Draft:33 Fainting Spells

33 Fainting Spells was an American dance theater company led by choreographers Dayna Hanson and Gaelen Hanson (no relation). Active from 1994 - 2006, 33 Fainting Spells’ work was noted for its complexity, precision and mystery, and for combining rigorous dance training and natural movement into a seamless performance vocabulary. Visual and technical design in the company’s work made unexpected use of ordinary furniture and everyday objects. Hanson and Hanson often juxtaposed disparate literary and cinematic source materials and, over time, increasingly integrated text and video into their work. "Dayna Hanson and Gaelen Hanson have forged what may be the most incisive dance ensemble on the West Coast,” Elizabeth Zimmer wrote in The Village Voice in 1997. “Give them an hour; they'll remake your vision of the American dance landscape."

The company created six evening-length dance theater pieces, which were commissioned and presented by dozens of dance and art institutions across the U.S. and in Europe, including On the Boards, Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts, Walker Art Center, Dance Theater Workshop, Institute for Contemporary Art/London, Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Jacob’s Pillow, Spoleto Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts and many others.

Founding and early work
Gaelen Hanson and Dayna Hanson met in Seattle in 1993 during Fieldwork, a peer-to-peer feedback program of The Field. Soon after meeting, they began collaborating on a short dance work, Tsigane, set to Maurice Ravel’s rhapsody for violin and piano,Tzigane. In 1995, Hanson and Hanson performed the duet in several cities in Germany and The Netherlands in a festival produced by the European Dance Development Center (EDDC), a post-modern dance organization co-founded by Mary Fulkerson and Aat Hougée based in Arnhem, The Netherlands.

Commissioned by On the Boards, then under the artistic direction of Mark Murphy Hanson and Hanson developed Tsigane into their first evening-length work, called The Uninvited, in 1997. Informed by Hanson and Hanson’s overlapping interests in 20th century classical music, film noir and fiction by Elmore Leonard and Witold Gombrowicz, The Uninvited launched the company, which Hanson and Hanson named after Russian constructivist director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1935 stage adaptation of Anton Chekhov short pieces (titled after the total number of references to fainting in those works).

The Uninvited, in which an uninvited guest drops from the ceiling into a solitary woman’s living room, was acclaimed for its suspense and kinetic, wordless storytelling: In the piece, the intrusion causes both dramatic tension between the characters and uncanny misbehavior on the part of household objects, including a large wooden table, a water pipe, and a hanging light bulb. Dance critic Deborah Jowitt wrote in the Village Voice in November 1997, “The Uninvited, by Dayna Hanson and Gaelen Hanson, is even more deliciously odd than I hoped, upholding dance’s intrinsic ability to foster mysteries.” Dance critic Roland Langer reviewed The Uninvited in Frankfurter Rundschau on April 26, 1997, writing, ”Gripping, complex, and full of fantasy, 33 Fainting Spells create dance that is altogether new. Absurd and comic, Hanson and Hanson's choreography makes delicious satire of traditional dance code.” In 2018, a section of the piece was remounted by Dayna Hanson at Base: Experimental Arts + Space in Seattle, WA.

The Uninvited was presented at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, DiverseWorks in Houston, TX; Dance Umbrella in Austin, TX; Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH; Kunstlerhaus Mousturm in Frankfurt, Germany; and Dance Theater Workshop in New York, then under the leadership of David R. White.

In her article for Seattle University’s Scholar Works project, “Many Streams Make a River: Seattle Dance 1990 to 2015,” culture writer Marcie Sillman wrote, “The Uninvited created a local stir. European audiences may have been accustomed to dancers in street clothing and hard-soled shoes, but in Seattle, the sight of the performers moving onstage around and upon a table and chairs, with buckets dropping from above, wearing heavy black Oxford shoes, was something completely new. Gaelen Hanson explains, ‘We had something of a film noir thing going on, and that led us to the shoes. The shoes really allowed you to hear the rhythm of the movement in a way that you couldn’t if we were barefoot. And we were working with characters, people who actually wear shoes. It seemed logical to us.’”

