Heather Kravas Will Showcase ROCOCOCOCO at Velocity Dance Center

Heather Kravas and collaborators will present RoCoCoCoCo - a situation for dancing in four movements. You can experience each movement one at a time from MAR 26-APR 2, or all of them at once on APR 3 or APR 4. Or, come just one night along the way. A proposal for envisioning new ways of seeing and being in the world together, this is a dance and an experiment with multiple entry points.

Since 1995, Heather Kravas has investigated choreographic, somatic, and collaborative practices in contemporary dance to explore the edges of performance. For Made in Seattle, she offers RoCoCoCoCo—an evolving cycle of four dances, shared across four evenings and culminating in two full-length presentations of the complete work.

Imagined as a DIY folk dance that turns into a snowflake, fractals into a vortex, veers into a grocery list, emanates like an aura, aligns like a pinball machine, and collaborates like an ant colony, RoCoCoCoCo slips beyond classification.

Instead, it proposes a new structure for performance—one that holds dancers and audiences alike in states of heightened attention, curiosity, and desire. Guided by the somatic dramaturgy of longtime collaborator Rebecca Brooks, RoCoCoCoCo is created for Allie Hankins, Carlin Kramer, Amanda Morgan, Symone Sanz, Sylvia Schatz-Allison, and Julia Sloane. The work traces the layered effort of dancing together—energetic, rhythmic, precise, and tender. It invites us to sense how intimacy scales, how perception expands, and how dancing itself becomes a site for both clarity and complexity—a space of shared and essential presence.

RoCoCoCoCo takes place in the black box of 12th Avenue Arts, with spectators seated on three sides of the stage. The dancers share the space with two pianists performing Terry Riley's Keyboard Study No. 1 on upright pianos bound back-to-back. The live sounds of the theater—breath, footsteps, resonance—are at times amplified, at times overtaken by electric music. Lighting, designed by longtime collaborator Madeline Best, shifts, echoing the slow transformations of daylight in nature.

Audiences are invited to experience RoCoCoCoCo in many ways: as singular performances that stand on their own; as a sequence unfolding across several days; or as the complete work, gathered in the final two evenings.

Heather Kravas's RoCoCoCoCo—a new work from the choreographer celebrated for her contradictory, exacting, and physically unrelenting dances—unfolds as an experimental cycle of four distinct pieces shared over four nights, before gathering into two evenings where the full-length work is revealed.

Defying easy classification, RoCoCoCoCo stages collisions of form: a rogue DIY square dance, a temporally skewed ballet, an explosive choreography of splayed limbs, and the simultaneity and compression of each of these parts.

The work is created for six dancers rooted in the Pacific Northwest—Allie Hankins, Carlin Kramer, Amanda Morgan, Symone Sanz, Julia Sloane, and Sylvia Schatz-Allison—each attuned to the pursuit of acute sensation. Conceived with and for them, the piece is a shared inquiry into how movement can be at once tender, insistent, and essential.

Dates & Times

MAR 26 – 28 + APR 2 – 3 | 7:30 PM

APR 4 | 2 PM

12th Ave Arts Mainstage |1620 12th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122

I. March 26, 7:30 PM · one hour | First Movement: Allegro Symone Sanz & Julia Sloane

II. March 27, 7:30 PM · one hour | Second Movement: Adagio Carlin Kramer & Amanda Morgan

III. March 28, 7:30 PM · one hour | Third Movement: Andante Allie Hankins & Sylvia Schatz-Allison

IV. April 2, 7:30 PM · one hour | Finale & Coda | The Cast

V. April 3, 7:30 PM · four and a half hours (with intermission and shared refreshments) | The Symphony | The Cast