For the past 11 years, Seattle-based dancers Jenny Peterson and Kaitlin McCarthy have been creating contemporary dance works for audiences in the Pacific Northwest. Now they’ve embarked on their first West Coast tour, which arrives next weekend at San Diego’s Liberty Station.
The evening-length work they’re presenting is “Drive Wolves Mad,” which examines the ambiguous line between victim and perpetrator with elements of humor, horror and friendship. The work features an original score by Peterson featuring riffs on predatory-themed pop songs.
The 60-minute dance piece includes some moments of nudity and implied violence, though the violence is abstract. Peterson and McCarthy recommend the show for adults or mature high school students.
They recently answered some questions via email about their work together, their tour and “Drive Wolves Mad.”
Q: How did you two meet and when did you begin collaborating?
Jenny Peterson: We met casually in class in 2010 and then our bond was solidified when we were in the same stressful and unfortunate performance experience together. You could say we trauma bonded, but from the very beginning we had a very similar sense of humor and edge to our personalities. We have always had this amplifying sort of gleeful and rebellious way of dealing with the world. We co-produced (along with Rachel Rugh) an evening length of work in 2013 called “Hot Mess” and this was the seed for not only showing our own work alongside each other but working together as collaborators.
Kaitlin McCarthy: We briefly worked in a dance company together before we quickly realized we’d rather be dancing for each other. It was a bit of a kindred spirits thing. Jenny’s personality is so open about being a kind of over-the-top weirdo that working with her I felt safe for my weirdness to come out, too. Our aesthetics and interests align, and we’ve built a real trust in the other’s ideas, even when we don’t understand them yet. I had always dreamed of having a collaborator soulmate to make art with, so I feel totally blessed that we found each other.
Q: How does your collaboration as dance partners work?
Peterson: There has been some evolution over the years. We have been through creative processes where one or the other took the creative lead and have now landed in a place where we are working towards a truly collaborative shared vision. We each have our own separate contributions (Jenny-music, Kaitlin-costuming, props), but we both have veto power and input at every stage. We are lucky to mostly be compatible in our likes and dislikes and we know each other well enough to trust the process of following the other down our impulses and creative rabbit holes. We like to be working on a larger more “serious” project while also leaving ourselves open to spur of the moment performances and quicker generative processes. We have been really enjoying performing as guests in Seattle’s drag scene and at other nightlife type events under the moniker “The Bonnies.”
McCarthy: Jenny is kind of a genius ex-child-prodigy type who can learn to do anything. She’s just picked up this music thing and ran with it, but she also does art photography, writes poetry, you name it. She’s a creative fountain. I am a bit more feet on the ground, so I end up doing a lot of the practical stuff like booking rehearsal space and writing grants, but I also have a lot of visions around costumes and props, so those tend to be my department. It’s always collaborative though. When I wanted to make costumes printed with our own faces, Jenny used her photography and photoshop skills to make a pattern where our repeating faces blend seamlessly from one to the next. I then printed it on fabric and designed and constructed the costumes. The costume concept is playing with feminine ideals of appearance but distorting them to be off-putting. Then for example, with the music, I brought in a Sufjan Stevens song I love (“Christmas Unicorn”) that starts in one place and then through this musical sleight of hand, slowly emerges into this recognizable pop song. I said, Jenny can we start in one song and end in another like this? And she made my dream happen in a way more beautiful and satisfying than I could have imagined.
Q: What are some of the thematic topics that have inspired your past work together?
McCarthy: Our first truly collaborative piece in 2013, “Umbilical,” was researching the dynamic of suffocation and pulling away that I think can happen on both sides of the mother-child relationship. We had a 50-foot scarf that we bound ourselves in, Jenny would unravel her dress on stage (I’d have to re-crochet it every night), and we did this partnering phrase of folding and unfolding our bodies where Jenny is literally stacked on top of me.
It was such a rich process that we eagerly dove right in again and in 2014 created the seed that would eventually become “Drive Wolves Mad.” But between a misunderstood in-process showing, a couple of funding opportunities that fell through, and our individual performance and choreographic careers ramping up, that work got put on the back burner.
We kept making short comedy pieces that we’d show around town as The Bonnies — often character work and awkward physical humor interposed with fussy and particular rhythmic choreography — but I always yearned to return to our more research-based process, and we were always coming up with ideas that we knew belonged in a longer-form, more serious work.
