one and the same. Something about vulnerability comes to mind. Something about how the self and performer is attending to the moment. Something about how one sees with their eyes. Performance is a place to play out both the interior and exterior life with all of its vulnerability and discomfort. What are the subtle ways we hide in our everyday lives, and does this impact how available we are to our creative process and the roles we bring to life? Maybe I’ve been hiding all of these years behind the roles I’ve been playing? Hiding or not-we are always present.” Like so a lot of her solutions, she is pondering either side of issues, dwelling in complexity the identical means her efficiency work does. Strange but relatable, goofy but sorrowful, delicate but feral.
In 2007, after a number of giant scale works of her personal and others, Piacenza had her “second burnout” and returned to high school to check faith and gender research at Smith College in Massachusetts. But even then the supposed distance from dance didn’t final lengthy. She began dancing for an outdated UNSCA classmate who occurred to even be attending Smith, after which, although her main was not within the dance division, “Everything I was writing about was funneled through the lens of the body and performance.” Touch Me Here featured a video of her thesis—a closely padded Piacenza finishing what have to be the world’s most exhausting and dizzying journey for a cup of espresso, log-rolling your entire distance down the streets of Northampton in tribute to Lotan Baba, “The Rolling Saint” of India.
Since her return to Seattle in 2010, Piacenza’s works have bent autobiographical, however her beginning place is one in every of picture quite than story. “I trust an impulse, I trust an image, and I basically build on it…one image leads to multiple images, some of the images form relationships, some don’t, some ideas stay, some go away. And the meaning that is inherent in my work is never clear from the start, but as the images start taking shape, the piece begins to inform me.” As an instance, Piacenza tells me about a picture that figures prominently in a number of works: a ship filmed from above, coming into view and out of view. Something about it caught along with her. Later, as her mom was dying, she opened to a poem, Bishop Brent’s The Ship, an actual description of the boat picture.
Featuring this picture, The Event responded to the dying of Piacenza’s mom and her personal fears round mortality. “I don’t feel the momentum of youth that I felt in my 20s, 30s, and even my 40s. Though I don’t feel old, my mortality kind of hovers over everything right now. And it’s asking me to pay attention in a different sort of way. It also puts into question, what does it mean to be an artist, at this stage, specifically a white middle-aged female identified artist? How am I connecting, responding, listening, belonging and trusting-within the current climate of all that is happening in this world. What kind of work am I currently making and does it have any relevance?”
Nowadays Piacenza’s focus is popping extra in direction of video set up because the outstanding car of expression to deal with a few of these questions, a pathway evident in her most up-to-date main work, candy rotten candy. Piacenza developed materials from The Event for an immersive set containing projections each bigger than life and tiny sufficient to slot in the palm of your hand. “Video allows me to broaden my palette for creating meaning and complexity. It allows me to direct the viewer in ways live performance can’t always do.” Examples she provides are highlighting minuscule actions or the feel of supplies, to not point out the play with scale and perspective displayed in candy rotten candy. “The images and characters I work with tend to create a surreal, fantastical landscape that is both real and imagined. The intent is always to reveal the power of the lived experience.”
In phrases of lived expertise, The Event and candy rotten candy felt private, however existed in that area of widespread expertise that gives just a little distance between the artist and the artwork. Less so in her most explicitly memoiristic work, Touch Me Here, which grappled with the taboo of her different profession as a stripper. “I never really talk about my 30 year career in the sex industry. I’ve been quite private about it. Touch Me Here was the first time I brought it out. What was important to me in this work was to get past the obvious conversation surrounding exploitation and empowerment, and talk about what never gets talked about, connection and intimacy. This is the conversation that is missing and that I’m always willing to have. There is so much shame associated with the human body—can we turn towards pleasure instead?”
