SCUBA 2009 featuring Salt Horse from Seattle and SF's Catherine Galasso May 9, 2009

SCUBA, the national touring network created by ODC Theater, Velocity Dance Center in Seattle and the Southern Theater in Minneapolis takes up residence at ODC Dance Commons over two weekends in 2009.

Seattle’s Salt Horse shares the bill with ODC Theater Artist in Residence Catherine Galasso the weekend of May 9 & 10. While Salt Horse concocts evocative and wildly physical sound-soaked “living images” in their choreography, Galasso specializes in pieces that combine the ephemeral qualities of performance and historical narrative and draw on her artistic impulses honed as a documentary filmmaker.

Salthorse's This was a Cliff features two characters—one dense and one hollow—as they traverse a room, a forest and a wormhole in order to pursue their separate fates. A playful and dark study of petrification and evolution, it features startling images and costumes, including a character with 360 degree floor length hair, and another with arms that extend six feet long.

Galasso's The Improbable Reign of Norton I, Emperor of the United States, is a dreamlike and humorous look at Norton as a multifaceted metaphor – one that reflects on hope, failure, and sanity, as well as on a rich forgotten history of San Francisco.

Taking place in an ambiguous afterlife not so different perhaps than the one imagined by Sartre in No Exit, Norton is joined by some other notable eccentrics that made their home in the Bay Area, though not necessarily at the same time as he. These include: Isadora Duncan, Joaquin Murrietta, Lillie Hitchcock Coit, and Frederick Willie Coombs.