Paris Hurley's "Bridging Wounds"--Live at the Film Forum!

Paris Hurley in "Bridging Wounds," photo by Bruce Tom

Paris Hurley does have a distinctive haircut. Sitting right behind her in the main theatre at the Northwest Film Forum last week while she rehearsed for her show Bridging Wounds (8 p.m. this Thurs.-Sat., tickets $12-$15), I got a really good look. Near the crown of her skull, her jet-black hair is cut short enough to stand on end, and can occasionally pop up in a cowlick. You can see a bit of pale scalp peeking through. From there, her hair parts along the right and comes down into two long tresses, dyed different colors at the ends, that frame her face. On the right side, the hair is slightly longer than on the left.

"I always cut my own hair," she explained, "and people always ask, 'Oh, where do you go? I like your hair!' People always ask me to cut their hair, because they like my hair. But I don't know what I'm doing! That's the theme of everything [in the show]—I don't know what I'm doing! So I give in sometimes and I give people haircuts, and I'm always like, 'I don't know what I'm doing!' It's my big disclaimer. It might not turn out! And sometimes it looks great, and sometimes I'm like, 'Oops! Sorry!' So I was like, well, let's do an experiment and see how many people are willing to get a haircut from someone who has sign on top of them that says: 'Free Haircuts—I don't know what I'm doing.'"

She was referring back to early August, when she and some of her collaborators on Bridging Wounds rented a booth at the Sounds Outside Festival at Cal Anderson Park, to conduct one of their final "experiments" for developing the show. In the end, Hurley wound up giving six people haircuts, and turning away several others.

"Everyone was happy! I was on a roll that day!" she said, laughing.

An Arizona native, Hurley moved to Seattle in 2002 at the age of 18 on more or less a whim. A violinist, she spent the prior year at Arizona State studying classical violin. In Seattle, she enrolled at Cornish College of the Arts, only to run into the initial disappointment that Cornish didn't have a classical, conservatory-based program. But over the next four years, she was seduced into the radical, experimental culture of Cornish's arts programs, and by 2005, the year before she graduated, Hurley was a member of Degenerate Art Ensemble , with whom she performed until 2008.

A still from Amanda Moore's animation from "Bridging Wounds"

Today, Hurley's a widely respected member of Seattle's experimental music community, the violinist for Kultur Shock, with whom she's about to go on her third European tour, and now, with Bridging Wounds: Staying the Course of Uncertainty, she's bringing her first major performance piece to the stage as the inaugural show for the Northwest Film Forum's new "Live at the Forum" series. Through movement, music, and animation, Hurley and her collaborators dissect their central character's psyche as she struggles through life with no real reference points to guide her. Hurley herself had a bit of a time putting into words the central idea of the show, but it calls to mind the old German expression Einmal ist keinmal—roughly, doing something once is like never having done it at all, as applied to life. Or, as Hurley puts it far more simply: "It's all vulnerability being an important thing, and just really admitting, 'I don't know what I'm doing.'"

The germination of Bridging Wounds came about two years ago, as a collaboration between Hurley and Beth Fleenor , a clarinetist with whom she started performing under the name Double Yoko, in reference to the fact that on more than one occasion, she and Fleenor had broken up a quartet by leaving simultaneously. Originally, the piece was more musical than movement. Though Hurley did some performance with DAE, she primarily thinks of herself as a musician, and develops movement through the act of playing. In fact, it's only in the last month that Hurley decided to abandon playing her violin at all in the piece, which now features her doing movement along with talented local movement artist Ezra Dickinson, who did most of the choreography for the piece as well as performs.

"It started out as, I was going to have my violin in hand the whole time, and I was going to be moving as a response to the music I was playing, and bringing that out into further realized choreography," Hurley explained following a run-through with Dickinson. "Through developing this story and this character, Ezra and I started working on it, and realizing, 'Oh, okay—so why are we performing live? What are our characters, what are we doing? Oh, well, I'm the external representation of this thing, and you're the internal representation, okay, so let's go from that place.' A lot of it was built around imagery, like I had this image of him just standing there ladling paint over himself. Or these different poses in the chair. And so we started from that place, and there was just never a reason to pick up the violin in our rehearsals."

