We are happy to announce the inaugural artists in the Alembic Resident Artists Program: Emily Stone & Lucy Yim.

EMILY STONE I am a multidisciplinary artist whose work integrates contemporary dance, devised theater, and visual installation. I use body-based research to create layered performances about an underlying question or idea, often using non-traditional spaces and ways of engaging audiences, sourcing text and images from diverse materials that include my own writing, video, photography and drawing. My collaboratively-devised projects have been produced by Performance Works Northwest, Portland Art Center, Conduit, Velocity, On the Boards, SFADI, 10 Tiny Dances, defunkt theater and PICA’s TBA Festival. As a dancer, I have co-created works with Sheri Cohen, Tahni Holt, Linda K Johnson, Angelle Hebert, Tiffany Lee Brown, and Linda Austin, as well as performed with fellow Lewis and Clark College alum James Moore. Originally from Seattle, I live and work as an arts educator in Portland, OR.Much of my work falls under the category of the “Domestic/Wild” project — essentially a “correspond-dance” between my chaotic household of two small children in Portland, OR and the raw husbandry of Karin Bolender’s rural Corvalis, OR barnyard. Starting as a weekly exchange during a period of relative isolation from our regular art practices – Karin had moved to a rural Georgia farm with her herd of donkeys and I had recently birthed my first child — we lifted tools directly from formal creative processes for the purpose of “solving” mundane problems, such as: How to get out of a rut? How to coexist with fire ants? How to plant a garden in wasteland? We sought to illuminate both strange and familiar terra incognitas: basements, overgrown bramble darknesses, murky pools, dirty dishes, and lurking questions hidden among the roots of habitual routines.In 2010, Karin and I (along with collaborators Kathleen Keogh and Corrie Befort) mined recurring themes and images from the first two years of research to devise a Domestic/Wild show for PWNW’s Alembic Series that intricately wove sound, dance, performative lecture, and digital video. Since that time, the project has taken many unusual forms: home school, performative lecture, video diary, rural picnic, and a series of neighborhood tours guided by a toddler. Domestic/Wild continues to explore the porous borders between the household and the feral, seams of embodied knowledge where the wild makes incursions into human-built spaces and wilderness lingers in our own animal bodies

LUCY YIM I initiate my dances from a collaged identity, containing parts from various influences from Jane Fonda to Yvonne Rainer. My work has been described as a marbled fantasy-fable with degrees of fatty narrative intentionally trimmed. Unreliant on old methods of story making, I insist on new ways, presenting in-the-moment, sensation-born fragments of thought and imagery. I am always in conversation with the body, with the parts that are culturally confused, culturally oppressed and culturally gendered. Any assertion that the body can be stripped down to some essential truth is questioned. Instead, a branded self is presented, one that is strange, one that is beauty-full and one that is beauty-less.I am a hyphenated American raised by Korean immigrants in a hyper-wealthy, conservative town. My mother kept fish eyes in the freezer while my classmates threw mansion parties on weekends. My work deals with living between cultural identities and learning how to function in normativity whilst feeling foreign. American “otherness” is a fascination that binds my dances and performer persona. The body is treated as both subject and object inside of a fuckered-with, mostly heteronormative paradigm. My work nods to more traditional and virtuosic forms of dance, but ultimately searches to clash this paradigm with a stranger and more bizarred one. My work says that identity is complex and so is our experience of it. Forever emerging, my dances have been shown at several New York City and Portland venues such as the The Chocolate Factory (NYC), The Headwaters Theatre (PDX), Conduit (PDX) and The Salvage Vanguard Theater (AUS). I have danced for choreographers Milka Djordjevich, Sally Silvers, Linda Austin, Tahni Holt, Cydney Wilkes and Theory:1. My dance career began as a hip-hopper and corporate party entertainer in San Diego, CA. In Portland I have led performance happenings (RECITAL) and improvisation classes at Conduit and Momentum Studios. I curated Alembic #9 at PWNW in 2010. I hold a BA in Liberal Studies from Sarah Lawrence College (2005) and studied at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (2007). Currently I am a teacher of the Gyrotonic Expansion System and reside in Portland, OR. Please visit lucyyim.com for more.