Spotlit in Seattle: kelly langeslay

A Storyteller Who’s Reshaping Dance, One Melting Barbie Cake at a Time by Nico Swenson kelly langeslay is redefining Seattle dance. With stories spoken “to and/or about you,” they create sincere, striking pieces that are the perfect balance of writing, dance, performance art, and Shrek references. Pop culture meets queer theory in repurposed spaces that might have you walking into a room made of blankets, a hyper-pink kitchen, or someone’s apartment with a melting Barbie cake in the oven.langeslay’s journey here started early. “I grew up in a teeny town and took dance classes from when I was 3,” they say. They studied dance at the University of Washington with a double major in psychology. “If you want to study arts in college, everyone tells you that you should study something useful, too, so I did psychology, which is not useful; I use the dance degree all the time.” They graduated into COVID lockdown. After a pause from creating, a brief stint running a childcare karate dojo, and the second of two major concussions, langeslay found themselves back in the dance world with an internship through Velocity Dance Center. From there, “I was applying to everything,” they say. “I started getting things, and I’ve been making stuff nonstop.”After receiving an impressive roster of short-form opportunities, langeslay began self-producing and applying for funding to make their own long-form work. As an emerging artist, “you can’t make long work unless you self-produce,” says langeslay. They created their first evening-length piece, girl dinner, at Base: Experimental Arts + Space, receiving grants from 4Culture and Northwest Film Forum. Opting out of the black box, langeslay created a pastel kitchen for the piece, “about ghosts and queer time and Barbie-embodiment-as-escapism, and literal/metaphorical fingering.”The site-specific use of unconventional spaces is a signature of langeslay’s riveting creations. “Theater spaces feel like a blank piece of paper,” says langeslay. “I always want to use part of the context that’s in the room.” For an iteration of their work crush, langeslay brought the audience into an annex space at Mini Mart City Park, where they fed the audience Totino’s inside of an elaborate blanket fort. An earlier iteration took place at their apartment—chili cooking on the stove as they delivered gorgeously intricate, poetic exposition. “It went super well. So it feels like when I want something to happen, I can make it happen. Which is crazy,” says langeslay.crush is langeslay’s ongoing long-form work, with each iteration counting down asynchronously from 100. Every performance reestablishes a narrative canon of langeslay’s thought-provoking writing, building and changing it through durational movement. The storytelling straddles personal, reality, and fantasy, and references queer artists like Sarah Kane, Jack Smith, and Freddie Herko. “It’s definitely not theater because I’m not acting. Sometimes it goes around theory and queer history and kind of blends all together, but it’s not acting because I’m directly addressing the audience. I talk to ‘you’ a lot, as a signifier because it could be ‘you’ personally or it could be ‘you’ anyone.” The piece takes real-life details and spins them into the absurd, paired with snippets of pop culture and descriptions of vivid events such as 10,000 cockroaches falling from the ceiling.“It’s not about crushes, but [it] has this crush theme woven up into it because they’re kind of horrible. I want something horrible to happen in crush,” says langeslay.