Knuckle Cartel’s mother is Headmistress MANDIE O’CONNELL.  She is a performer, playwright, director, spectator and speculator.  Among many other things.  Blah Blah Blah.

MANDIE O’CONNELL

Mandie O’Connell was raised in Hailey, Idaho, where she learned how to be lonely.  She also learned how to throw an axe, light a fire, pan for gold, and piss outdoors.  Among many other things. Blah Blah Blah.  She moved to Seattle, Washington at the tender age of 17 to attend ACTING SCHOOL!  It was mostly a nightmare.  In 2003/2004 O’Connell was one of the founders of Implied Violence, an experimental theater ensemble based in Seattle.  She performed, wrote, and directed for Implied Violence with her partner, Ryan Mitchell, until 2010, when she decided to leave the company.  Mandie moved across the country and across the wide Atlantic to Berlin, Germany, where she remains today.   See her past work at www.impliedviolence.org

Knuckle Cartel collaborates with Herr DARIN SHULER, a tour-de-force of crazy n’ brilliant illustration.

DARIN SHULER

Darin Shuler grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 80’s and 90’s. He gets most of his artistic influences from the comic books, cartoons and video games he obsessed over in his formative years. He attended the Evergreen State College to study art and illustration, focusing on drawing. Since graduating in 2005 he has been putting up shows around Seattle and made dozens of posters and design projects for bands. Darin moved to North Carolina last year to see what its like to live in the sleepy South. He is still working like crazy. He is a third of “TEETH collective”, an art gang designed to put the bark and the bite back into art, and one half of the North Carolina illustration force known as “SOLID GOLD”. He is also a faithful artistic servant to Mandie O’Connell and Knuckle Cartel. More of his work can be seen at www.flickr.com/photos/super-rare/ as well as http://darindraws.blogspot.com/ and http://teethblog.tumblr.com/

Also a Knuckle Cartellion is Ms. ALLIE HANKINS, the amazing and incredible dancer-slash-choreographer-slash-beauty behind the amazing Part & Parcel.  

ALLIE HANKINS

Allie Hankins holds a BA in Dance from the University of New Mexico. From 2004-2008 she taught modern dance to children and adults, as well as teenagers in the Pre-Professional Program at Keshet Dance Company in Albuquerque. Her choreography was commissioned by the North 4^th Arts Center for their annual Wild Dancing West Festival, and she was a core member of Blythe Eden Dance Company from 2003-2008, with whom she toured to New York and San Francisco. In 2005 she co-founded the PutAttention Dance Collective, whose multimedia work was presented regularly in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. In the summer of 2007, she was granted the opportunity to dance a reconstruction of Mary Wigman’sHexentanz in the documentary Mary Wigman: Die Seele des Tanzes, which was filmed in Berlin, Germany. 

In 2008 she relocated to Seattle, where she was quickly hired as the Choreographer for local theater company Implied Violence. Their newest work, The Dorothy K, was performed at the New Island Festival in New York in the Summer of 2009, and at the prestigious Donaufestival in Krems, Austria in the Spring of 2010. Most recently The Dorothy K was staged as a five hour installation in the reflecting pools outside the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. Allie has been the recipient of two residencies since moving to Seattle in 2008: The Flight Deck residency at Open Flight Studio (2009), and the ROOT SEASON Residency at Studio Current (2010). Her work has been shown in 12 Minutes Max at On the Boards, in Spin the Bottle at Annex Theater, and at Open Flight Studio. She has danced for choreographers Marissa Niederhauser (Josephine’s Echopraxia), Paige Barnes (PB_TMOG), Beth Graczyk and Corrie Befort (Salt Horse). See more of her work at http://partandparcelperformance.wordpress.com/

WILLIAM D. BRATTAIN

William D. Brattain is a performance and mixed-media artist currently located in Seattle, WA. A 2007 graduate of Cornish College of the Arts, William holds a BFA in Theater with an Original Works emphasis as well as a Certificate in Playwriting from the University of Washington Extension School, 2003.

As a performer, William has appeared in numerous productions by Implied Violence, most notably as Hamilton in Barley Girl, part of Our Summary in Sequence (2008), in which he also worked as part of the collaborative ensemble for Versus and Eat, Fight, Fuck (also known as the piece that William got incredibly drunk in), the other 2 performances in that triptych. Also with I.V., he assisted as an ensemble member for Flinch Not and Give Not Back (2009 – 2010) and performed in the 5-hour piece in the reflecting pools of the Frye Art Museum, The Dorothy K.: For Better, For Worse, and Forever (2010).

As Artistic Director of TIT (the irrealist theater), William produced and directed his play Amniotes: an imaginary History of the end of the World from 1954 – 20XX (2010).  He is currently working to develop and advance an Irrealist aesthetic for performance, simultaneously codifying Irreal techniques in word and image, working under a mode of production termed EXTREME PROVENANCE.