EVENT DETAILS
Learn more about the artists and their work performing at the 20th Anniversary of SIDF in 2025.
Inter|National Series - Weekend One
Project CHAM - Seoul, S. Korea
Performance Details :
June 7th – In 1943, deep in a 1,000-meter underground tunnel on Hashima Island, young boys were sacrificed to mine black diamonds under brutal forced labor. The work Black Diamond is inspired by this fateful event. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
Project CHAM uses a highly athletic physicality to draw out pathos and other intense dynamics. Inspired by Tolstoy’s belief that “art is meant to unite humanity,” the company reinterprets Korean aesthetics in a contemporary language, using dance to explore relatable modern concerns. Through this, we bridge conflicts, foster understanding, and create a space for empathy. The company is one of South Korea’s most serious up-and-coming companies and has received numerous awards including the Choreography and Performance Excellence in Choreography Award at the Young Choreographers’ Creation Presentation for BLACK DIAMOND, the Choreography and Performance Choreography Award Winner at the Young Artists Development Project 30th New Debut Exhibition and the Grand Prize at the 7th Dance and Opera.
Khambatta Dance Company - Seattle
Performance Details:
June 7th – Khambatta Dance Company (KDC), performs Family Tide, a humor-filled satire on the characters that live in families. The piece “rotates” around tables – which could be a dinner table, a family meeting table, or any table that calls its cast of characters to bear. Sometimes the table is solitary confinement, sometimes a barrier, sometimes a revelous romp more akin to a circus. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
Khambatta Dance Company (KDC) was founded by executive artistic director, Cyrus Khambatta, a biracial artist whose father emigrated from India, and who studied contemporary performance at New York University in NYC’s creatively fertile 80s. KDC connects artists and audiences by exploring contemporary issues, emotionally resonant performances, and a collaborative dance creation process. KDC tours annually nationally and internationally at renowned festivals and venues, and intentionally cultivate networks of support with other dance artists through residencies and artist-to-artist collaborations. Since 2006, the Seattle International Dance Festival, KDC’s signature program, unifies communities and celebrates the city’s neighborhoods by showcasing the work of local, regional, national and international dance artists who exemplify the diversity of contemporary dance.
Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company - China/NYC
Performance Details:
June 8th – Shadow Force duet – This beautiful and haunting dance work was created during the pandemic to highlight the importance of human relationship and our longing for connection and love for each other.
Way of five fire – Way of Fire is Nai-Ni Chen’s first exploration of the ancient Chinese theory that the cycles of creation and destruction correspond to the ever-changing phenomena of nature. The “Five” refers to the five elements: wood, water, fire, metal, and earth. Each element, as part of the forces of nature, creates another in harmony and destroys another in conflict. This exploration is focus on the element of “Fire.” Buy Tickets
Company Background:
Nai-Ni Chen (1959-2021) was a legendary choreographer who worked in the NJ/NY area professionally for over thirty years since coming to the US in 1982. She built a diverse repertoire of over 80 original works and toured to major venues in the US and international festivals in 12 countries around the world. A cross-cultural choreographer who aims to bring audience across the cultural boundaries, she has developed unique movement and choreographic styles that reflect the grace and splendor of the Chinese cultural traditions she studied in Taiwan since youth and the dynamic spirit of modern dance that she acquired in New York from luminaries such as Mary Anthony, Bertram Ross, Doris Rudko and Patricia Rowe. She received multiple Choreographer Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has been a principal affiliate of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and was a resident artist of the Harlem School of the Arts. Her contribution to the immigrant cultural experience has been honored by OCA and the International Institute. Commissions have come from the Joyce Theater Foundation, the Lincoln Center Institute, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Towson University, Dancing in the Streets, New Jersey Ballet, Ballet Met, and the Cleveland Dancing Wheels. Nai-Ni is currently in residence in New Jersey City University creating a new dance program for the university in collaboration with the Joffrey Ballet School as well as pioneering a program with the University’s Laboratory School for children with multiple disabilities.