In 2022 we decided to return to that old 2014 piece — we had one rehearsal recording — and see what would happen if we threw everything we had into it. I love our Bonnies work, but working on a big, ambitious project and seeing that vision come to life — making it everything we wanted it to be–that has been so meaningful. And it paid off. Because of “Drive Wolves Mad,” we were asked to make a new big, ambitious work for Velocity Dance Center’s 2026 Season.
Peterson: We have been inspired by our own id and by fantasy. We are inspired by the overlap of the personal and political, often using dance to disassemble both events in our own lives and current events/cultural phenomena, finding the interconnection between the two. We are fascinated by events that happened in our lifetimes but that we only experienced as part of the cultural milieu. The process of recontextualizing and finding meaning outside of the dominant narrative is a continued interest, which means exploring morally ambiguous territory — the villain, the violent, the cast off, the maligned — often with a feminist leaning.
Q: Jenny can you talk about your original score for “Drive Wolves Mad”?
Peterson: I started getting seriously into music in 2021 when I decided to revisit piano lessons after a 20-plus-year hiatus. “Drive Wolves Mad” is the first time I have endeavored to make (almost) all of the sound for a dance work. This included arranging, piano and theremin playing, singing, recording, etc. I also had some collaborative help (Brandon Milner contributed a percussion track and Peter Zachos mixed one of the songs). This work features several covers of pop songs that we consider predatory in some way. We wanted to reauthor them outside of the context of male experience. How is it different for a woman-coded person to sing “Run my good wife, you’d better run for your life?” The score also features more original atmospheric sound that contains abstracted elements from these pop songs. The whole thing is connected in subtle ways that may not be obvious but I believe can be felt. Our next work is going to feature more original compositions and songwriting so stay tuned.
Q: What was the inspiration for “Drive Wolves Mad”?
McCarthy: The seed for the show was a choreographic study we made in 2014 in response to the Isla Vista shooting/murders (at UC Santa Barbara) and the horror we felt that those students were killed not because of who they were or what they did, but because of what they symbolized inside some male fantasy. That’s the way it so often is in male violence. We set that material aside for eight years, but it always stuck with us. When we returned to it, we brought with us everything that had happened in those eight years, both personally and politically.
The insidiousness of misogyny, the way it plays out in large and small ways. The idea of subverting the male fantasy still really resonated with us as a way to take back power. The whole piece is about moving from a disempowered place into an empowered one, and all the stages that happen along the way in a recovery process — from dissociation and depression to violent urges of our own, and eventually finding our way to tenderness and freewheeling joy.
It’s about the way friendship can bring you through something. Also I’m making it sound heavy, but this piece is not a bummer to watch. There are moments of lightness and beauty and our kind of bizarre humor. Internally I feel like we are laughing the whole time as we perform this. To tell this story makes me feel like I am living in the final freewheeling joy state — the arc of the piece is not just theoretical; the act of making it healed some deep part of me.
I think that’s true for Jenny, too. Part of the piece we call “Jenny Joy” and it was entirely based on a fantasy Jenny had of being totally supported, floating in water. She made a gorgeous cover of The Carpenter’s hit “You’ve Only Just Begun” for this section, because we felt moved by Karen Carpenter’s story — the way this wildly talented person struggled so deeply, and never got the full life or creative control she deserved. So it’s a bit of an homage.
Images and ideas inspired by survivor stories, cultural phenomena, and other works of art are woven throughout. We even have our own take on the Kingdom of the Shades, the famous parade of female spirits from the ballet “La Bayadère.”
Q: This is your first joint tour of the West Coast. Why now?
Peterson: I have fortunately had the experience of performing the same work in multiple cities over several years and watching the evolution that happens when given those opportunities. I thought that this work deserved the opportunity to deepen in that way. After our Seattle premiere (February 2024) it just felt like we were not done with this piece.
There is also a bit of a funny and tragic running theme in this work that has led us to believe it is cursed. From our very first showing in 2014 (which was the seed) to our evening-length premiere, we have been plagued by missed opportunities, major injuries, illnesses, etc. We figured one of these times we are going to get through a whole weekend without a problem! How do you overcome a curse? I think you just keep showing up and hitting the demon over the head with a big metal pot of cream of wheat.
‘Drive Wolves Mad’
When: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 8 and 9
Where: Light Box Theater, 2590 Truxtun Road, Suite 205, Liberty Station, San Diego
Tickets: $20.57-$27.99
Online: drivewolvesmad.com