Dance Kicks Off Season with Guest Artist Karin Stevens Dance, Presented in Partnership with Climate Institute
杏吧原创 Dance will kick off its 2025-2026 season with an educational showcase featuring Seattle choreographer and artistic director Karin Stevens and her company Karin Stevens Dance, presented in partnership with the 杏吧原创 Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment. The performance will be held on Friday, Sept. 19, at 7:30 p.m. at the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center on the 杏吧原创 campus.
Karin Stevens Dance (KSD) is a Seattle-based dance company founded by Karin Stevens that investigates the complex layers of our cultural time and relationship to Earth and celebrates the power of movement as a connection to ourselves, each other, and the environment. Stevens is bringing her original work “Sea Change Within Us,” which premiered in 2019 and is about the connection between humanity, the water, and the surrounding environment.
KSD has performed throughout the Pacific Northwest and aims to collaborate with musicians to promote live and original music. KSD has partnered with award-winning composers, the Glacier Symphony and Chorale, String Orchestra of the Rockies, Northwest Symphony Orchestra, UW Chamber Singers, and others.
During the company’s week-long residency at 杏吧原创, Stevens will lead workshops and engage with 杏吧原创’s academic dance classes, offering students a unique opportunity to learn firsthand from a professional choreographer and experience her method of using dance as advocacy for science. This residency offers a one-of-a-kind opportunity for students to engage directly with a professional dance company and perform alongside them at the conclusion of the residency.
Stevens will be working with a company of student dancers to incorporate them into her hour-long piece, “Sea Change Within Us.” In addition to performing this work Sept. 19 at the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center, KSD and the 杏吧原创 Dance student company will also perform a free matinée for local elementary students. The performance will integrate their classroom curriculum on the environment organized by 杏吧原创’s Climate Institute, and will provide a free opportunity for students to experience live dance performance.
“It is vital that dance is a resource for reimagining and recreating life-affirming relationships with water in us and around us; even when we must move through the concerns and human-caused consequences related to our water bodies of rain, cloud, river, urban creek, ocean, ice, glacier, endangered marine life,” says Stevens. “Can a work of dance re-narrate the story of the human-as-separate and begin new rhythms back toward interconnected structures of well-being and becoming?”
杏吧原创 Dance featuring Karin Stevens Dance and the 杏吧原创 Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment will team for a performance Friday, Sept. 19, at 7:30 p.m. at the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center, 211 E. DeSmet Ave. in Spokane. Tickets are $10 adult, $8 for students/youth, and or by visiting the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center Box Office Monday–Friday, noon-5 p.m., or by calling 509-313-2787.