T.O.B. GROUP - Seoul, S. Korea)
Performance Details:
June 8th – Dissonance explores the concept of “appropriate distance” in modern life. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
TOB, short for “Think Outside The Box” is a dance company willing to break boundaries and embrace creativity. It is a young contemporary dance group that has won numerous awards in its short existence, including the Best Choreographer Award at the 2024 Young Choreographer Creative Performance, the Individual Performance Award at the 2024 28th Chungnam Dance Festival and the Jury’s Special Prize in Senior Women’s Division 2020 Seoul International Dance Competition. The company strives to question it motives, reflect on its creative impulses, and deliver something refreshing in the world of art.
Mary Sigward + Artists - Seattle
Performance Details:
June 8th – Alternative Future is a pulsating trio that examines the intensity and interconnectivity of life from the vantage point of the smallest beings on the planet: microorganisms. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
MS+A was formed in 2022 and has presented two evenings of work. It is devoted to investigating the future of contemporary dance. MS+A provides a platform for experimentation of interdisciplinary dance works through integration of technology, movement, and visual arts.
MiYoung Margolis - Seattle/S. Korea
Performance Details:
June 7th – Threads of Her: Seo-Nang blends Martha Graham-inspired movement with Korean ritual, exploring memory, feminine power, and ancestral presence through spiraling intensity and modern embodiment. Buy Tickets
June 8th – Hanji Soul explores transformation and resilience, blending the use of hanji lanterns, Martha Graham-inspired movement, and MiYoung Margolis’s textured storytelling into a meditative journey of light and memory. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
MiYoung Margolis Dance Collective (MMDC Dance Company), based in Seattle, blends contemporary dance with visual storytelling and Korean cultural elements. Rooted in personal narrative and collective expression, MMDC creates immersive, emotionally resonant performances that bridge tradition and innovation.
MiYoung Margolis is a Seattle-based contemporary fine artist known for her vibrant, textured mixed-media paintings that explore feminine emotion through bold brushstrokes and organic materials. Her work blends elements of nature with materials like oil, acrylic, resin, hanji, and crystal to create sculptural, story-driven canvases. MiYoung’s art has been exhibited internationally in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Seoul, and she has received numerous accolades, including recognition from the Bombay Artisan National Competition and the City of Shoreline Public Art Program.
Spotlight on Seattle Series
Freedom in Motion
Performance Details:
June 10th – Two individuals who are dragged into a radioactive world while encountering personal challenges. The composition explores interpersonal dynamics and rhythmic motifs. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
Freedom in Motion is a contemporary modern collective based in Seattle, WA, founded by Rodrick Barnes and Staphany Olalde. They are two compelling artists who both studied and trained at Cornish College of the Arts. Inspiration for the collective’s work stems from personal experiences, political and social aspects such as evolving nature, and human nature. This collective explores diverse origins within each other and brings art to the community. Ideally, conversations don’t happen unless you’ve been moved by what you’ve seen.
Blended Motion Dance Project
Performance Details:
June 10th – Screened In explores technology’s impact on connection, identity, and isolation through dynamic movement and digital projections in the digital age. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
Blended Motion Dance Project explores the intersection of culture and movement. By blending perspectives and movement styles, we craft compelling dance works that celebrate connection, innovation, and the human experience.
SLOWBURN Dance
Performance Details:
June 10th – Ecila (Seattle, WA, USA) is an apocalyptic look at losing everything. Swallowed by remorse, dancers perform disintegrated versions of themselves. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
SLOWBURN Dance is a contemporary dance company, founded in Seattle in 2019 by Artistic Director Meredith Pellon. The style of the company is grounded in Pellon’s movement aesthetic, which employs small movements and sharp shifts with resonating aftermath.
