Pat Graney Makes HER MARK.

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."

Graney is perhaps the latest addition to a notable line of distinguished choreographers coming from the Seattle area--Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Robert Joffrey, Mark Morris. Graney's company, one of the first to tour on the National Performance Network, now tours more and draws larger audiences than any other Seattle-based modern dance company. As people in twenty states and seven countries can attest, the award-winning Graney is someone to watch.

Graney was graduated with a degree in dance from the University of Arizona in 1979, having dabbled in dance earlier at Evergreen State College in Olympia, and returned to Washington the next year.

"That was an amazing year. Everything was happening--Bill Evans had a school with regular classes and artist showcases," says Graney. "There was a lot of new energy, contact improvisation was a big scene in Seattle and On the Boards was just getting started by a group of artists."

In 1983, Mark Morris returned to his native Seattle and Graney joined him in performing Deck of Cards, which Morris included in his concert at On the Boards that year. Graney also became the artistic director of Choreography, Etc., a monthly showcase of new work chosen by audition at On the Boards. A lot of the series' productivity and nurturing stemmed from her. It still does. Many Seattle artists have worked with Graney over the years.

"I remember an old Dance Magazine article tracing a family tree of modern dance," says Graney. "I had my place in it, which at the time I remember feeling very strange about. Many of Seattle's recognized individual artists have, at one time or another, worked with me. They have then gone on to create strong, independent careers of their own, which have greatly contributed to Seattle's eclectic sensibility."

Graney, who was raised by her mother (her father died when she was 3), began to practice her craft in Florida, where she grew up. She cites John M. Wilson from the University of Arizona and Pam Schick from Evergreen State College (one of the originating artists of On the Boards) as her strongest choreographic influences, although now she derives inspiration from visual art, science fiction stories, Star Trek memorabilia (she is an ardent Trekkie), and her impressive collection of miniatures that, according to Graney, together "form the basis of family history, hopes and dreams," creating a fantasy world for her rich imagination.

Graney acknowledges that she is an optimist and a hopeless romantic. She gets a wild idea, "a seminal idea," she says, and "takes it to the edge," drawing her choreographic elements and motifs from everyday life--a crucifix, bits of speech, sign language, gymnastics, guns, cocktail dresses, Barbie doll poses. An earlier work, Jesus Loves the Little Cowgirls, combined chunks of the Texas two-step, sign language, punk-style floor slamming, calf-roping and spoken narrative. A piece choreographed for Pacific Northwest Ballet in 1988, Light Years, combining minimalist music with pedestrian and two-dimensional movement on pointe, was greeted with rave reviews at the Kennedy Center and Seattle's Opera House.

More typically these days, Graney's dancers are involved in every aspect of the creative process. For Tattoo, each of the dancers made books. They shared dreams, dream drawings and tattoo designs.

Company member Saiko Kobayashi explains. "The basic idea of the book-journals is to have the dancers share their thoughts and movement ideas, based on the writing and drawing assignments Pat gives," says Kobayashi. "My book was quite small, with a black cover and simple sketches. Pat plants some seeds in us and then uses what emerges. By sharing, the dancers all get to the same point in visualizing and creating the final product. It allows Pat to finish the puzzle, to complete the whole choreographic picture."

The result for Graney has been juicy, evening-length projects such as Faith, premiering in 1991, followed by Sleep in 1995, and Tattoo this year.

She recognizes that her choreographic process is hard for the dancers.

"This process is painstakingly slow and painful," says Graney. "Understandably, the dancers want to feel good about what they're doing, and have something to show for it. I can't say that in the beginning of the process I was patient. It's hard to be in the process for a long time and not see a product, especially in this culture."

Other Graney works are more economical--pieces such as Sax House, which premiered in 1991 and in a revised form in 1994 at Jacob's Pillow, are, in Graney's words, "straight dance--choreographed more like music visualization."

Tattoo was a particularly exacting project. About six months before the premiere, there was a cast change. Some of the dancers left, frustrated with the lengthy and taxing choreographic process as well as the postponement of the premiere, from fall 1999 to winter 2000.

Graney puts this in the best possible light. "There was a complete change of cast, and it was the most fabulous thing," she says. "We have an exemplary group now, and this is the cohort that will tour."

Tattoo takes the exploration of the personal memory of childhood and family introduced in Faith and Sleep one step further--into the genetic and cultural history that is imprinted or "tattooed" on peoples' minds. The piece features Graney's trademark humor and irony with unusual theatrical elements--Marilyn Lysohir's sculptures and composer Ellen Fullman's electrically wired skirts.

"I'm still working on the piece," says Graney. "I want the sections to be more integrated. This is part of the post-premiere process. If the work is successful, it should look easy. It shouldn't look complicated."

For composer Amy Denio, the collaboration was gratifying.

"Working with Pat on this piece was a great pleasure, because we are exploring similar ground right now," says Denio. "We both find the most surreal elements in what many consider to be mundane, and I thinkTattoo captures the essence of that very strongly. Ultimately, this soundtrack is a living testament to my love of surreality. Pat also was very clear that the music should create a tension which would bring a unique character to each section."

Graney is considering a retrospective tour of the triptych [Faith, Sleep and Tattoo] which shows the evolution of her work over the past ten years. She also is working on a collaboration with Mary Ann Peters based on comic strip characters and a Denio vocal score.

With all the national and international exposure, does Graney ever imagine herself working somewhere else?

"I consider myself a Seattle artist," says Graney. "I've grown up here professionally, and I've made my work here. I'm planning on staying in Seattle, although I've considered the possibility of a joint-city residency. I also want to continue to travel and visit other cultures--within my own city and abroad. Seattle is, in fact, a great place for people to develop their work--not that there's a lot of funding. Still, there's an audience for dance--and that's the important thing. It is a place that can provide a steady audience for new work."

Graney has considered a temporary artistic directorship in Europe. But for now, Washington is her home--Seattle, and her forty-acre retreat of woods and fields, a habitat for wildlife, in eastern Washington. In the Pacific Northwest, Graney continues to till the soil, whether it be in artistic landscapes or wilder ones.