The Pat Graney Company, incorporated in 1990, has toured to most major American cities as well as internationally to Japan, England, Scotland, Germany, Singapore, Chile and Brazil. Seattle-based choreographer Graney received numerous Choreography Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from Artist Trust, the Washington State Arts Commission, the NEA International Program, the National Corporate Fund for Dance and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2008/09, Ms. Graney received both a US Artist Award and the Alpert Award in the Arts/Dance. In 2011, Ms. Graney was selected as one of two artists to receive an ‘Arts Innovator’ Award from Artist Trust and the Dale Chihuly Foundation. In 2013, Ms. Graney was one of 20 Americans selected to receive a prestigious Doris Duke Performing Artist Award.
Ms. Graney has been commissioned by Pacific Northwest Ballet, has created several large-scale gymnastic performance works, including ‘Seven/Uneven’ with visual artist Beliz Brother and ‘Pier 62/63,’ which featured 150 gymnasts aged 8-50 and was presented as part of the Goodwill Games Arts Festival in 1990. In 1996, Ms. Graney presented the Movement Meditation Project, which featured 130 female martial artists in an environmentally designed work at Seattle's Magnuson Park.
The Pat Graney Company began Keeping the Faith in 1992, which they offer to incarcerated women and girls nationwide. The program consists of performances, lecture-demonstrations and workshops for incarcerated women and girls. Keeping the Faith is currently in its twenty-third consecutive residency in Washington State. In 2000, the Company developed a National Model of Keeping the Faith, where the KTF Artist Team worked with local artists and social workers in US cities to set up local programs based on Keeping the Faith. Ms. Graney has also lectured abroad about this unique program, drawing capacity audiences in Tokyo and Yokohama, Japan. Keeping the Faith had its first international presentation of the artist training in Dublin, Ireland in May of 2004.
Ms. Graney’s work Tattoo toured to 11 US cities in the 2001/02 season, as well as going to Valparaiso and Santiago, Chile. Tattoo completed the triptych that included Faith and Sleep, which took ten years to create. Her work the Vivian girls, based on the visuals of ‘outsider’ artist Henry Darger, premiered in Seattle in 2004 and toured to six US cities in the 2004/2005 season.
In 2010 the Company was funded by American Dance Masterpieces to reconstruct the Triptych of Faith, Sleep & Tattoo – three one-hour works. The evening premiered at On the Boards and later Faith was featured at the National Performance Network’s annual meeting in 2010 and went on to tour to RedCat in Los Angeles in the spring of 2011.
The Company premiered the installation/performance work House of Mind in Seattle in 2008, which traveled to DiverseWorks/Houston in 2009 and was featured at the John Michael Kohler Art Center from June 2011 through February 2012. While at the Kohler Art Center, over 30,000 visitors saw House of Mind.
The Chair Spectacle, originally developed at the Kohler Art Center as part of the Community Residency Program, was re-developed in Seattle and commissioned by Seattle Center Foundation for ‘The Next Fifty’ Festival. The Chair Spectacle featured over 100 people, all dressed in white, performing in the International Fountain at Seattle Center in April/Oct of 2012.
The company premiered Girl Gods, which explores the ancestry of women, individuals, and family, and the idea of rage, in fall of 2015. The piece, which was both a visual installation and time-based performance, continued to tour in the 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 seasons.
The new work
Currently, the company is working on ATTIC, which is set to premiere in 2020.