Earlier this spring I got a text from dance artist Amy O’Neal.
She’s been based in Los Angeles for the past seven or eight years, but O’Neal has kept her ties with Seattle’s dance community and she comes up here on a regular basis. She was texting to let me know two things. First, she’s moved back to Seattle and, second, she’s producing one of her Hybrid Lab evenings here on Friday, May 23.
I’ve known O’Neal for many years, and have interviewed her in advance of so many dances she’s created, so I thought I’d find out more about her Hybrid Lab, and what attendees could expect on Friday.
One thing was clear from the get go.
“It’s not a company” she told me over a Zoom call. “It’s not a show. It’s a community engagement initiative.”
O’Neal is interested in creating a platform where she can present dancers—in particular street dancers and Black social dancers—in a concert dance setting. That means she invites certain artists to participate together in a format that’s part traditional concert dance and part social dance venue, where a handful of invited dancers can interact or collaborate or perform as they wish. According to O’Neal, as audience members, you’re more than welcome to sit in a chair to watch the evening unfold, but you’re also free to get up to dance.
This coming Friday O’Neal has invited a Los Angeles-based dancer named K’niin to perform a solo. Also bringing solos will be Joseph “MN Joe” Tran, a Minneapolis-based choreographer, dancer and co-founder of BRKFST Dance Company. Bi-coastal teacher, choreographer and current Artistic Director of Seattle’s CD Forum for Arts and Ideas dani tirrell will be on the bill with what dani is calling a new solo, plus O’Neal herself performing an excerpt from a new evening length piece she’s working on for On the Boards’ next artistic season, along with two of its cast members.
O’Neal sees the Hybrid Lab as a chance for open conversation about merging dance cultures and dance collaborations between artists from different dance worlds: club dance, street dance, Black social dance and contemporary Western concert dance, which was a launching pad years ago for O’Neal herself. She graduated from Cornish College of the Arts, which she credits for introducing her to contemporary dance. which she didn’t see much of during her Texas youth.
As she built her professional dance career, O’Neal began melding dance styles in her own work and teaching. I first saw a performance she created called Opposing Forces at On the Boards at least a decade ago. O’Neal recruited a talented cast of dancers, mostly male identified, who’d made their dance reputations in the street dance scene, but she wanted to create a work that could showcase the “feminine” aspects of what was seen as breakdancing’s “hyper-masculine” sides.
O’Neal launched the “official” Hybrid Lab in 2020, during her tenure at the University of Southern California’s Gloria S. Kaufman School of Dance, where she still teaches part time.
“I was really interested in how our school was using the buzzword “hybrid,” O’Neal explains. “My experience has been merging different movement languages in my body for a long long time.” When an LA-based dance festival invited her, a relatively new Angeleno, to come up with something for their program The Hybrid Lab was born.
O’Neal is most interested in making dance in places that bring a multiplicity of voices together, where she can feel safe bringing her authentic self to the dance floor while at the same time making space for other aesthetic voices to showcase their own artwork.
She’s produced a half dozen Hybrid Lab evenings around the country, most often in Los Angeles where she’s been based. Now that O’Neal is back in the Pacific Northwest, Hybrid Labs may pop up here more often. O’Neal is excited by the prospect of expanding dance literacy in our region, a place where she says audiences for hybrid dance work have been mostly white. “I was realizing how little curators and a lot of audience members here understood what Hip Hop dance and culture actually is.”
Despite program changes aimed at broadening the foci of academic dance programs at both USC, where O’Neal currently teaches, and the University of Washington, where she helped launch ongoing classes in non-northern European popular dance styles, including break dancing and social club dance, O’Neal says faculty and student performances at most colleges and universities still emphasize more traditional Western classical and contemporary dance. She hopes her work can help to open doors at academic dance programs, as well as teaching people about thriving social and street dance scenes in their own communities.
“It makes me really happy when I get to ask audiences when they first saw hip hop dance,” O’Neal says, “Just sort of get them to think about their perceptions of it.” You can find out more about her past creations and teaching at her website.
The upcoming Hybrid Lab, this Friday May 23 at Base, opens its doors at 7:30 with DJ WD4D. The performance will begin around 8pm, and O’Neal says the doors will not open for late arrivals so try to get there by 8. You don’t have to get up and dance, but she says the audience is more than welcome to do so after the official performance. I just have to say it’s great to have Amy O’Neal back in the Pacific Northwest.