Underbelly | Degenerate Art Ensemble

Degenerate Art Ensemble's Underbelly took place in spaces around the Seattle Space Needle never intended to be seen by the public. Underbelly was a 4 part site transforming journey bringing the public to various locations around the Seattle Center as part of celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the 1962 World's Fair for which the Space Needle and the numerous public spaces and cultural facilities were constructed. Historically, World's Fairs were designed to project a vision of the future. These "predictions" were seldom accurate. Underbelly was offered a chance to reconsider that trajectory. Underbelly was part of a series of multi-discipline portraits of imagined iconic women examining power, transformation, and hidden phenomenon using music, dance, architectural site transformation and contemporary séance. Songstress fuses contrasting media and methods of storytelling into a single art environment, employing both time-based performance and music with time-static media such as portraiture and architecture to create a many angled looking glass on the subjects.