Artist to Know
Editor’s note: In this series, our arts and culture writers highlight local artists who should be on your radar.
Who: Alice Gosti, choreographer, who also creates under the name MALACARNE, an experimental dance and performance group.
Best known for: Over the past decade, Gosti has established herself as one of Seattle’s foremost choreographers, focusing on time-based and improvisational work. Celebrated for her site-specific, durational choreography — performances in which time is an essential element, often lasting three or more hours — she received a prestigious Princess Grace Choreography Honoraria in 2021, among her many honors and awards. Gosti tends to avoid the typical proscenium stage in favor of locations with complex histories or politics or cultural significance, such as Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, Fort Worden Historical State Park and the Inscape Arts and Cultural Center; the latest will be a 5-hour performance in downtown Seattle June 27. Originally from Perugia, Italy, Gosti is devoted to working with female, nonbinary, transgender and immigrant dancers and performers of color, using her choreography, which is full of abstract yet graceful movements, to push against traditionally accepted norms around class, sexuality, gender, ability and ethnicity.
Why you should know her: In addition to her site-specific work, Gosti founded and ran the Yellow Fish // Epic Durational Performance Festival in Seattle for four years before passing on the reins to focus on her work. Featuring a roster of live works (some up to 48 hours), the festival included dancers, choreographers and filmmakers presenting pieces created for nontraditional performance spaces. “I love making site-responsive work, studying the architecture and history of a space and responding to it,” Gosti says. “The other element I like is the durational aspect. My medium is more time than dance, and I’m often creating moments in which time is so stretched out that you experience the sensation of getting lost in it.”
Two of Gosti’s most popular works, 2015’s five-hour-long “How to Become a Partisan” at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral on Capitol Hill and 2022’s “this is concrete II” (also five hours) held at the historic Georgetown Steam Plant, cemented her place, first as a choreographer to watch, and then as an artist not only entrenched in, but leading the Seattle dance scene in interesting new directions. Both performances showed the versatility of Gosti’s choreography — contemporary, yet underlined with balletic grace and punched through with dramatic moments, such as a woman being hastily carried on her back down the aisle between church pews — and her penchant for collaborating with artists from other genres, such as musicians.
See her work in: For the past two years, Gosti has worked on a one-day-only performance titled “the sky is the same color everywhere or on the rapture of being alive,” which will premiere June 27 at the 2+U courtyard in downtown Seattle. Supported in part by a Neighborhood Matching Fund award from Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, Path with Art, Shunpike and Northwest Film Forum’s Collective Power Fund, the five-hour, immersive work looks at how we view our city and the people who live in it. Gosti first saw the location on Christmas Day 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she took a walk in the mostly deserted downtown area. “In my head, as soon as I saw the spot, I knew I wanted to make something happen there,” she says.
In addition to the MALACARNE dancers, Gosti is including participants from Path with Art, a nonprofit offering art classes to people who have recovered from addiction or being unhoused, where she has taught for six years. Additional cameos will include multimedia artist Timothy White Eagle and Cheer Seattle, a local nonprofit adult cheerleading organization raising funds and awareness for the LGBTQ+ community. “A lot of themes will come out,” says Gosti, who has been thinking about the idea of camouflage and visibility, as well as the constantly shifting social fabric of downtown Seattle. “Dancers, guests and people just walking by will come together to witness this performance. I think the biggest focus is how do we build new memories together in a neighborhood that is so complicated for our city?”
What’s next: In addition to her work with MALACARNE, Gosti has what she terms a “normal person job,” choreographing for Shakespeare productions in regional theaters across the country and collaborating with upstart crow collective, which produces classical plays with racially diverse casts of women and nonbinary people. She is currently working on a new production that will appear at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in January 2025.
Correction: A previous version of this story said Alice Gosti is choreographing for Shakespeare productions through Seattle University. Gosti is not currently working with Seattle U on Shakespeare productions.