Zoe Scofield

Zoe Scofield creates performances that are not just experienced through a time-based perception, but further explored through photography and video installation. Instead of separate works, these variations on a performance are continued distillations of specific aspects of the original performance that may reach a broader audience than performance alone. Zoe has choreographed for the Northwest New Works Festival, received funding from the National Dance Project and the Princess Grace Foundation, received residencies from The Body Festival and Bates Dance Festival, and is currently the Co-Artistic Director of the Zoe / Juniper Dance Company. She has attended the Boston Conservatory, Prometheus, Samarya Center for Integrated Movement, and Seattle Central Community College. Zoe’s work is frequently featured in The Stranger’s Art & Performance Quarterly. In 2008 she received a Seattle Magazine Spotlight Award, and in 2013 she was profiled in Dance Magazine and CityArts Magazine.

Zoe received 2008 GAP Award funding to support a residency at Centrum Arts Center with Juniper Shuey, video/installation artist, and three dancers from her company. This seven-day residency took place in the Fall of 2008 and focused on her work A crack in everything. Zoe took the time and space provided by this residency to explore, challenge and create choreography in response to Juniper’s set. It used three evenly spaced layers of semi-transparent silk hung taut from the ceiling. Projected light and video on the silk manipulated what can and can’t be seen in the performance space.

As part of her Fellowship’s Meet the Artist requirements, Zoe taught two movement classes at the Boys and Girls Club at Bagley Elementary School in Seattle. The students, ages 5-12, had little to no dance experience. She began by talking about dance and choreography, which was lost on them until she asked if they knew Beyonce and the Single Ladies video (they all did, and even showed her some of the moves; some of the students said Beyonce didn’t make up the movement herself and that she had to spend a lot of time – “about a thousand years” – practicing). Then they played with making their own gestures and movements and directing each others’ movements. In the end they all danced as their favorite thing, and the room was full of pianos, wolves, dogs, snow angels, reindeer, chocolate cake, and bubble gum.