Stephanie Skura chants a world into existence
Stephanie Skura, an award-winning choreographer who left her native New York for the Pacific Northwest in 1993, returns with a four-person experiment in “radical language” and movement. She brings her latest work, “Two Huts,” to the newly renovated Roulette.
“I’ve had a writing practice for the last 13 years,” she says. “Two Huts” has expanded her approach to performance, immersing her with actors Tom Caylor and Todd Jefferson Moore, as well as her longtime company member and colleague Debra Wanner. “I’m integrating this approach to language with movement, dance, even light,” she says.
Known as a madcap experimentalist during her 15-year career here, Skura’s extending herself in the new piece. “It’s deep with a lot of wordplay; it goes from serious and moving to kind of silly,”?she says. “It’s been interesting for me to direct; I’ve had to video rehearsals and be rigorous about directing myself.”
Skura and her colleagues have a combined age of about 240. “We’re all still extremely active. It’s remarkable to bring that much experience and history together,” she says. “We live in alternate universes; we have whole conversations that are more like conversations with ourselves. We voice each other’s thoughts; we write our world into existence. A line in our journal will appear on the stage, to create a door or a wall or a window. Some of it’s really funny; it has to do with very long lives.”
Audiences in Seattle were captivated by the vocally athletic piece last month. One critic described a journey “from hysterical to somber and many places in between.”