In Seattle, SLOWBURN Dance has performed at Yaw Theater, 12th Ave Arts, Gallery 110, Mutuus Studio, Base, Jack Apartments, Seattle Center, Erickson Theater and Columbia City Theater. In February 2022, the company’s first evening-length work Ours premiered at Arts at the Armory in Somerville, MA. Their second evening-length work Excavate premiered at The Shed in November 2022 and was re-staged in 2023 at Counterbalance Park as part of Uptown Arts Storefronts Project, as well as in DanceWorks (Port Townsend, WA). In 2023, the company was featured in the James Ray Residency and Touring Project through Seattle International Dance Festival. Additional performances include Ten Tiny Dances® presented by The Dance Complex, NACHMO Boston, Salem Arts Festival and Dancing Through It – Expressions of Movement From the Pandemic, hosted by Celebrity Series of Boston.”
Hana Shiozaki + Arlo King
Performance Details:
June 10th – Bone//Brine//Break exists within a king tide, a kelp forest, an eroding coastline. Tendrils surge and collapse, a microcosm of violent beauty. The external creates the internal becomes the external. Buy Tickets
Artists Background:
Hana Shiozaki is a movement artist specializing in butoh, eco-somatics, and interdisciplinary performance. They have performed solo works at the Salish Sea and Seattle Butoh Festivals, studied Art and Design with a Dance minor at Cal Poly SLO, and collaborated with notable artists. Hana has trained with influential mentors and participated in dance festivals, experimental films, site-specific performances, and movement research.
Arlo Sage King is a choreographer, performer, and installation artist with a background in dance and sculpture from Bennington College, plus physical theater training in Italy. They’ve performed solo works at Salish Sea Butoh Festival, explored Butoh Drag in Berlin and Seattle, collaborated with renowned artists, and focused on Butoh and Open Source Forms.
Duvall Performing Arts Performance Division
Performance Details:
Deconstruction, A Staggered Journey Towards Hope, is a visceral exploration of healing, blending raw movement with moments of release and connection, as dancers embody resilience and transformation. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
Since earning her dance degree in 2017, Miranda Knorr has choreographed across SC, FL, and WA for competitions, festivals, and community events. She now works full-time, focusing on contemporary, “floor flow,” and improvisation.
James Ray Residency - Program A
Rhea Keller
Performance Details:
June 11th – reconciliation of a wanting body is a work interested in shedding patriarchy and healing one’s personal embodiment. Buy Tickets
Artist Background:
Rhea (she/they) is an independent dance artist based in Seattle. Her work utilizes patience, vigor, lilt and quirk to explore and validate identity, healing and connection. Their choreography has been shown at 12 Minutes Max, Fuselage Dance Film Festival, Choreography Project, Seattle International Dance Festival and Newport Dance Festival. She has also served as co-choreographer for Kyrin Grey’s evening length dance drama The Infinite Loop.
Leah Russell
Performance Details:
June 11th – A New Way, traces a transformative and electric journey from isolation to connection, shame to liberation, fear to freedom—ultimately channeling vulnerability into immeasurable power. Buy Tickets
Artist Background
Leah Russell is a dance artist, actor, and fire spinner driven by an insatiable curiosity for building freedom of expression through movement. Leah’s choreography blends contemporary dance styles, improvisation, and theater, crafting work that is visceral, athletic, and emotionally charged. She has had the pleasure of performing for local, national and international choreographers and her work has been featured in festivals such as Converge Dance Festival, 12 Minutes Max, Newport Dance Festival and Seattle International Dance Festival.
James Ray Residency - Program B
Rainbow Fletcher | HYPERNOVA
Performance Details:
June 12th – In I’m Almost Me Again, dance, music, and video reflect on grief, resilience, and believing in the unbelievable. How the loss of a loved one leads to a dazzling transformation. Buy Tickets
Company Background
Rainbow Fletcher | HYPERNOVA is a Seattle based dance group that has been making projects together since 2014. HYPERNOVA strives to deliver dynamic and fully conceptualized dance experiences to the public.
