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ex-stasis – on making good better
The set was falling apart by the end of the run. "Is that a metaphor?" Whim W'Him director/choreographer Olivier wondered, "suggesting that it needed to be redone someday?" Five years later, it's happening. A new [...]
how to rethink Ecstasy
In the almost-decade since Whim W’Him was founded, June 2017’s Approaching Ecstasy is the first evening-long production to be remounted. By no means a simple repeat, the show is being newly imagined in every scene, [...]
re-approaching ecstasy
Before the first rehearsal for each new Whim W'Him program, the seven dancers gather together in a 'powwow' to check in with each other and chat about what's been going on with them. It's a [...]
remembering the Roma – Music of Remembrance
Music of Remembrance is a Seattle-based organization dedicated to remembering the Holocaust through music. Each year, MOR presents two concerts at Benaroya's Nordstom Recital Hall, to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken [...]
auditioning – Seattle & NYC
There are myriads of dancers out there. It is a real tribute to the magnetic pull of art that a profession which demands such talent, fierce commitment and sheer, unremitting physical exertion, with so few [...]
dancing & talking – after-show Q&As
After each of the four performances of SENSATION, audience members asked wide-ranging questions of dancers and choreographers and composer. A sampling of their varied responses. Jim Kent (dancer) In a general comment on how a [...]
multiplicity of meaning – impressions of SENSATION
At the end last weekend, which had included two Whim W’Him shows and the final performance-cum-hootenanny of Seattle Rep’s Woody Sez, I came out of the theater amazed, bewildered, scared and touched to the core [...]
lines and shadows – SENSATION
Reviews were great and audience response fervent for the first weekend of Whim W'Him's current SENSATION program at the Cornish Playhouse in Seattle Center, also running January 27-28, 2017. Whether your state of mind is [...]
waiting – in the theater
Whatever did dancers do before cellphones? Even when the Whim W’Him dancers are in all 3 of the pieces on the program, the last days before the opening of any show are a strange and [...]
costuming – for SENSATION
“There are those,” says costumer VAL MAYSE, “who like to buy things and rework them, but I’ve been at it so long I’d rather start from scratch." She smiles. "And anyway I don’t like shopping.” [...]
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.