At the end of July — when Seattleites were scooping up box fans and crowding lakefront beaches to escape the heat of the city’s record-breaking streak of 90-degree days — I spent an early Saturday morning lying on the living room floor of artist Juniper Shuey’s apartment watching choreographer and performing artist Zoe Scofield dance.

Wearing only blue velvet leggings, she moved around inside an installation made from fragments of crumpled and jagged thin copper-leafed textile that she later describes as a “contained explosion.” There was an emotional intensity to her movements. She threw her arms out, twisted around herself, slid to the floor, grasped a piece of textile and wrapped it around her face. At one point, she knelt in the center of the installation, dipping her hands into a hole in the floor that contained a bowl of gold paint. Bowing her head, she tossed the liquid onto her body — an adornment, a supplication, a cleansing.

Although I was watching Scofield dance, she was not actually in the room with me. What I experienced is the virtual reality component of “The Other Shore,” a two-weekend show by dance and visual arts company zoe | juniper that will premiere at Seattle’s On the Boards this October. 

More than four years in the making, and with several iterations in its wake, “The Other Shore” is a homecoming of sorts. Zoe | juniper last performed at the venue six years ago, but the group’s out-of-the-box, intersectional approach to performance (it sits squarely at the crossroads between visual art and dance) has made the group an On the Boards mainstay in years past.

“Zoe and Juniper are really multidisciplinary artists,” says On the Boards artistic director Rachel Cook, who first met Scofield five years ago while working at DiverseWorks, a contemporary art and performance center in Houston. “They have a genuine curiosity for materials, and they think about aesthetic languages through multilayered and multidisciplinary expressions.”

Officially founded in 2006, zoe | juniper evolved from a creative collaboration between Scofield and Shuey that premiered at On the Boards’ NW New Works Festival in 2005. The 20-minute piece, “I am nothing without you,” caught the eye of the organization’s then-artistic director Lane Czaplinski, who approached the duo and asked them to create a full-length piece. 

Embodying the genre-crossing, boundary-pushing spirit of Seattle’s mid-2000s art scene, zoe | juniper began to produce work that was hard to classify but captivating to watch. A trained ballet and modern dancer, Scofield codified a mesmerizing signature style of movement, the performances of which were set in brilliantly artful installations created by Shuey. Reaching beyond a set of motions presented on an adorned stage, the duo’s work provided escapist, dreamlike worlds that evoked an emotional response.

In 2018, zoe | juniper started a residency at the Jacob’s Pillow performing arts space in Becket, Mass., that would, over the next four years, evolve into “The Other Shore.” A radical reexamination of the traditional audience/performer relationship, and the complicated power dynamics inherent within it, the work was slated to premier at Carolina Performing Arts in March 2020, but the Covid-19 pandemic derailed those plans.

Sydney Donovan has performed with many companies, including zoe | juniper’s “The other Shore.”

Juniper Shuey for zoe | juniper

“We were thinking about what happens when people are in a space together,” Scofield says, noting that for part of the show, audience members will lie on the floor as dancers perform above and around them. “There’s a new level of intimacy to [this positioning]. There might be points where I am sweating and breathing on you and we’re both very vulnerable. Part of what I’ve been thinking about is what it means to see and be seen, to regard each other, in a way that isn’t so controlled or prescribed.”

When the pandemic hit, instead of scrapping the show, Scofield and Shuey pivoted its presentation. In lieu of heading to the theatre, patrons received at-home viewing experiences: a box with an art book and a set of cardboard VR goggles that allowed them to watch performance videos of “The Other Shore” — the same ones I watched in Shuey’s living room.

“I’m really interested in the idea that how you view something changes the way you view it,” he says. In “The Other Shore,” audience members are each having their own solo experience rather than sharing a big-picture performance as they would if they were watching the show on a proscenium stage. All of those relationships — people’s thoughts and emotions and experiences — are part of the show and there’s beauty in that.”

The On the Boards premiere will offer two performance experiences, each held over a different weekend. The idea is to eventually have the two parts running at the same time, but the premiere will present them subsequently. The first weekend’s performance, “The Other Shore: Always Now,” is the segment when audience members (14 per show) will watch from the floor as six dancers move around them.

The second weekend, “The Other Shore: Future Ancestors,” features dancers performing solos in the “contained explosion.” Attendees will purchase timed-entry tickets and have a free-range viewing opportunity: They can sit in seats or walk around the installation, watching the dancer from different points of view.

Scofield says she’s been thinking about the viewer/performer relationship for years now. It’s an idea she has been exploring since 2013, when she first had audience members lie on the floor during a performance at Seattle’s Velocity Dance Center — but there’s something about the pandemic, and the ensuing isolation and disconnection, which makes “The Other Shore” all the more prescient. In addition to performance hierarchy, Scofield is also investigating ideas related to lineage, transformation and perspective, and looking at the question of whether we can affect or change the actions of those who are no longer with us in physical form.

“If you look back at peoples’ lives and the choices they’ve made in the decades and centuries before us, those choices are having a very real impact on our lives right now,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about the ways in which my actions can and will have an impact on people in the future, the future ancestors, and whether we can rectify the choices of those before us.”

“The Other Shore” runs at On the Boards October 5–9 and 19–23. Ontheboards.org