The A.W.A.R.D. Show! Returns For a Second Round At On the Boards

Zoe Scofield, “a crack in everything.” Photo by Juniper Shuey

It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times for Northwest (mostly Seattle) dance: the best because The A.W.A.R.D. Show! is upon us starting Thursday at On the Boards (through Sunday, Jan. 30; tickets $15), offering up to $10,000 to one lucky, audience-pleasing artist out of twelve contenders to make a new work; the worst because the last thing the area needs is another dance showcase, which are proliferating at a mad rate (Chop Shop and BOOST are coming up within the next two months).

So here’s the back story for all those who don’t know—and for all my apparent grousing, if I was in Seattle I’d totally be there every night (I almost flew back for it, so that should say something): A.W.A.R.D. stands for “Artists with audiences responding to dance,” and the entire deal started in mid-Aughts when then-NYC-based choreographer Neta Pulvermacher was looking for a new way to engage audiences with dance, acknowledging that one of the biggest problems dance faces is a lack of literacy in the populace. The more dance you see, the more it becomes like any other engaging activity—reading, watching movies, listening to music—and sure, some of it’s bad and some of it’s mediocre and some of it will blow your mind and implant itself somewhere in your psyche and you’ll carry it to your grave. But first, we’ve all got to yet you into the theatre to experience the work.

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So Pulvermacher’s informal salons got picked up by the Joyce Soho, and at some point a big $10,000 grant was attached and The A.W.A.R.D. Show! became an audience voting competition that, in 2009, went national to a half-dozen cities due to a generous sponsorship by Boeing. Each of the first three nights, four choreographers will present a 15-minute work or section of a longer work; the audience votes and whoever wins goes on to the final night on Sunday. There, the three finalists will perform the same work, and a winner will be determined. The audience votes again, but they award only one point out of five, the other four being awarded a panel of experts made up of Pat Graney, Jen Salk, Linda Shelton, and last year’s winner, Amelia Reeber. The winner gets $10,000; the runners up each get $1,000.

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So how does this break down? Well, the line-up is actually a little more interesting and competitive this year than last, for a couple reasons. One, last year there was a lot of ambivalence in the dance community about putting their work out there for popular judgment, reality-show style. The fact that Reeber won last year at least partially put that to rest: Reeber’s a seriously gifted and artistically uncompromising choreographer, one of Seattle’s finest, and the fact that she could win seems to have inspired a bit more interest in the program. But two, as if to try to knock everyone off their footing, this year, the committee that chose applicants (which was made up on the artist directors of OtB and the other institutions presenting A.W.A.R.D. Show programs around the country) added in three artists and companies working in a cabaret vein. That should have the contemporary dance choreographers sweating, as each night one member of the line-up will be working in a form that’s already seen as more audience friendly.

The three are the Offshore Project, Cherdonna and Lou, and the inimitable Waxie Moon. The Offshore Project (performing Saturday) are, of course, the people that The Stranger‘s Brendan Kiley has accused of tricking people into liking modern dance. Led by choreographer Rainbow Fletcher and dancer Ezra Dickinson, it’s essentially the crew of the Can Can cabaret in the Market. That said, Fletcher is recognized as an accomplished choreographer and only a couple weeks later the company will be part of the Amy O’Neal-curated The Lowdown at the Moore Theatre.

The Cherdonna and Lou Show (Thursday) is the strange, postmodernist cabaret act devised by dancers Ricki Mason and Jody Kuehner in which they perform as Lou Henry Hoover and Cherdonna Shinatra, a fictionalized soft-rock act from the late-70s/early-80s who play out their life onstage in a sort-of send-up of the likes of Sonny and Cher. If the act has a weakness, it’s that you have to come in with a fairly strong idea of the scenario to make sense of it: that’s one of the risks of taking a cabaret act out of its element, but like Dickinson and Fletcher, these two are accomplished modern dancers and their cabaret style is about as high-brow as they come.

The dark horse, in a weird way, is Waxie Moon, a.k.a., Marc Kenison (Friday). A boylesque act, I’ve raved and raved endlessly about Moon in the past. By and large, the circus art, neo-cabaret, neo-burlesque thing in Seattle is ridiculously played out, but Waxie Moon rises above the rest because of how innovative and fresh his performances are. However, I do tend to feel that Kenison will need to show more dance chops than I’ve previously seen in his act to deserve to win. That’s not to say he doesn’t have them, mind you, I’m just saying that’s what I’d be looking for. Though I would like to see if his A Chorus Line act could win (I don’t know if he’s performing)…now that would be a judgment on Seattle dance!

Josephine’s Echopraxia (Marissa Rae Niederhauser), “stifle”: Rosa Vissers, Marissa Rae Niederhause), Meredith Horiuchi, Meredith Sallee, and Allie Hankins. Photo by Ryan K. Adams

Two of the pieces promise to be rock influenced: Ellie Sandstrom‘s the DECLINE (Saturday), and Marissa Rae Niederhauser‘s Saying goodbye again and again and again and again… [stifle] (Friday), featuring live musicians led by the Murder City Devils’ Spencer Moody. Both should be exciting and intense. Olivier Wevers’ Whim W’Him (Saturday)—returning from last year’s edition along with Lauren Edson and Shannon Mockli—is presenting Fragments, which showed at On the Boards last year as part of the evening with the debut of Three Seasons. A five part danse bouffe, I’d say it all turns on how well the audience responds to dancer Vincent Lopez’s solo set to one of Mozart’s requiems, which me and a number of other critics have been blown away by.

Portland’s tEEth (Friday) are also making their way up to Seattle for the show, and this is a company I’d be very interested to see. Based on my limited experience with their work, they thing way outside the box in terms of movement, and I have a lot of respect for their approach and fascination with their work, which–based on what I’ve seen–tends to work well outside the world of traditional dance technique but is nevertheless deeply compelling movement.

And finally, there’s Zoe Scofield, who will be presenting a selection of her company’s new work, a crack in everything, which debuts this year at Jacob’s Pillow and goes on to tour nationally through 2012. I’ve seen too showcase presentations of parts of this show here in New York over the last few weeks, and it’s visually stunning and, based on the small selections of movement I’ve seen, extremely compelling.

Unfortunately, I can’t speak to the work of Shannon Mockli, Crispin Spaeth, Lauren Edson, and Quark Dance, which I don’t know (or don’t know well enough to comment on), but there you go. The A.W.A.R.D. Show! is presenting a dozen of the region’s top artists in a three-day buffet sampler of dance. The risks that something will be bad or boring are high, but whatever else, the program offers audiences the chance to really engage with a variety of artists, and the talkbacks afterward (despite there being something kind of dumb to with “P.O.E.M.”–you’ll see what I mean) present audiences with an unusual chance to actually seek out information on what these choreographers are doing.

And finally, as voting members of a really big panel awarding grants, you finally get to help put your imprimatur on the dance world by supporting the sort of art that moves you. The ability to do that in whatever small way is absolutely what motivates people like me to put ourselves through this more than any human being should have to, so seize the moment, get excited, and take part.