Katie Piatt is an artist living, playing dress-up, and telling jokes in Portland, Oregon. She explores the ideas of gender, body, sizeism, and identity with her extensive background in soft sculpture and sewing, as well as in her newer participatory performance and storytelling practice. Through the art of spoken word, improvisation, body language and costume, she collects the stories of participants while challenging the effects of growing up a fat girl in the conservative Ozark hills of Missouri. She received a BFA in Painting from Missouri State University in 2012, and an MFA in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2015. Her recent mischief includes crashing last year’s Whitney Biennial as an aged characterization of Little Orphan Annie and doing stand-up in Canada dressed as an old woman named Martha. http://katiepiatt.com/

All the stories created in Springfield Today are based on true local color, traditions, and memories from Katie’s hometown in Missouri. The group fiction that occurs is a magical, one-time-only part of the show. Even the theme-song is created from an interview! Everything you see happening will not happen again. This show will make you laugh if you’re from the Midwest, have ever traveled through there, or know any of the major stereotypes about Midwesterners.

WEEKEND 2: This dance/theatre work, created and choreographed by Seattle dance artist Dani Tirrell, is centered on Dani’s relationship with America/Seattle and his identity as a gay black man. He summarizes it as: semi-patriotic, gender non-conforming Butch Queen, some heels, some Drag, and a little bit of Thug Realness.

Nancy Ellis began dancing professionally in 1994, when she joined the musical theater chorus of the St. Louis Muny Opera and became a member of Gash Voigt Dance Theater of St. Louis. In New York City in 1995, Nancy became a founding member of both Yanira Castro + Company and Maura Nguyen Donohue/inmixedcompany. With these and other artists, including Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar/Big Dance Theater, Nancy has performed throughout the U.S. and in Russia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and South Korea. Since moving to Portland in 2006, she has worked with Jennifer Monson (TBA 2006), Hand2Mouth Theatre, Tahni Holt, Linda Austin, Katherine Longstreth, and Dawn Stopiello. Nancy began making her own work in 2014, with generous support from the N.E.W. Residency program at Studio 2@Zoomtopia. She presented Nancy’s NANCY in sold-out shared evenings there in September 2014, to positive audience and critical response.

Nancy’s NANCY is a self-portrait inspired by Yanira Castro’s NANCY, a performer portrait based on Nancy Ellis which premiered in New York in September 2013. Life events and documentary dance-theater solos by artists including Miguel Gutierrez, Jérôme Bel, and Faustin Linyekula also inspired this performed memoir.