The dance artist Zoe Scofield photographed in 2013, in garments by Anna Telcs.Photo by Kelly O
Good morning. It's Monday, May 11, the start of another so-called week.
For many people including professional dancers, today looks exactly like yesterday did. (Except that yesterday's glorious weather is now turning back to the usual cloudy/rainy bullshit.)
In a hilarious video from the award-winning Zoe Scofield, who makes "dance dreamscapes that make theaters feel like bottled lightning," as Brendan Kiley once put it, the choreographer and dancer draws on her face, "smokes" with a tiny pencil, and eats chunky peanut butter off of a spoon.
Zoe, a 2013 Stranger Genius Award winner and 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, is a dance and visual artist who has been living and making work in Seattle since 2002.
Born and raised in Gainesville, Georgia, Zoe began ballet at a young age, instilling in her a deep love and interest in structure, discipline, and performances’ ability to create transformative experiences.
In 2005, Zoe began working with video and visual artist Juniper Shuey on video works, photographic collaborations, and dance collaborations that have been shown in visual art galleries, museums, and theaters around the world.
Zoe has been awarded so many awards, grants, and residences that if we listed them here the English language would run out of letters. So let's just look at a screenshot of her right before she eats that glob of unbelievably delicious-looking peanut butter.
Peanut butter is a tool for easing tensions between roommates, Zoe argues in her message today.Courtesy of Zoe Scofield
See more of Zoe's work here and here. Read more about her here. Follow her on Instagram here or here.
Thank you, Zoe, for the laughs, and good luck nursing that tub of peanut butter. The Stranger editor writing these words cannot keep peanut butter in the house—he would go through one of those tubs in two days. But you're a dancer; you have discipline. And the advice about roommates is solid.
Thank you for this peek into the glamorous life of professional dancers.
Good luck making the best of your shit-sandwich Monday, everyone.
