Speak to Me
2003-2004
In 2003 KT collaborated with musician/comedian Reggie Watts to make Speak to Me – a 75-minute production that tackled our ceaseless desire to communicate and the strengths and inadequacies inherent in language. In the initial rehearsal phase, the company spent two weeks in the studio with earplugs in and 25 pieces of paper on the floor with captions like, “noun,” “little word,” “slang,” “connector word,” “descriptive word,” and so on. The dancers made up movement “words” they felt fit the categories and notated each on the paper with tic marks and scribble drawings to remember the move. After 400 or so of these single word movements were collected, they ran around doing them for one another, silently stringing them together until they created sentences and paragraphs and essays….
Performance History
February 2003 – Premier – On the Boards – Seattle WA
June 2003 – Delta State University – Cleveland MS
August 2003 – Centrum Arts Festival – Port Townsend WA
August 2003 – Bumbershoot – Seattle WA
October 2003 – Mt. Holyoke College – Amherst MA
October 2003 – Hobart and William Smith Colleges – Geneva NY
November 2003 – Vanderbilt U. Great Expectations – Nashville TN
January 2004 – Kent Arts Season – Kent WA
January 2004 – Evergreen State College – Olympia WA
February 2004 – The Southern Theater – Minneapolis MN
May 2004 – Kirkland PAC – Kirkland WA
October 2004 – 5th Internationale Tanzemesse (invitation) – Düsseldorf Germany
Funding
National Dance Project, Seattle Arts Commission, Bossak/Heilbron Foundation, Centrum, King County Arts Commission
Original Cast
Bianca Cabrera, Scott Davis, Dustin Haug, Aiko Kinoshita, KT Niehoff, Aaron Swartzman, Janine Tiede
Collaborators
Reggie Watts – music, KT Niehoff – scene design, Jean Landry – stylist, Julie Keenan – light
