Sumer is icumen in!
Whimmers are scattering—traveling and dancing all over the world.

  • SHANE OHMER is ranging farthest across the globe with Bad Boys of Dance.
  • For CHALNESSA EAMES, a Carribean vacation with her husband Ash Modha will be followed by the great adventure of working in Africa.
  • JIM KENT mines a different vein in Kitten La Rue’s Fantasia at the Triple Door.
  • TORY PEIL too continues her other dance life, “at the Can Can weekly, as well as working on a new burlesque show with Lily Verlaine at the Triple Door.” She’ll also be in the new piece ANNABELLE LOPEZ OCHOA is coming back this summer to Seattle to create for Whim W’Him—it will be, as the company’s artistic director OLIVIER WEVERS puts it, “a smaller, more contemporary work, no pointes, just socks.”
  • KAORI NAKAMURA opened Pacific Northwest Ballet’s lively Coppélia as Swanilda this last Thursday.
  • ANDREW BARTEE also performs in that show. After it’s over, he will work with Annabelle and then, as he says in an email, “the PNB 12/13 season starts with rehearsals this summer! Mark Morris will be around creating a new work for PNB, AND I will be rehearsing for my own piece for PNB during the summer weeks. It’s going to be a lot of nonstop dancing for me, which is actually perfect. That’s how I like it.”
  • LUCIEN POSTLEWAITE, now in California visiting friends and family and getting his visa for Monaco, will be back to work with Annabelle, after which he and his husband Olivier will travel to Palma and Ibiza, Spain, before delivering him up to his new life at Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, in August.

Since Whim W’him’s Approaching Ecstasy, I too have been on the move—to a nephew’s raucous and colorful graduation on Oahu; to Martha’s Vineyard where the gorgeous summer and not-so-lovely tick-and-mosquito season are getting into gear; and now to Sweden, where we arrived last night to spend three weeks way up north in Umea and on a tiny, marvelous island called Ulvön. In late June and July we’ll have time with friends in England and France, before returning to Seattle. With all that moving around, these posts will be—already are—a bit erratic (call it Whimsical!), but they’ll keep on appearing more or less once weekly all summer.

Last Saturday morning I finally caught up with Olivier, who has been moving house in Seattle. He told me that actual rehearsal starts Monday for Intiman Theatre’s Hedda Gabler, the innovative play-cum-dance interpretation of Henrik Ibsen‘s Hedda Gabler that will premiere in July as part of Intiman’s Summer Festival. So far Olivier has participated in several exploratory workshop sessions with director Andrew Russell; MARYA SEA KAMINSKI who will portray Hedda; and other actors.
This coming Friday’s Behind the Scenes post will feature a conversation with Marya.