Photo by Bruce Tom.

The show was constructed around a series of very concrete images and ideas. Among the first that came to Hurley was the idea of strings, which suggested "the connectivity of all things. The space between point A and point B, and what happens in that space." Originally, Hurley conceived of herself playing violin onstage anchored into place, with dozens of strings tied off to her body and stretching out around her to other points in the space. While that particular concept was jettisoned, the strings remain, stretching out in a lattice-work over the audiences' heads.

The show is structured as a series of movement pieces performed by Dickinson and Hurley, interspersed with animated video from local artist Amanda Moore, with live music by a team of superb local musicians including Fleenor, X-Ray Press's Adam Kozie on drums, Jherek Bischoff on bass, Alex Guy of Led to Sea on viola and other strings, and Samantha Boshnack of Reptet on horns.

In the movement pieces, Hurley stands in for the central character, while Dickinson performs as a sort of representation of the character's psyche. One movement is simply based on waiting at an airport; Hurley paces back and forth, she changes shoes between stiletto heels and a well-worn pair of old boots. The designers rely mostly on incidental lighting rather than stage lights, which creates some dramatic effects. In one long sequence, Hurley uses just a flashlight, trained on her foot as the slides her heel back and forth and on the stage. In another, a large functional sculpture, designed by iacoli&mccallister, comes down over Dickinson and illuminates him from above. As Hurley pinpoints parts of his body with the flashlight and Dickinson runs through a series of repetitive motions, Moore's clever, artful stop-motion animation depicts the internal workings on the body.

The idea of travel became central to the piece, not only because it served as a compelling metaphor for the idea of life as a journey and a process, but also just because Hurley's been traveling a lot more, touring with Kultur Shock. One of the central animated sequences, "The Bag Story," is based on her first tour with the band last year. It all started in Slovenia, where the band kicked off a two-week tour. Hurley, who was new to the band and struggling with the challenges of being on the road, connected with a Slovenian woman who worked with them, despite the fact that she didn't speak English well and Hurley didn't speak Slovenian. This was the woman she got the bag from.

"She loaned me this bag," Hurley said, telling the story, "because I had to go on part of the tour and couldn't bring my luggage—which I hadn't been told about—because we didn't have room in the van. So we had to take out back-line on that part. So they're like, 'Yeah, we have to be gone for 14 days right now, and we'll come back here and pick things up.' So she loaned me this bag that I carried around with me everywhere. And that was a really hard part of the tour, because of the process I was going through and where the band was at at the time. Six weeks with seven dudes is what I call it. It was a new experience!"

Another still from Amanda Moore's animation.

"So I had this bag, and it was kind of like a safety blanket, in a way," Hurley explained, "and I met this woman that I connected with, and I'm with all these dudes, now I have this thing that I can kind of pull from. So it's the story of all the experiences that I had with the bag. And it came about because the bag broke. I was in Dubrovnik, walking through the old town at 3 a.m., bats are screeching everywhere, I'm by myself, and I'm walking back—we're staying in these nuns' quarters—and the bag all of a sudden just drops off my shoulder. I just stood and looked at it, and it was this moment of, 'Oh my God! My one thing is breaking!' And my boots were breaking, everything was breaking."

To make up for breaking the bag, which had been made by the woman's mother, Hurley decided that she'd simply record the experiences she had with the bag, which eventually became the film, a story in honor of the bag, Hurley's friend, and a record of her experiences. The boots she mentioned made it into the show, too, a sign of her Southwestern roots that have worn through the soles. Bridging Wounds is their last hoorah. Hurley's got a new pair, though, which should serve her well on the next tour; after Bridging Wounds, she's back on the road with Kultur Shock for a two-month tour starting in October.