Pat Graney Makes HER MARK - choreographer's latest work, Tattoo

Dance Magazine, Nov, 2000 by Gigi Berardi

Her Tattoo draws on mysteries--primitive and otherwise

PAT GRANEY IS AN ENTHUSIASTIC SEATTLE GARDENER, fiercely proud of the lilies and dahlias in her backyard. But she is better known for the way she's cultivated a devoted dance audience. Her clean and gutsy dancing, heavy on theatrics and stunning special effects, is infused with the personal insights of the dancers. Her most recent piece, Tattoo, showcases particularly unusual spatial and temporal landscapes.

It is work Graney is particularly pleased with. The January 2000 premiere of Tattoo in On the Boards's New Performance Series in Seattle, which ran for four performances, sold out almost immediately, and additional weekend performances were scheduled. This month Graney takes her show on the road throughout the Northwest and on to venues in ten cities, with final performances in New York at Dance Theatre Workshop in fall 2001.

"This piece is about how, as we become more technological, we are called back to some primitive state" says Graney. "The primitive state is complex, not simple. Body decoration, mockup and tattoos provide a connection to those more primitive states. In most of the earliest mummies that have been found intact, there are distinct tattoo designs and markings. There's a mythology in many countries based on tattooing. Even with prison tattoos, they're part camouflage and part identification."

For Tattoo, Seattle tattoo artist George Long supervised the full-body painting that took up to forty minutes to apply per person. The tattoos were applied each night, before and during the performance, and then removed.

"I love the opening designs of the tattoos," says Graney, who is working on some of the more contemporary imagery--bar codes, teacups, chairs--to symbolize popular culture. Other images are ethnic in origin--Pacific Islander, Asian Pacific and Nordic.

Tattoos are painted on the lower leg and upper body. During the piece, the tattoos metamorphose from aboriginal folklore to contemporary motifs. Contrasting sections show the dancers without tattoos, in sheer costumes or short, black slit skirts.

Tattoo also features Graney's use of "authentic speaking," in which a dancer walks slowly downstage keeping a stream of verbal patter going. In the practice studio, this exercise lasts thirty minutes and propels performers into a trance. Graney uses such exercises to help the dancers clear their minds in producing the sound text.

Visual elements, coordinated by Northwest artist Mary Ann Peters, help create the sense of time--with Marilyn Lysohir-designed bone sculptures and streams of drifting sand descending from the ceiling and creating a translucent curtain. With Bessie Award-winning composer Amy Denio providing the music, consisting of elemental sounds of nature, this is a piece that celebrates both the primitive and the body electric in contemporary culture. Denio's score--grand and evocative of different times and places--helps produce a movement landscape suggesting primordial times.

Graney has been choreographing in the Seattle area since 1979, creating and touring over forty major works. Her dance-making skill has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, which has granted her choreography fellowships regularly. Her other awards include a John Simon Guggenheim memorial fellowship for choreography in 1995 and an Artists Trust choreography fellowship that same year. Her work in combining community activism with dancemaking was recognized in 1997 by an Artists Trust President's Award to Artists Working in the Community. As a tribute to her twenty years of creating and supporting Seattle dance, Graney was recently selected for the Seattle Bumbershoot Arts Festival's Golden Umbrella Award. Graney received the award in September at the premiere of a KCTS public television documentary profiling her work.

Graney, at 45, is committed to combining community work with choreography, to "walk her talk," as she says.

"I'm not just going for the big ideas," she says, "but also work with incarcerated women and girls [as in her prison project, Keeping the Faith]. I also mentor early-career dancers and make sure that their names get out as well."

She bristles at the possessive term "my dancers."

"Perpetuating the ownership idea is not good--the financial situation for dancers just becomes more difficult if you don't treat them professionally. I want to empower dancers. Mine is a humanistic concern--I am training dance artists, not dancers."

Longtime company dancer Alison Cockrill acknowledges the impact on her. "Pat really helped me shape my identity as a dance artist and move beyond some narrow, romantic image of a dancer--deriving my identity from just conditioning my body or working on my technique," says Cockrill. "Because her choreographic process takes so long--you're in the piece, literally, for years--it gives you a different reference point for evaluating your life. This is unique in the world of dance--every day you're living your art. This doesn't come easily, but it doesn't go easily either. She's cultivating an image of the dance artist that is a legacy for the dancers, far beyond what they initially imagine."