8/24 || Kaitlin McCarthy

FREE showing of work-in-progress by Kaitlin McCarthy
Thursday August 24 at 7pm
Reception to follow
Performance Works NW || 4625 SE 67th Ave Portland, OR

Kaitlin McCarthy, this summer’s visiting Alembic Parent Artist, will be in residence August 13-25 and will share work near the end of their time here.

In this residency’s first week I am developing process structures for entering creative practice states, as well as feeling my way towards the glimmering threads of a new work rooted in character physicalities. The second week I’m joined by collaborator Jenny Peterson to continue development of an evening-length duet premiering in February that uses humor and horror to manifest empowerment in a complete release of the societal obligation to be a palatable, consumable feminine entity. Please join us at the sharing for excerpts of both the solo research and duet work, as well as artistic dialogue on process and our findings from the residency.
—Kaitlin

Kaitlin McCarthy (she/they) is a Seattle-based dance artist, journalist, and teacher. Over the last decade her choreography has appeared at On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, SOIL Gallery, 12^th Ave Arts, and at countless other festivals and self-produced performances. Her work is “fondly humorous and stunningly creepy” (SeattleDances) and “in the forefront of innovative contemporary Seattle dance” (Deconstruct Collective). In addition to her own work, she has developed a decade-long collaborative partnership with Jenny Peterson, performing under moniker “The Bonnies.”

As a dancer she has performed for over a dozen Seattle-area artists, including regularly with Alice Gosti/MALACARNE since 2014, with whom she has toured nationally and internationally. She has spent the last eight years as a teaching artist for Velocity Dance Center and eXit SPACE.

As a dance journalist she has contributed regularly to City Arts Magazine, Dance International Magazine, and SeattleDances.com, where she has been the Editorial Director since 2016. During her leadership she grew SeattleDances from a volunteer site to one that paid its writers and staff, and realigned the organization’s mission to focus on local and independent dance that is often passed over by mainstream press. In 2022 she was awarded a fellowship to the National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Center for Theater. Kaitlin graduated summa cum laude with a degree in dance from Mt Holyoke College in 2009.

artist statement:

My work blends uncanny imagery, elements of theater, and athletic dancing to construct abstract narratives and perform human relationships. Through weaving kinesthetic empathy with cultural mythology, I seek the space of simultaneous contradictory truths to make pathways for the underlying to find its way to the surface. Whether austere, intimate, or comical in mood, my works find a foothold in the bizarre as a way to access honesty.