Deborah Goffe (Artistic Director, Scapegoat Garden) is a performer, choreographer, dance educator and video artist.  She earned her BFA in Modern Dance from the University of the Arts and an MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from California Institute of the Arts.  Upon her return to Connecticut in 2002, the Hartford-native founded Scapegoat Garden, for which she currently serves as Artistic Director.  Scapegoat Garden has become the vehicle through which she cultivates a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment for the creation of new work and artistic innovation.  She is a recipient of Artist's Fellowship Grants from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism as well as from the Greater Hartford Arts Council for her choreographic work.

Her choreography has been commissioned by Full Force Dance Theatre and educational institutions, including Trinity College.  She has served as co-founder and director of Drink to This!, an intergenerational ensemble of performers, designers, writers and visual artists who create multimedia, collaborative works.  Deborah has performed as a member of Velvet Lemons under the direction of Karen Bacon and in works by Ruth Barnes, Rebecca Lazier, Milton Myers and Randé Dorn.  For several years, beginning in 1997, she performed with the Judy Dworin Performance Ensemble (JDPE) and continues to serve as a teaching artist at Parkville Community School through JDPE's, Moving Matters Residency.  Since 2000, Deborah's interdisciplinary focus has blossomed into a passion for dance video.  She has nurtured this passion by developing video works, and sound designs, for Scapegoat Garden, JDPE, Figments Dance Ensemble and the Greater Hartford Arts Council.  

Deborah has taught dance and related courses in a number of institutions including Belmont High School in Los Angeles, California Institute of the Arts, CREC's Center for Creative Youth, Hartford Conservatory, University of Hartford/Hartt School/Community Division and Connecticut Conservatory.  She is currently on the faculty at Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts and Trinity College.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 1, 2007

Scapegoat Garden, Inc.                                                                  

Deborah Goffe, Artistic Director

810 Tower Avenue

Hartford, CT 06112 

(860) 881-9943

deborah@scapegoatgarden.org

www.scapegoatgarden.org

Charter Oak Cultural Center presents,

Present Company Included

Hartford's Scapegoat Garden Celebrates 5 Years of Innovative Dance Theater

Friday & Saturday, March 30-31, 2007, at 7:30pm

Charter Oak Cultural Center, Hartford.

Ticket price: $20, $10 seniors, Charter Oak & Let*s Go members, $5 students

For reservations or more information, call 860.249.1207

In this multimedia birthday extravaganza, Scapegoat Garden reveals roots that have grown down deep - giving way to an extraordinary body of work. The company will perform Invisible, its newest work, as well as updated works and signature pieces from its repertoire.  Joined by special guests, the concert will culminate in Present Company Included, an interactive work where you, the audience, will determine the fate of the piece.  Compelling live performance will be accompanied by Scapegoat Garden's imaginative video work, the photography of Connecticut-native Jennifer Cormier, a reception with the company in the gallery, door prizes and a silent auction. 

Scapegoat Garden is a collaborative dance theater based in Hartford, Connecticut, driven to create daring, interdisciplinary performance that goes in through the nose, eyes, skin, ears and mouth to stir those who witness or participate.  This company of artists, under the direction and vision of Hartford-native Deborah Goffe, creates works that are theatrical, vulnerable and athletic, choosing themes that are as much universal as they are personal.  Scapegoat Garden was founded in 2002, and established as a non-profit 501(c)(3) arts organization in 2004.  Scapegoat Garden's repertory has been selected for performance in festivals and venues throughout the region including: the Bushnell's Belding Theater, Trinity College's Austin Arts Center, the Carol Autorino Center at Saint Joseph College, Hartford's Charter Oak Cultural Center, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Truro Center for the Arts in Provincetown, White Mountain Dance Festival at Springfield College and New York City's Raw Material Performance Series, DUMBO Dance Festival, Artists of the Tomorrow Festival at the West End Theater, and the 92^nd Street Y.

In the five years since the company's inception, Scapegoat Garden has consistently surpassed expectations.  Deborah Goffe, the group's artistic director, has not been thwarted by the limitations of a small city or the ongoing struggle's of Hartford's dance community.   Instead, she has found that Hartford has allowed a freedom to pursue art-making with fewer constraints of time and money than exists in bigger cities like New York.  She leads the group in the creation of works that are visually spectacular, dramatic, thought provoking and profoundly human.  By fusing multiple media with Deborah's commitment to the collaborative process, Scapegoat Garden has come to embrace a form of dance-theater that is layered with multi-sensory stimulation, attention to detail and athleticism.  In this, the total theatrical experience - movement, text, video, music, costume, light, sound and set design, Scapegoat Garden's work heightens sensation and encourages introspection on the part of the performers and audience.  Audiences leave performances more aware than before the encounter.  In all areas Scapegoat Garden stands out an innovator in the dance community and a voice that reminds us that dance is alive and well in Hartford.  Don't miss this opportunity to witness, celebrate and deepen your appreciation of the dynamic, entrancing and thoughtful Scapegoat Garden.