Project Convergence
Performance Details:
June 12th – Taalam (Rhythm) and a new work yet to be titled will be presented. Buy Tickets
Company Background
Project Convergence is home to the union of Bharatanatyam (Indian dance form) and American tap dance. Lauded by both the New York Times and The Hindu, Project Convergence presents an experience simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar to audiences by uniting two seemingly different cultures in the universal language of rhythm. The company has been featured in The Guardian, WNYC (New York Public Radio), and The Dance Enthusiast. They’ve appeared across the United States, including at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre for the Erasing Borders Dance Festival, Lincoln Center for their 2018 Out of Doors Series, and the Houston Texan’s NRG Stadium. Excerpts of their show Taalam (Rhythm) have played to a sold-out 5,000-person audience at Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center and the Citigroup Theatre at Alvin Ailey.
Inter|National Series - Weekend Two
Almada Dance Company - Lisbon, Portugal
Performance Details:
June 13th – The Process of Burning in Reverse combines the body’s expressive potential with the visceral and enigmatic narrative of Kafka. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
Companhia de Dança de Almada (Almada Dance Company) engages its community through artistic creation, dance training and cultural programming. Founded by Maria Franco, it began as a professional contemporary dance company in 1990. Throughout its history, the Companhia de Dança de Almada has produced pieces by national and international choreographers, presented in Portugal and abroad, namely in Europe (Germany, Belgium, Croatia, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Switzerland), Africa (Cape Verde), America (Brazil) and Asia (China). It has participated in numerous festivals and Dance meetings, among which the highlight was taking part in the 26th edition of the Fira de Teatre al Carrer, Tarrega – Spain, winning 1st prize for best debut.
Presentation at SIDF is provided with the support of FLAD – Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento. The Companhia de Dança de Almada is supported by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture / DGArtes and Almada Municipality.
Maia Melene d'Urfé - Seattle, WA
Performance Details:
June 13th – a crisis of standing is an examination of failure in an ever-evolving, metastable form and the sensation of loss for something that never existed. Buy Tickets
Artist Background:
maia melene d’urfé is a Seattle freelance dancer and choreographer, who creates and researches movement that challenge the body and mind to thoughtfully display sensations, textures, and musicality. They dance and train with the local contemporary dance, Breaking, and House communities and have worked with companies and choreographers zoe | juniper, Undercurrent, Cameo Lethem, Elia Mrak, Tariq Mitri and Beth Twigs. Their choreography has been presented internationally at Festival Internacional de Danza Contemporanea de Mexico (CDMX), and (upcoming, 2025) Quinzena de Dança de Almada (Lisbon, PT), nationally at ADF (Durham, NC), Estrogenius Dance Festival (NewYork, NY) and Bates Dance Festival (Lewiston, ME), and locally in Seattle, through The Hybrid Lab – curated by Amy O’Neal, eXit Space, and Seattle International Dance Festival. In addition, they have produced three dance and mixed media events Liminal, Ode, and ode • K’an, presenting their own work as well as creations by other local artists. Through their dancing, choreography, and curation, they work on exploring abstract and personal thoughts through movement, and aim to meld their experience with street styles, contemporary dance and music to create something intricate and visceral.
Adage Ballet Ensemble/Guillaume Basso - Seattle, WA/Dijon, France
Performance Details:
June 14th – Café Brel is a suite of solos, duets, and trios set to the music of iconic Belgian singer Jacques Brel. His songs — portraits of people in all their fragility, humor, and passion — serve as emotional landscapes for choreography that explores the intimate poetry of everyday life. Buy Tickets
Company/Artist Background:
Adage Ballet Ensemble is the performing and touring group of Adage Ballet Academy, composed of a dynamic mix of professional dancers and advanced students. Led by Guillaume Basso and Abby Jayne DeAngelo, the Ensemble is committed to producing thoughtful and technically rigorous work. For the Seattle International Dance Festival, the Ensemble expands to include guest artists from diverse backgrounds, brought together specifically for this collaborative creation.
