In House of Mind, Pat Graney once again uses memory and consciousness as her muse. The piece is really two works of art: a multi-media installation that's a mind-boggling array of art, and a dance performance. Graney has transformed a converted 5,000-square-foot warehouse to great effect, using bleached white sand and alternating hot air blasts in a maze of sometimes charming, sometimes haunting rooms.
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The Alpert Award in the Arts
January 1, 2008
Pat Graney Choreographer
A longtime Seattle based choreographer, Pat Graney draws from a unique suitcase of sources—writers Julio Cortázar and Gertrude Stein, artist Henry Darger, American Sign Language, and the cross cultural art of tattooing—to make emphatically visual and kinetic dances. Grounded in collaboration with composers, writers, designers and visual artists, the work ranges from evenings of formally structured contemporary dance performed in theatres to a site-specific piece in a vast meadow for more than one hundred martial artists. Her latest project, House of Mind, will consist of installations and events (video projection, motion-triggered audio and live choreographed performance) in a 10,000 square foot warehouse transformed into a series of ‘memory rooms’.
Seattle Times
March 11, 2006
Beauties, beasts battle in fragile, fevered realm
"The Vivian girls" makes one thing eminently clear: Pat Graney does her homework. The nationally renowned local choreographer spent nearly three years completing this piece, which is based on the paintings of hermetic outsider artist Henry Darger. Graney's work reveals such a close study and understanding of the reclusive, odd man (who died in 1973), it seems she climbed inside his head and returned to show us what she found.
Seattle Times
March 9, 2006
Choreographer Graney ends a phase of her career with restaging of "Vivian girls"
The willowy dancers motion abruptly.
Jerking their limbs beneath Crayola-colored schoolgirl dresses, the women emanate a silent strength as muscular legs disappear into short white socks and Mary Jane shoes.
These contrasts magnify the oddness of "the Vivian girls," Pat Graney's take on outsider artist Henry Darger's work. Graney's piece lacks a traditional narrative. Instead, she paints vignettes by blending dance and theater.
HoustonPress
May 12, 2005
Flight of Fancy: A dance icon unearths some winged crusaders
As far as anyone knew, Henry Darger was just a reclusive, aged janitor. But when he died at age 80, his landlord cleaned out his apartment and found paintings, drawings and more than 15,000 pages of text. Contained within was the cartoonish fantasy world of the Vivian Girls, hermaphroditic, winged children who take on crazed adult soldiers to save the world. Fortunately, dancer Pat Graney's career is more available to the general public. The Seattle-based choreographer has created more than 40 original dance pieces since 1979. Her latest concoction, based on Darger's paintings and words, comes to Houston this weekend as a joint presentation of DiverseWorks and Society for the Performing Arts.
Houston Chronicle
May 8, 2005
Based on Henry Darger's works, Vivian Girls takes flight
Seattle's highly respected Pat Graney Company brings Darger's androgynous Vivian Girls to life via a new modern dance on Friday. Darger's 12-volume, 15,000-page opus and hundreds of large watercolors tell an epic tale of winged boy-girl creatures who fight militiamen to save society from death and destruction.
"The guy obviously didn't have a life," Graney said via phone last week before heading to New York's Dance Theater Workshop, where The Vivian Girls finished a four-night run last night. "But the world in which he lived is absolutely fascinating."
Dance View Times
May 6, 2005
Henry Darger's Fantastic Landscape
Based in Seattle, Pat Graney has taken on the impossible task of turning Henry Darger’s artwork into a dance. Graney wisely does not attempt to take on the plot of the epic. Instead she creates images and episodes taking their initial poses from Darger’s illustrations. It’s a series of tableaux vivants.
The work opens on a set that consists of the hand bound book manuscripts in “Alice in Wonderland” scale. There are projections at the back, first of Darger’s room in Chicago, then of his illustrations. Graney’s five dancers, in pinafores and smocks as well as black pageboy wigs, become the illustrations. The tableaux unfold at a leisurely pace to haunting music by Amy Denio and Martin Hayes.
The New York Times
May 6, 2005
The Listings: May 6-12 - "Pat Graney Company"
PAT GRANEY COMPANY (Tonight and tomorrow) Henry Darger, an eccentric and reclusive American artist, inspires a fantastic multimedia dance production. 7:30, Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 924-0077 or www.dtw.org, $20, $12 for members, students and 60+. (Anderson)
The New York Times
April 29, 2005
Dance Listings
PAT GRANEY COMPANY This Seattle troupe comes to Dance Theater Workshop with the New York premiere of "the Vivian girls" (above), inspired by the life and art of Henry Darger, a notoriously reclusive Chicago artist who mopped floors by day for a charity organization. But at night in his crowded one-room apartment, he created his own fantasy realm in the form of a lavishly illustrated 15,000-page novel and 300 paintings. Darger's writings and artworks chronicle the turbulent battles of the innocent Vivian sisters against an evil male empire. The images are often as disturbing as they are fantastic, for they abound with psychological implications of cruelty and enslavement. Pat Graney, a choreographer who often takes the visual arts as a point of departure, will have reproductions of some of Darger's imagery projected during her work for five dancers, costumed like characters from the paintings and novel. For instance, the Vivian girls are in brunette wigs and white dresses, while butterfly-like creatures wear colorful wings and dance en pointe. And all the adventures take place on a stage cluttered with giant books.
The New York Times
April 29, 2005
THE LISTINGS: APRIL 29-MAY 5; PAT GRANEY COMPANY
This Seattle troupe comes to Dance Theater Workshop with the New York premiere of ''the Vivian girls'' (above), inspired by the life and art of Henry Darger, a notoriously reclusive Chicago artist who mopped floors by day for a charity organization. But at night in his crowded one-room apartment, he created his own fantasy realm in the form of a lavishly illustrated 15,000-page novel and 300 paintings. Darger's writings and artworks chronicle the turbulent battles of the innocent Vivian sisters against an evil male empire. The images are often as disturbing as they are fantastic, for they abound with psychological implications of cruelty and enslavement. Pat Graney, a choreographer who often takes the visual arts as a point of departure, will have reproductions of some of Darger's imagery projected during her work for five dancers, costumed like characters from the paintings and novel. For instance, the Vivian girls are in brunette wigs and white dresses, while butterfly-like creatures wear colorful wings and dance en pointe. And all the adventures take place on a stage cluttered with giant books.