Made possible through the community support of Base’s Flourish campaign, our 2025-26 pilot programs, Jump / Cut: The Moving Body On Screen, and Pairings: Collaborations in Movement and Music, create much-needed space for the making and experiencing of multidisciplinary art in Seattle.

Arising organically from conversations with members of Seattle’s creative community, these programmatic experiments aim to provide compelling creative opportunities while filling gaps in the local arts landscape.

Pairings: Collaborations in Movement and Music

July 31 @ 7 PM | curated by Bebe Miller and Lori Goldston

Base is excited to introduce Pairings: Collaborations in Movement and Music, a new pilot program for our  2025–2026 season. This program brings together musicians and movement artists to explore the boundaries of form, range, experimentalism, and context. Pairings offers a platform for cross-disciplinary collaboration and inquiry, supporting artists in incubating connections that are improvisational, present, and rigorous. These collaborations culminate in an informal showing at Base on Friday, July 31 at 7 PM.

Purchase tickets here
Program here

This edition will feature collaborations between:
Alyza DelPan-Monley x Sue Ann Harkey & Stephanie Skura x Salma Zenia

About the Artists:
Alyza DelPan-Monley (they/them) believes in the expressive power that can be accessed in the body through movement. Known for their embrace of whimsy, quirky non-sequitors and esoteric theatricality, they take inspiration from physical theatre, clowning, puppetry, cartoons, and a myriad of movement styles. As a Filipinx-American third culture kid - they are interested in performance as a means towards connection, part of a life-long attempt to communicate beyond the obstacles they encounter with the structural limitations of language, to be more understood or relatable, to better understand and articulate what makes us all so different and yet so similar. Their choreography and direction has been presented at Velocity Dance Center, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle University, On the Boards, 5th Avenue Theatre, Washington Ensemble Theatre, ArtsWest and Seattle Children’s Theatre.

Sue Ann Harkey (singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist) has been a part of Seattle and New York's underground music and visual arts scenes for decades. Her work blends philosophical and political lyrics as a songwriter with instrumental improvised music inspired by free jazz, electronica, folk, and Middle Eastern and African elements. Harkey discovered improvisational music's power in 1979 at a Fred Frith concert, this led to her exploration of the electric 12-string guitar, which she played with mallets, bows, plectrums, rods, and metal discs woven between the strings on invented alternate tunings. "Harkey entices and embraces listeners in a fully-realized alternate aural universe." By 1980, Harkey formed the cassette label/political pamphlet and book publisher, Cityzens for Non-Linear Futures (CNLF) and the improv group Audio Leter. She has recently self-published a photo book titled 'On the Periphery of Greatness - a visual memoir’ featuring her black and white 35mm documentation of Seattle and New York’s early (1979-1988) punk and performance art scenes.

Stephanie Skura, (called ‘reliably irreverent’, ‘major American experimentalist‘) & Bessie award-winner, has for many years described her choreographic process as ‘anti-fascistic’, experimenting with methods that evoke the power and individuality of each performer. With a deep respect for individual diversity & subconscious realms, she has researched, performed & taught movement & performance for four decades in fourteen countries and 30 US states. Investigating boundaries & intersections of dance, poetry and performance, she has a passion for collaboration, as political act as well as artistic choice, and for sustainability both in nature & performance. These days, Skura considers her work as ‘compassionate planetary activism’ and is grateful to be part of a community dedicated to creative empowerment as instigator of positive change on the planet. Skura’s non-fiction and poetic writings have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, as well as the books Oxford University Press Handbook on Improvisation in Dance; Skinner Releasing Technique, a Movement and Dance Practice; and Reimaging America, the Arts of SocialChange. A former New Yorker directing a touring dance company, she now lives in Auburn, WA. Her next project is a book about improvisation, with Substack posts as a process to find a format befitting its subject.

Salma Zenia is a Seattle-based violinist, improviser, and composer. A contemporary classical performance graduate from Cornish College of the Arts, Zenia blends traditional violin techniques with avant-garde and improvisational elements, regularly integrating electronics, visual installations, dance performances, and multi-genre collaborations characterized by an adventurous, "outside-the-box" approach to modern music.

