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Midsummer thoughts
Things are seldom what they seem. Even—or perhaps especially—fairy tales, with their happy-ever-after endings, are riddled with plot holes and layered with ambiguity. I’ve always wondered, for example, about the significance of the little [...]
touring – Midsummer in Seattle
In recent years, Olivier Wevers, Whim W’Him’s artistic director and founder, has been known or a sort of counter-ballet, or at least for incorporating shapes and unballetic movements like the ‘sickle-pickle’ turned-in foot and highly [...]
ranging wide – Shindig opens
"Anytime you buy a ticket to a performance, it’s kind of a crap shoot, right?" Marcie Sillman asks on her blog, And another thing... "You never really know what will happen, whether or not you’ll [...]
Shindig – choreographer Joshua Peugh
A while back, after the first round of creating his new piece for Whim W'Him's upcoming Shindig,* choreographer Joshua Peugh wrote me from Tulsa, where he was doing another job: "The working title for Whim W'Him [...]
inventing the Choreographic Shindig
Step One—the idea. Olivier Wevers, artistic director of Whim W'Him thought up the notion of both "supporting emerging choreographic talent and simultaneously empowering our dancers by placing them at the helm of the curating process." [...]
Shindig – choreographer Ihsan Rustem
Born and raised in London, Ihsan Rustem has always had boundless intensity, energy, and curiosity. His parents wanted their son and daughter not to lose their Turkish Cypriot roots, "but they wanted to give us [...]
Shindig—choreographer Maurya Kerr
"I'll never do that again!" exclaims San Francisco-based Maurya Kerr with a rueful grin, referring to the almost 5-month hiatus between the initial working out of her latest piece last March and this week's resumption [...]
travels – whimming in Brno
"I saw La Bayadère and fell in love with ballet again," Olivier Wevers, Whim W'Him's artistic director, told me on Skype a couple of weeks ago from the Czech Republic. He spent most of [...]
X-POSED – Alone is the Devil onstage
"Closing out the program was the stunning and theatrical Alone is the Devil, choreographed by Wevers. Chillingly layered with darkness, anxiety, self-doubt and struggle, this premiere tapped into the nightmare world of addiction and [...]
X-POSED – RIPple efFECT onstage
The curtain went up on what I call "the electrocution section." RIPple efFECT, by French-born and trained, New York-based Manuel Vignoulle, premiered as the first piece on Whim W'Him's X-POSED May program. Out of industrial-sounding [...]
About the writer
Victoria Farr Brown is a former historian, a writer, now mostly of fiction, and a long-time lover of dance. She has written about Whim W’Him from its first steps in 2009.