NEVE MAZIQUE-BIANCO
NEVE MAZIQUE-BIANCO
Lover of Low Creatures
Directed by Sara Porkalob
MAY 9-12 / 7:30PM*
MAY 4 / 3PM / Community Preview Performance
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$20 ($25 at the door) / $17 MVP-Friend / $15 under 25 (w/ ID) / $50 Patron
*The Saturday performance will have ASL interpretation, and Velocity and Neve are in the process of securing CART and audio description
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. Lover of Low Creatures is simultaneously a unique new take on musical and dance theatre, a solo cabaret, and a spiritual ritual take on coming of age and sexual healing. Snow is a mixed race (Sudanese Nubian and Scottish American), physically disabled girl growing up in a forest on a river near a town. She and her white mother’s house is whimsical and magical, filled with friendly animals and butterflies, dancing in the morning, and sleeping spells in the evening. Snow and her mother are scientists, artists, and witches in tune with each other and the natural world. But underneath the flow of their routine, is an entity, or entities, very ancient, and very much alive, following Snow, that she is afraid to face, most of all because she has reason to believe her fate is intricately tied to it, in a way her mother’s is not.
“Experiencing this performance was a transformative gift of healing, self-acceptance and grace.” –The Seattle Globalist
“Neve Mazique-Bianco is a force…” –QueerSpace Magazine
In Lover of Low Creatures, Mazique-Bianco’s contemporary dance style combines the fearless irreverence of punk, the assured shapes of ballet, 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.
This project is made possible with the direct support of the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and PlayThey Studios.
PHOTO – Saira Barbaric
ARTIST BIO
Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco (dancer/performer/creator), or NEVE, is a Black (specifically Sudanese, even more specifically Nubian) punk disabled queer fairy beast. A certified personal trainer and integrated dance teacher trained by NASM and Axis Dance Company, respectively, Neve cares about the welfare and equitable access to joy, sensuality, community, self-expression, and liberation of all bodies. Neve received multiple film and theatre directing awards in 2017, from East Bay Express in Oakland, the Toronto International Porn Festival, and from the Seattle Gender Justice League. They made their international debut at Berlin’s Hebel Am Ufer. In spring 2018, Neve joined the artistic board of directors of PlayThey Studios, a media and event production cooperative company of queer/trans/Black/disabled and otherwise marginalized artists. Neve is one of the first four recipients of the PNW Afro X Fellowship, a research fellowship for African American artists created in collaboration by The Seattle Public Library and the Central District Forum, as well as the recipient of a 2019 City Artist grant, both of which benefit production of their evening length work Lover of Low Creatures.
PHOTO – Sofia Mohamed