2006 has offered more lessons than I was prepared for.  I went into the year feeling depleted but hopeful.  The previous years had been burdened by a people-pleasing nature that had drained me completely. I'm a good student.  I see in others a wealth of wisdom.  I believe that everyone has something profound to offer and I'm always open for the moment when that special "something" comes to light.  Over the course of this year I've mastered the art of "NO" and have begun to trust my own instincts and wisdom in life and art.  I can hear myself for the first time.  As it turns out, I like to be alone. 

In my quiet moments alone, I've wondered if I would have started Scapegoat Garden if I knew in 2002 what I now know.  I may have proceeded with more caution, but I wouldn't trade this experience.  There's something about the concrete nature of a company - the character of Scapegoat Garden is establishing itself more and more firmly.  So, while my personal growth is closely tied to the company's, the integrity of the mission has independence.  Scapegoat Garden has provided a structured curriculum for my growth as an artist.  I guess I'm a student of that structure.  I'm not sure where it will all lead, but I trust it. 

I don't think I was prepared for the secret language of the dance world.  Many of us were raised to believe that hard work and skill is all one needs to advance in the world.  Instead, I'm finding that there is a secret language that I was never taught.  And I'm realizing that a proficiency in this language can not be replaced by hard work or skill.  But I'm more observant now.  I'm beginning to unlock the code.   While my dance training taught me to be seen and not heard, to require little and to always be flexible, I'm seeing that those who are successful are unwavering in their efforts to get their needs and desires met.  So, I'm learning to be less flexible in many areas.  I'm less willing to relent.

Another Evening: I Bow Down

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University

September 15, 2006

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's compelling work, Another Evening: I Bow Down, served as this seasons opening for the Center for the Arts Breaking Ground Dance Series at Middletown's Wesleyan University.  In her introduction, Pamela Tatge, Director of the CFA, noted that Jones was returning to Wesleyan after 15 years – having taught at the school with his partner Arnie Zane in the 1970's and having their work presented on the CFA stage.  It was a homecoming well worth the wait.  In a metaphysical and theatrical alchemy, Another Evening: I Bow Down drew its audience into ceremonial observance as reluctantly passive participants.

In a pre-show talk, the company's Associate Artistic Director, Janet Wong and Creative Director, Bjorn Amelan discussed the origins of Another Evening.  After years of creating work together in response to their physical/cultural differences and compliments, the company was formed in 1982 by Jones and Zane. They sought to create the world they hoped to live in, reflecting and celebrating the diversity of the world they saw around them.  This piece brings together excerpts from the company's repertoire in a new context.  The format was first explored as One Night in 1999 as an informal grouping of excerpts, assembled through chance methods for a performance during the company's off season.  The second was intended for performance inside the World Trade Center on September 12, 2001.  That performance never came to pass.  Since that time, each incarnation of Another Evening, builds on the memory of the last experience with new insights, new collaborators and new experiences to pass on. 

The stage design consisted of a stripped down proscenium stage with a white rectangle on the floor marked by yellow squares and grid lines.  Downstage, two red and yellow squares could be found, like prayer rugs, on either side.  Upstage, a large black box with red sliding doors was positioned.  Jones was the first to inhabit the space, harkening back to 2042 BC and Noah's flood, with booming voice and gesture. Dancers in rehearsal clothes entered in sweeps of legs and arms and ripples of spine.  An array of blue pants and colored tops highlighted the varied bodies and varied kinetic voices.  With pizzicato rhythms, violinist, and music director Daniel Bernard Roumain, mounted his platform and the count down of years ensued.  Jones, in a kind of blessing of the sacred space moved from corner to corner and eventually slid the red doors of the black box open to reveal (and give full sound to) a death metal grindcore band inside.

Weaving stories of Noah's flood, hurricane Katrina and his mother, Bill T. Jones illustrates a world of catastrophe and hope.  In the work's early moments, the eruption of God Moves on the Water drove a rhythmic song and dance that was at once familiar and brand new.  Agile dancers told gestural tales as they were pulled by the extremes of reach and release.  Repetition and variations on a single phrase of movement created one layer of a complex ritual.  In this piece, the custom of recycling material from the company's existing works, and linking them through stories, sound and new movement, is a kind of ceremony of its own.

