Degenerate Art Ensemble ON TOUR

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Following our recent performance of Skeleton Flower at On the Boards in Seattle, we have just had time to take a few deep breaths and are already gearing up for the next leg of our Skeleton Flower adventure. Next month we head to Denmark to the Hans Christian Andersen Festival, and then a few months after that we will take the performance to San Francisco. We will also have some absolutely amazing announcements about some upcoming opportunities to share with you very soon.

In the meantime we are reaching out to you to ask for your support in shoring up our resources as we embark on some of the most ambitious work we have ever undertaken. This ask is the first small step in some really exciting new projects and programs that we will be sharing with you in the coming months.

The support of our community in recent years has been extremely important to our work, and we couldn't have taken flight so quickly out of the ashes of 2020 without it. It has been such an honor to have you on our side and we hope that we can count on you being there with us long into the future.

ABOUT SKELETON FLOWER

Skeleton Flower is Degenerate Art Ensemble’s (DAE) performance of live music, visceral movement theater and dance, projected cinematic imagery and storytelling ritual. It is a semi-autobiographical exploration of Haruko Crow Nishimura’s (DAE’s director) struggle with identity, depression, childhood trauma, and the awakening of personal power. The piece deals with these issues with humor and imagination, casting her family as monsters from a Godzilla movie, and traces her personal struggle through three fairy tales which were read to her by her mother growing up (The Fitcher’s Bird, The Wild Swans, and The Red Shoes). The world of Skeleton flower is a multi dimensional patchwork quilt that conjures and consoles her female ancestors through the use of hand felted wools, ten thousand hand painted silk flowers, and knitted sweaters which fill fantastic worlds in the work’s cinematic imagery.


“The piece attains power and awakening by examining the fairytales that my mother read to me when I was young, which ultimately became clues, which through creative work, I was able to confront and navigate my own darkness. It also deals with a violent assault that I experienced as an adult which became the catalyst for healing and the realization of feminine power. Skeleton Flower is a commitment ceremony that confronts the painful energies and tangled karma of my women ancestors. It is an exorcism and personal proclamation to choose my own path consciously for my own life.”

Skeleton Flower was first shown as a work in progress in Plovdiv, Bulgaria as part of American Dance Abroad’s Spotlight USA Festival followed by its world premiere in Seattle in March of 2019. It was performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance (FIDCDMX) in Mexico City in August of 2021, On the Boards in Seattle in June of 2022 and will be presented in Denmark at the Hans Christian Andersen Festival and in San Francisco in 2022-23.