Subsequent Work
Hanson and Hanson returned to the European Dance Development Center in 1996 for a choreographic residency to create their second work, Sorrow’s Sister. A trio featuring Hanson, Hanson and dancer Peggy Piacenza, Sorrow’s Sister was commissioned and presented by New City Theater in Seattle and as part of The Joyce Theater’s Altogether Different Festival. The company’s second wordless dance drama, Sorrow’s Sister used dance and imagery to explore the ravages of war. Deborah Jowitt wrote in The Village Voice, “The triumph of Sorrow’s Sister is that the three collaborators reveal immense drama through small, numb moments.”

33 Fainting Spells’ third evening-length work, Maria The Storm Cloud, was presented in 12 cities across the U.S. in 1998-1999, with support from the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project a program founded in 1996 by Sam Miller to encourage a strong ecosystem of dance creation and presentation in the U.S.. Set in a landscape of swiveling stools, Maria The Storm Cloud, which derived its title from a line in Natalia Ginzburg's Family Sayings, addressed the physical and emotional frailties of the human heart. The piece was created in part during a Pillow Works Residency at Jacob’s Pillow and was commissioned by On the Boards.

A quartet featuring Hanson, Hanson, Piacenza and John Dixon, September September was commissioned by Seattle Theatre Group in 2000 and premiered at The Moore Theatre before touring to U.S. cities including Chicago and Richmond, Virginia. Set to an original score by Kyle Hanson, September September was a nostalgic, neo-vaudevillian examination of how the changing light at the end of summer produces a magnified sense of mortality. Dance writer Hedy Weiss described September September in the Chicago Sun-Times as "beautiful, haunting, multilayered work that is performed with such seamless precision, such unearthly playfulness and such a delicate weave of memory and momentary pleasure, nostalgia and loss, that you begin to think you, too, are dreaming.”

The company’s fifth work, a trio called Dirty Work, was a tawdry, elaborately low-tech hallucination on themes of age, regret, and the art of performance, and drew from cinematic sources including Ingmar Bergman’s Summer Interlude and The Entertainer directed by Tony Richardson. Featuring video by Lynn Shelton, Dirty Work was presented in a three-week residency at the Performing Garage in 2002 as well as touring to the ICA London Highways in Santa Monica and Dance Umbrella, Austin, TX. Richard Faires, culture writer for The Austin Chronicle, called Dirty Work “a choreographic investigation of time, its detritus, and the work of performance—sometimes comic, sometimes melancholy, but always strikingly original.”

33 Fainting Spells’ final piece, Our Little Sunbeam, juxtaposed elements of Ivanov by Anton Chekhov with the Hanson and Hanson’s research into the U.S. space program. Featuring Hanson, Hanson and performer Linas Phillips, Our Little Sunbeam was commissioned by On the Boards, Walker Art Center and Dance Theater Workshop. The work was also presented by Jacob’s Pillow, TBA Festival, Miami Light Project and other venues.

Support and Honors 33 Fainting Spells received grants and awards for their work from National Endowment for the Arts, National Dance Project, MAP Fund and Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, among other funding organizations.

Dance Film Out of their own fascination with the hybrid art form of dance film, Hanson and Hanson introduced the genre to Seattle audiences with a biennial festival of international dance film, New Dance Cinema, which was produced by 33 Fainting Spells in partnership with Northwest Film Forum from 1999-2005.

In 2001 Hanson and Hanson co-directed “Measure", a seven-minute 16mm dance film shot by Alan Caudillo, edited by Lynn Shelton and produced by Carlo Scandiuzzi. Featuring Dayna Hanson’s choreography and performances by Dayna Hanson and John Dixon, Measure can be found at Tanz digital. as well as on First Run Features’ Dance for Camera DVD. Measure has screened at more than 50 festivals and film centers worldwide, including New York Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Edinburgh International Film Festival. The company directed a second 16mm short dance film, Entry, in 2003, with cinematography by Benjamin Kasulke and edited by Gaelen Hanson. In 2005, commissioned by The Film Company, a production arm of the Northwest Film Form, Gaelen Hanson directed a short 35mm dance film entitled “Your Lights Are Out Or Burning Badly,” which adapted a solo from Our Little Sunbeam for the screen with music by Kinski.

In 2006, Hanson and Hanson dissolved the company and embarked on individual pursuits in dance and film. In an article in The Seattle Times, writer Judy Chia Hui Hsu wrote of 33 Fainting Spells, “Over the years, they've injected their daring vitality into Seattle's contemporary dance scene, and with each successive innovation, challenged audiences to stretch with them.”