Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner is a Portland-based contemporary dance collective that will knock your socks off and back on again. Fresh and smart with a combination of choreographed and structured improvisation, with humor, manic elements, and Tammy Faye eyes, Woolly Mammoth Comes To Dinner—Katie Arrants, Rikki Rothenberg, Kathleen Keogh, and David Rafn (who brings much of the music and is a fashion student at AI)—make movement performance that might happen just about anywhere. What’s in a name? They, “use this moniker as an excuse to indulge themselves in non-sense, and then attempt to make something coherent out of it.”
The spirit of collab extends beyond the four, as they work with designer Diana Lang of )open((clothed) who costumes them (often in garments that invite their own kind of movement) and makeup artist Lauren Hobson. Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner threw down with many players in the larger contemporary dance community in Linda Austin’s Circus Me Around.
Here they take a minute to answer the questions of the ultra Q wherein we ask a few of Portland’s more interesting movers and makers a few pressing questions:
Photos of the Woolly ladies courtesy Chris Mulliken.
Qualities you most admire in design: (or performance)
Katie: Generosity. Also: risky athleticism, emotional rigor, antics. And frequently, absurdity and glamour.
David: I admire honesty and letting the freak-flag fly. It’s the 90s, you can do whatever you want!
Rikki: potential risk, real physicality, pedestrian-ism, humor, real emotion, people doing tasks, curiosity and transparency
Kathleen: imperfect beauty, accidental synchronicity, nonsense, the extraordinary everyday. Also, fake beards.
Qualities you most despise in design: (or performance)
Katie: Exclusivity. Pain.
David: Fear and trepidation. Pledging allegiance to the Satan of appearances, instead of submissively licking the hot Bodhisattva of ergonomics.
Rikki: fakeness, false/dramatized emotion, lazy movement as an excuse, fake beards.
Kathleen: blandness, perfection, lifelessness.
