Daniel Alexander Jones

FREE and open to the public. Extended through August 6.

Daniel Alexander Jones collaborates with participants from the University of Washington, Meany Center and greater Seattle communities through a series of conversations and creative workshops. These gatherings will include several temporary altars to be installed in and around the UW campus. A one-day processional performance rite will animate the altars and feature music, poetry, movement and testimony, inviting folks to embody an act of imagining and remembering. An altar by Jones, featuring contributions from all his collaborators, will be installed in the Henry Gallery through July 9.

Altar no. 3: I Choose to Remember Us Whole extends Daniel Alexander Jones’s ALTAREDSTATES initiative which is housed at the CalArts Center for New Performance. Prior explorations were produced by CNP with support from New York Live Arts and NEFA, with commissioning funds from the Public Theater. ALTAREDSTATES invites participants into an intentional relationship with unseen forces that shape our lived realities, including waves of history, culture, cosmology, and Soul. Altars have traditionally served as meeting places between the material and the numinous, among and across a range of cultures and artistic forms. 

I Choose To Remember Us Whole is affiliated with the number 3 and has three core components: 

One — five altars imagined and manifested in response to the core theme, created by Seattle-based collaborators: 

Valerie Curtis-Newton (UW School of Drama, Founding Artistic Director The Hansberry Project)

Leon Finley (Interdisciplinary Artist)

Afroditi Psarra (Multidisciplinary Artist and Associate Professor, UW DXARTS) 

Althea Rao (Multidisciplinary Artist, PhD student, UW DXARTS)

Timothy White Eagle (Art/Ritual Objects and Performances)

Read artist descriptions about each of the altars

These altars will be animated on May 20 in a community processional devised in response to the core theme and the five anchor artists’ visions, by UW Department of Dance students from the class Dance 490C: Moving Altars: I Choose to Remember Us Whole.

Two — an altar installation in the Henry Art Gallery which will explore the theme of remembering, devised and created by Daniel Alexander Jones and including contributions the Seattle-based collaborators, including Wa Na Wari artists Inye Wokoma, Anne Wokoma and Elisheba Johnson. Walter Kitundu (Affiliate Faculty, UW School of Art) will make an offering for the May 20 Processional. 

Three — YOU! We invite you to participate in this project by filling out a MEMORY card (or two), available at the front desk of the Henry Art Gallery beginning April 6, and submitting them to the installation. We invite you to take part in the processional on May 20. And we invite you to consider the theme yourself, and discuss it with your loved ones, or maybe with a perfect stranger: what would it feel like to remember and to be remembered as whole beings? What would change? What would enable wholeness? And what can we do to embrace as whole what now seems irrevocably torn asunder?

Co-presented by Meany Center for the Performing Arts and the Henry Art Gallery as part of Becoming: At Home in the World, a curated series of events produced in partnership with Bill T. Jones and New York Live Arts.​

This co-presentation represents a deeper engagement with Bill T. Jones as 2022–23 Meany Center guest Artistic Associate, to increase artist engagement, support new work, amplify diverse voices and further expand and diversify audiences of contemporary performance in Seattle, including increasing access to new generations of artists and audiences.

Becoming: At Home in the World is generously sponsored by the Floyd and Dolores Jones Endowed Fund for the Arts, The College Inn Pub and by John Robinson and Maya Sonenberg.

Generous support for Altar No. 3: I Choose to Remember Us Whole comes from sponsors The U District Partnership, the City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and by the Neighborhood Matching Fund from the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods.

Funded in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Theater Project, with lead funding from The Mellon Foundation and support from the Doris Duke Foundation.