About the Curators:
Bebe Miller's vision of dance resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience, and beauty. Her aesthetic relies on the interplay of a work’s idea, its physicality, and the contributions of Bebe Miller Company members to fashion its singular voice. Seeking to expand the language of dance, BMC’s creative work encompasses choreography, writing, film, video and digital media. Archival projects aim to share its creative practice, including two ebooks: Dance Fort: A History and How Dancing is Built: The Making of In A Rhythm. BMC also convenes gatherings to facilitate inter-artist dialogue and exchange, such as Vault (vault-project.org). Bebe formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985 to pursue her interest in finding a physical language for the human condition. Since then, she has created more than 50 dance works for BMC that have been performed worldwide. BMC has been commissioned and presented by leading venues including 651 ARTS, BAM Next Wave, DTW, Jacob’s Pillow, Joyce Theater, PICA, REDCAT, Walker Art Center and Wexner Center for the Arts. Her choreography has been performed by A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, Philadanco, Repertory Dance Theater, the UK’s Phoenix Dance Company, PACT Dance Company of Johannesburg, South Africa, and others. Named a Master of African American Choreography by the Kennedy Center in 2005, Bebe is an inaugural Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, a Movement Research honoree, and a Danspace Project Gala honoree. She has received four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards, the David R. White Award from New York Live Arts, and honorary doctorates from Ursinus College and Franklin & Marshall College. Bebe is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance and is currently living in a forest on Vashon Island, WA.

Lori Goldston (classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit) is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer and teacher from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist, amplified or acoustic, is full, textured, committed and original. A relentless inquirer, her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time and geography. Current and former collaborators and/or bosses include Earth, Nirvana, Mirah, Jessika Kenney, Ilan Volkov, Eyvind Kang, Stuart Dempster, David Byrne, Terry Riley, Jherek Bischoff, Malcom Goldstein, Steve Von Till, Lonnie Holley, Cat Power, Ellen Fullman, Maya Dunietz, Mik Quantius, Embryo, O Paon, Tara Jane O’Neil, Natacha Atlas, Broken Water, Ed Pias, Christian Rizzo and Sophie Laly, Threnody Ensemble, Cynthia Hopkins, 33 Fainting Spells, Vanessa Renwick, Mark Mitchell, Lynn Shelton, and many more. Her work has been commissioned by and/or performed at the Kennedy Center, Sydney Festival, Cineteca Nacional de México, Tectonics Festival, Frye Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival (TBA), WNYC, The New Foundation, Paris Fashion Week, Northwest Film Forum, On the Boards, Seattle International Film Festival, Seattle Jewish Film Festival, Bumbershoot, Crossing Border Festival, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Joe’s Pub, the Stone, University of Chicago, and venues large and small throughout North America, Mexico, Australia, and Europe.

Jump/Cut: The Moving Body On Screen

January 3, 10, 17, 2026 @ 7 PM | curated by Jay Kuehner

This moving image showcase explores varieties of kinesthetic cinema in historical and contemporary contexts. These works gesture toward new forms—of choreography released from time and space by the camera, of cinema attuned to the exigencies of the body. 

Saturday, January 3 at 7 PM: Program 1, Vers Mathilde by Claire Denis

Saturday, January 10 at 7 PM: Program 2, Essais by Hannes Schüpbach, Naked Blue by Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie

Saturday, January 17 at 7 PM: Program 3, Early Films by Yvonne Rainer, Cofounder of Judson Dance Theater, 46' Bis and Topic I et II by Pascal Baes, Me gritaron negra (They shouted black at me) video documentation of performance, excerpted from the documentary, Victoria—Black and Woman by Torgeir Wethal, and Lightning Dance by Cecilia Bengolea

Jay Kuehner is an independent film curator, writer, and educator based in the Pacific Northwest. He was curator of Veracity: New Documentary Cinema, a film series dedicated to creative non-fiction cinema from around the world, and Pulsos Latinos: Films From The Frontier of Latin American Cinema, both presented in Seattle at Northwest Film Forum. He has taught classes on the history of documentary practice  and evaluations of 21st century cinema. As a critic, his work has appeared in Cinema Scope, Senses of Cinema, Film Comment, IndieWire, Sight and Sound, Desist and more. He is currently co-curator, with David Dinnell, of On Site Moving Image at Mini Mart City Park, and TAM Cinema at Tacoma Art Museum.