CATHERINE CABEEN

Catherine Cabeen - Artist

 

2009-2019

Artistic Director of Hyphen

 

Mission Statement:

Hyphen was created in 2009 as a forum for the intersection of ideas. This forum is fed by difference, juxtaposition, and contrast. Hyphen seeks to celebrate the multifaceted nature of our experience as human citizens of earth.

 

As a choreographer and seeker on the embodied spiritual path, I see all bigotry and bias based on gender, race, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, ability, size, and class as an anathema to our evolution as a species. On that note, yes, I believe in evolution, climate change, and science in general. I know that Black Live Matter.

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I strive to create work that stands in defiance of misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, racism, denial of climate change, and “alternative-facts.” I pray for all of my creative peers that we may transform our fear and rage into grist for the mill.

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I let Hyphen go in 2019 in order to respond to a calling to more deeply engage in my teaching as a form of activism. However, my life as a maker deeply informs my resounding faith that art, dance, education, and activism are interconnected aspects of living a considered life that is both creative, and in service to my community.

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Company History:

From 2009-2019, Hyphen was a project-based, interdisciplinary, performance company, that had anchors in both Seattle and New York City.  The New York Times called Hyphen, “highly kinetic, complex... visually exquisite,” and “beautifully performed.” The New York Times, May 13, 2011.

 

Founded after Cabeen was a finalist in The A.W.A.R.D. Show! Seattle: 2009, Hyphen (originally Catherine Cabeen and Company) was created in order to provide a forum for investigating the intersections of scholarship, interdisciplinary 

collaboration, and movement invention. 

 

Hyphen created 3 evening-length works inspired by New Realists.  On the Boards in Seattle, WA commissioned Into the Void, based on the life and work of Yves Klein, in 2011. The full work can be viewed @ On the Boards Television.

On the Boards also commissioned Fire! in 2013, fueled by reflections on Niki de Saint Phalle's Shooting Paintings.  The Seattle Art Museum commissioned an evening-length site-specific work, Where They May, inspired by Saint Phalle's monumental Tarot Garden for the Olympic Sculpture Park in 2012.

 

Playing with relationships between the visual and performing arts, Hyphen created several site-specific works in collaboration with art museums including the Mahaney Art Museum in VT, Grounds for Sculpture in NJ as well as the Seattle Art Museum.  Hyphen regularly engaged fashion designers, sculptors, composers, writers, and digital media artists as well as dancers. In its ten years of original creative work, Hyphen featured the work of over 40 brilliant interdisciplinary artists on programs that were performed throughout the continental United States, as well as in Vieques PR, Byblos Lebanon, Belfast Ireland, and Dar Es Salaam Tanzania.

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Hyphen's final evening-length production, Give Me More, which premiered at Theater for the New City in 2018, explored the intersections of over-consumption, environmental destruction, and gender performance. An interactive set was created for the work out of over 300lbs of recycled clothing. The set both elevated and trapped six dancers as the dancing fluidity of their genders became locked in various garments; caught in the web of consumer culture and societal rules.

 

Hyphen received support from the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, 4 Culture, The Washington State Arts Commission, the National Performing Network Creation Fund, The Bernstein Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and generous individual donors.