Velocity Presents Neve Mazique-Bianco's LOVER OF LOW CREATURES

Velocity is very excited to announce their upcoming co-production with Seattle's own rising dance star Neve Mazique-Bianco's Lover of Low Creatures, a world premiere that will run at Velocity's Founders Theater May 9-12 2019. This radical, genre-defying work is a sung-through Nubian musical ballet that tells the coming-of-age of a young, bi-racial, disabled, queer child growing up deep in the heart of white, small-town New Jersey. While the performance is a prequel to Bet Ya UnGodly Things, which premiered at Gay City Arts in January 2018, Mazique-Bianco is kicking things up a notch this time by teaming up with another rising star in Seattle performance, director Sara Porkalob, who recently co-curated the Intiman's 2017 season and snagged three Gregory Awards in 2018 for her new play Dragon Lady, in addition to landing on Seattle Magazine's "Most Influential People of 2018." This will be the first collaboration between these two radical artists of color who are changing the face of performance in Seattle, and will mark Mazique-Bianco's first full-length performance at Velocity.

"Experiencing this performance was a transformative gift of healing, self-acceptance and grace." -The Seattle Globalist

In Lover of Low Creatures, Mazique-Bianco's choreography combines the fearless irreverence of punk and the audacity of Vogueing, with inflections of Zar, a trance ritual dance form originating from the Horn of Africa in which participants dance in an effort to expel the spirits of possessive demons from the body. Perhaps even more daring, in what Mazique-Bianco calls "true African storytelling tradition" this new work will be entirely danced and sung through, with music that is just as genre-bending and bold as the dance, in equal turns operatic, punk and folk.

Given such revelatory artistic vision, it seems only fitting that Mazique-Bianco has brought in Porkalob as director. In Porkalob's words, "Neve is an artist for today and the future, weaving together mediums and magic in ways that I've never seen before. I feel very lucky to collaborate with them on this project because their voice and their work is an integral part of our arts ecosystem." Both Porkalob and Neve-Bianco artists bravely fly in the face of conventions in their performances and insist on using their work to celebrate people typically pushed to the margins of our society: LGBTQIAT, people of color, disabled people, and immigrant and second-generation stories foreground the work of these two remarkable artists. In an era when our political rhetoric is publicly threatened by hate and ignorance, Lover of Low Creatures offers a deeply needed, revamped and radicalized coming-of-age story for today's audiences.

Tickets: $20 advance ($25 at the door); $17 MVP members; $15 under 25 (w/ ID); $50 Patron

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