Guillaume Basso is a French choreographer and Ballet Master at Adage Ballet Academy. A former dancer with Pacific Northwest Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, and Houston Ballet II, he trained at the Paris Opera Ballet School. His choreography blends classical form and contemporary language and was influenced by his background in yoga. In 2018, he participated in the Seattle International Dance Festival, and his work was awarded at the Universal Ballet Competition.
Meta Dance Project - Daejon, S. Korea
Performance Details:
June 14th – Saitsori, a unique Korean linguistic phenomenon, inspires this piece exploring human relationships as unpredictable and delicate. Like the saitsori sound, connections form under shifting, nuanced conditions, reflecting invisible forces that shape interactions. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
The Meta Dance Project, founded in 2001, embodies “dance beyond dance,” exploring the art of mental processes through contemporary movement. By seeking, developing, observing, and integrating new materials from a higher perspective, the company strives to create a meaningful and innovative dance language. It currently consists of 20 regular members.
J. Cline Motion - Bar Harbor, ME
Performance Details:
June 14th – Embodied/Disembodied examines the contrast between being “whole” and “vacant,” reflecting modern life’s disconnection. A trio of acrobatic dancers in black and white suits forms unique body configurations in space. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
Jeremy Cline, originally from Bar Harbor, Maine, is an artist, and teacher. He uses movement arts for self-realization, creativity, and collective good. With a decade of professional dance experience across prestigious U.S. companies and festivals, he holds an MFA in choreography from the University of Iowa. His award-winning work has been showcased internationally, and he co-founded Skoptur in 2021 to integrate movement and digital arts. Jeremy has toured over 70 cities, performed for over 2 million people, and is now training as a Feldenkrais Practitioner while continuing his practice in Capoeira Angola, breaking, and contact improvisation.
Degenerate Art Ensemble - Seattle, WA
Performance Details:
June 15th – Anima Mundi – The Animist, is a solo dance with live music and visual hallucination that aims to find interconnectedness through our human senses. Buy Tickets
Company Background:
Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE) makes performances with an aesthetic inspired by punk, comics, cinema, nightmares and fairytales driven by live music and their own style of physical theater and butoh inspired dance. They combine projected imagery with the movement and sound to create new mythologies, revealing other dimensions, challenging reality in a multi-dimensional storytelling experience.
DAE has shown their work throughout the US and Europe known for their large scale dance and theater projects. Highlights of the group’s work include a major exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, a commission by director Robert Wilson to interpret his work Einstein on the Beach and collaborations with Kronos Quartet in 2013. DAE has received awards from Creative Capital and MAP Fund and the group’s choreographer Haruko Crow Nishimura is a Guggenheim Fellow.
Soo d Art & Company - Seoul, S. Korea
Performance Details:
June 15th – Terminal is a work about a journey toward finding certainty in a modern world where everything is uncertain. Buy Tickets
Artist Background:
Soo d Art & Company is an art group that explores the expansion of ‘body-space’ created by accumulated memories in a specific place as a keyword. They continue their creative work by discovering various images and phenomena based on the body that passes through the past and present via place and memory.
Note: All ticket sales are final. There are no refunds for “no-shows.” Tickets may be exchanged for alternate dates with 72 hours’ notice prior to the new date desired. Unused or partially used passes are non-refundable in whole or in part and may not be converted to single tickets. As indicated on the ticket sales page, fest pass holders must reserve a seat for each show desired using the provided 16-digit code for all seats and shows desired. If you require assistance, please contact us.
Photos of Khambatta Dance Company by Jim Coleman, Cyrus Khambatta by Marcia Davis, Identity Performing Arts by the artist, Jovon Miller by Dane Doerflinger, Ashley Menestrina by Steven Pisano, Maia D’urfe’ by the artist, Vania B Dance by Tim Summers, Luminski Dance Project by Angelika Karal, Choomna Dance by the artist, and Bo Kyung Lee by Nitzarindani Voga.