It’s taken quite a lot of processing, however Piacenza has realized that there’s no distinction between these numerous points of herself—the performer, the intercourse employee, the getting older dancer, the religious self, the roles that she’s performed through the years. The work she’s presently creating, Quiet, is all about exploring integration, largely by digging into her private archives. “These are characters and roles throughout my performing history that are dear to my heart. These characters haven’t stopped living in me. So I want to resurrect them in a new light.” Footage from a current On the Boards residency reveals the eagle from Gloria’s Cause in dialog with the clown from The Clay Duke, two roles performed in Dayna Hanson’s work. Hendri Walujo, Julia Sloane, and Amelia Reeber have been a part of her course of.
Photo by GlassWorks.
Quiet is predicted to debut in 2023, however Piacenza’s not getting too particular about timelines. Previous tasks have been so consuming it typically feels as in the event that they “rob me of my life.” So Piacenza is studying to work slowly. “I’m trying to counter this tempo of production and consumerism and the fact that we have to produce and work quickly and onto the next project. My artistic process is asking me to slow down a bit, to see what’s here, what’s present. And I feel like that helps us to cultivate a way of seeing that moves beyond a sort of capitalist consumerism, consumption, and fast pace living that takes hold of our psyche and soul. So slowing down, that’s my resistance.”
Piacenza cites Barbara Brennan’s guide, Light Emerging, as an affect. “I really love the way that she talks about the creative process. She talks about it as an expansion and contraction, and that the contraction phase really needs to be honored. It’s after you’ve just given birth to a big piece and that it takes time to come back to yourself and digest what you’ve done.” The practices of slowing down, meditation, digestion, all of them lead her to the concept that “We begin again and again,” a line that has appeared in Piacenza’s works. “Every moment is an opportunity to start anew. To start fresh with perhaps a different response to whatever the moment is bringing us.”
True to her philosophy of recent beginnings, Piacenza is asking herself how she needs to develop as she embarks on this new work. This time, she needs to make a stronger connection to her viewer and needs the viewers to have the ability to “find something a little bit more tangible.” Process-wise, she’s studying to combine the ever-present doubt that, like many completed artists, plagues her. “There’s always going to be the feeling like, why am I doing this? But I’m beginning to trust. I think this is a common process, a process I’ll be in dialogue with for the rest of this life.”
I’m reminded of one thing Piacenza mentioned to me about 5 years in the past at a DanceChat occasion, after I was experiencing my very own bout of garden-variety artist doubt. “There’s a whole person in there,” she mentioned. It’s stayed with me—a reminder that each one persons are stunning and sophisticated and worthy of constructing artwork in the event that they wish to. Piacenza’s knowledge and work has me fascinated by this concept of integration—of the individual, the performer, the artist. In dialog she is so all the way down to earth, so humble, and a contact reserved. I’m delighted and impressed to know that this individual can be that unusual, or attractive, or wild, or commanding individual I skilled via efficiency. It flies within the face of the ego we prescribe to performers, or any stereotypes round intercourse employees. When it involves Piacenza, “There’s a whole person in there” looks as if an understatement.
Perhaps most evidently, Piacenza appears to strategy every little thing with a deep kindness and consideration. Those could sound like character traits, however when course of is product, when the work of the artist is dismantling and questioning, the artist and the artwork overlap. As a founding member of Base Experimental Arts + Space in Georgetown, Piacenza has spent the final 5 years serving to make area for artwork exterior her personal work. “I’m grateful for the Base team and for all the artists who have made Base a home for their artistic process. One of my greatest joys is making new connections and seeing people do their work.” She is worked up that the 2022 artist residency program will likely be curated by Pol Rosenthal and DK Pan.
“Just watching bodies move brings me so much joy. The power of performance is that it is a portal. It’s a transference of presence where a kind of magic happens. And it’s a witnessing, receiving and giving a witnessing…something larger than ourselves. This very powerful medium takes me beyond the mundaneness of everyday existence.”
To study extra about Peggy Piacenza, previous and current, go to her web site peggy-piacenza.com.