The I Bow Down section of the piece provided the purest ritual.  Lights illuminated squares on the grid as the dancers began by walking the line (the razor's edge, as one dancer called it).  Each of three phases were accompanied by the chanted refrain, "I bow down", from the Lotus Sutra, along with three offerings of a single phrase of movement.   This section, placed in the middle of the larger piece, served as the place of transition and cleansing.  The trance-inducing accumulation of sound grew from sparse violin and piano to the relentless growl of grindcore.  Dancers entered from time to time with hooded sweatshirts like urban monks.  In time the wall of sound gave way and reverberated through the theater.  The dancers, transformed into white clad saints, were now purified sufficiently to enter into a memory from the company's famed, Still/Here. 

The dancers' buoyant meditation of Still/Here, like airy mitosis, absorbed the new sound of Katrina recall.  Ending with the yearning sounds of Wagner, the solitary voice of 500 miles, and the counting of years too far in the future to comprehend, the dancers exited, through the path of light, to the "other side.

For me, Another Evening: I Bow Down was a great relief and comfort.  I have personally existed marginally in the marginal world of dance.   My own work has far too few mentors and I've struggled to find a niche between the technique obsessed, shock obsess and self obsessed.  I've found much of the work I've witnessed of late to be long . . .  Too long . . . yet short on content, clear intention and editing.  I've longed for an experience of performance that would validate my own vision of dance as contemporary ritual – a ceremony that might lift me up, whisk me away and immerse me in a kind of true religion.  Ahhhh.  There it is.

Present Company Included

Hartford's dance history has been a tumultuous one.  I could go all the way back to Hartford's role in bringing Balanchine to America, followed by the ballet visionary's decision to call New York home instead.   I could reopen that old wound . . . but I won't.  I'll begin in the more recent past with the demise of a certain prominent ballet organization (for the second time) and the subsequent grief as the city mourned the apparent death of its dance.  If one listened intently, a low moan or grumble could be heard as many stood at the edge of the precipice and marveled at the vast chasm where Hartfords cultural identity once stood.

Those were sad days for many, and yet, for those who looked beyond the moan, a great army could be seen.   OK.  There was no army.  It was more of a pack.  They hovered in the center of the chasm, and as their faces emerged from the smoke and debris, observers saw something unexpected.  The survivors were articulating their spines, balancing on their hands, laughing heartily and performing lavish gestures in their bare feet.   As it turns out, these were dancers of the modern persuasion.  They had been there the whole time, but only a discerning few could see them.

With even closer scrutiny, observers noticed some distinction within the pack.  Some moved minimally with a human sensibility, others moved in highly stylized ways.  Some spoke as they moved, while others communicated strong emotion in their bellies and hips and faces.  And then they saw her - the child.  Her small frame moved as a forceful wind.  On her delicate face shone eyes of intensity and resolve.  The childs age, her size and her status within the pack threatened to obscure her presence.  But some who saw her knew she was special.  She called the chasm home.  Her name was Scapegoat Garden.

The Great Ballet Disaster was viewed by most, at first, as a loss.  With time, word that dance had, once again, risen from the ashes circulated throughout Hartford as many became aware of this curious pack of modern dancers.  Some had even seen evidence of the resurrection with their own eyes.  A few gathered to celebrate in honor of the miracle.

As these gatherings traveled from conference room to theater to hotel ballroom throughout the city, individuals from within the pack emerged.  Ill tell you about the personalities that emerged with them and the understated struggle for the alpha position at some other time.  For now, know that though still only seen by a small minority, the modern dancers, individually and collectively, were re-establishing a foothold.  And that in the middle of many of these gatherings sat the powerful, yet diminutive Scapegoat Garden, soaking it all in.  And with time, the little girl would grow in wisdom and stature and she would demand that the chasm she called home acknowledge her.

. . . Or so the legend goes.

Well, I'm almost all moved in to my space.  Isn't it pretty?  This was exactly the distraction I needed.  Of course none of my work has been done today . . .  So, let's call this work.  OK.  Ahhhh.  The life of an artist . . .

I founded Scapegoat Garden back in 2002 as a vehicle for my creative work.  Since then, I've been on the most exhilerating and terriying adventure of my life.  We're a kind of chamber group working to create dance theater works (among other things) through a collaborative process.  Check out our official website at:
www.scapegoatgarden.org  

Though my current collaborators reside in New York and New Haven, Scapegoat Garden calls Hartford, CT home.  It was a deliberate choice to set up shop outside the "dance capital of the usa".  And its proven to be relatively successful - creating work away from New York's fast pace and heavy external pressures, not to mention the city's high cost of living.  Its been amazing to work at my own pace, discover my own voice and chart my own course.  In the last two years we've created three evening length works, as well as several shorter performance and video works.  I'm pleased. 

Now as we approach our 5th anniversary next spring, we are ready to establish a greater presence within our community and outside these borders.   So we are embarking on our "campaign to make our presence known".  Stay tuned for the what, how and when of that journey . . .  should be interesting . . .

Deborah