The Offshore Project’s “The Buffoon” (Photo: Bruce Dugdale)

The finals for The A.W.A.R.D. Show! at On the Boards tonight, Sunday, January 30, are sold out; you can call the box office, beginning at 3 p.m., to get on the wait list. Last night’s winner, The Offshore Project, joins tEEth and zoe | juniper. (See coverage of the first night’s program here.)

That Olivier Wevers didn’t pull off a win leaves me nonplussed, but it’s not like Whim W’Him needs the extra attention or even, comparatively speaking, the $10,000 prize. Otherwise I was hard-pressed to rank the rest of the program, as attendees are instructed to do, because all were strong for different reasons. (Besides the audience voting, there’s a post-show Q&A and written “notes” so that choreographers get a range of qualitatively different kinds of feedback for participating–which, all in all, may be worth more than $10,000.)

“Another Dadaist provocation!” is what I happily scribbled about The Offshore Project’s offering. You may know choreographer Rainbow Fletcher’s work from the Can Can Castaways group. For “The Buffoon,” they favored a steampunk Weimar cabaret aesthetic, with a live band (cellist Dylan Rieck wrote the tipsy jazz score) backing up the absurdist obstacles the Buffoon (Ezra Dickinson) encountered while pursuing a relationship with his favorite chair, and a table. Wearing a Buster-Keaton deadpan, the Buffoon crawled on, on top of, and beneath the chair, going to great lengths to secure his seat–including making his way across the stage, prone, using his shoulder and the tips of his feet for locomotion. A quartet (Fletcher, Jonathan Betchtel, Benjamin Meersmen, and Randall Phillips) alternate between amusing themselves and frustrating the Buffoon’s attempts. The piece blends humor (Dickinson’s cartoon-sneaky, high-knee small steps) and bravura beauty (Fletcher is “waltzed” across the stage with her partner holding her upraised hand and one extended leg’s ankle).

Yet how to rate that above SANDSTROMMOVEMENT‘s “the Decline,” with choreographer Ellie Sandstrom mustering an eight-dancer ensemble, and incorporating, by way of music, Chad Bieler’s assembly of a bass solo by Christopher Lytle; Alan Lomax recordings, an interview with Irmgard Bartenieff; “Cross the River Jordan” by Blind Willie McTell; an interview with Alphonse and Ulysses Picou; and “No More My Lawd” as sung by an unknown prisoner? If the ambitiousness of the work was not, apparently, matched by the rehearsal time required, you still got an eyeful of originality. Sandstrom deployed her forces en masse, in those quasi-martial poses that make her choreography distinctive, had them abruptly break into smaller cells–one group crossed the stage crouched down in a spider-like scuttle–then threw in a duet, a frantic, falling-down solo, and closed with herself on the floor looking up at the line of dancers, who, facing away from the audience, were s-l-o-w-l-y pulling up their T-shirts.

Far from ensembles and cabaret, you’d find Lauren Edson‘s “Part of Your Life,” a one-woman dance-and-video performance that managed to be both striking and indulgent. The video portion, projected on a huge screen that Edson appears from the wings to dance in front of, and flee from, is stop-motion glimpses of (Edson’s) life: it opened with her walking on the edges of things (roofs, concrete structures), and a voiceover spoke about both a fear of pigeons and happiness (Can you remember what it’s like?). Meanwhile an egg stop-motion fried in a pan, wine glass emptied, a dollhouse door opened, a rocking chair rocked, an armada of pennies crossed the screen, a faucet flowed. Edson’s classical ballet training has left her with a gracefulness that’s a pleasure to watch–she suggested a bird with her arms extended, elbows up to an extent that would mean dislocation for me–but it wasn’t until the music (by the Venetian Snares) gained in rhythmic intensity that her dancing left the realm of the merely pretty, and the frazzling low-level anxiety that underlaid the piece transformed into something real you could see. Unfortunately, the “home movies” continued for some time after that, until you felt a little trapped. This is why film editors make a good wage.

In contrast, Olivier Wevers’ “Fragments” was a torrent of ideas that, despite being in four parts, sped to its conclusion leaving you wanting more. Jeremy, who saw the work earlier, picked up on the seriousness that bursts into view from behind its louche set-up:

[“Fragments”] opens with a duet between Kelly Ann Barton and Vincent Lopez, both in tutus, lip-syncing to opera. Largely they perform the same movements, but Lopez, exaggerating a coquettish expression, comes off as aping the (sometimes) more serious Barton. But “Fragments” also shows off Wevers’ ability to create powerful drama […] a solo by Lopez set to Mozart’s Requiem, ends with the dancer contorted on the ground, back arched, caught somewhere between agony and ecstasy. The finely sculptured tableau is a powerful and beautiful image, achieved with neither the humor nor the light, athletic movements that are generally associated with Wevers’ work.

There’s a lot on display here, from a quarrel with gender categories to an eye for the human form. Spectrum’s Barton and Lopez are in corsets and ankle-length tutus, the kind that flow over an outstretched leg, and which in earlier days offered a not-quite-rigorous presumption of modesty. Two gestures–arms folded across the chest, a hand slid over the face–reoccur. Barton’s solo is energetic, in-your-face stuff, while Lopez’s is a slow, contorted crawl through a magenta spotlight, and has a Francis Bacon ambiance. Then Lopez, just in extremis, simply gets up, walks casually back to his corset and tutu, and rejoins Barton for a final pas de deux set to the Queen of the Night’s aria–the dancers trade a move where, seated, with legs together and knees up, they dance out on tiptoe the aria’s famous high notes.

The Get Up Kids will be at Neumo‘s on Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2011. Doors are at 7 p.m., tickets are available for $21 in advance, and the show is all ages.

The Get Up Kids aren’t really kids anymore.

Emo wasn’t always the maligned subgenre of punk that it is today. In the mid ’80s, East Coast hardcore punk bands begin to tire of being angry all the time. In fact, they started to feel downright sad about it. Bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace had people crying at their shows and musicians were realizing their music could have a power to inspire people to feel something other than anger.

About thirteen years after Rites of Spring and Embrace broke up, the genre was popularized and summarily ruined. While emo songs were always melodramatic, they became comically so. Bands like My Chemical Romance started wearing eyeliner and dyeing their hair black, brushing it to the side in a precursor to the world’s next Celine Dion, Justin Bieber. Yet just before this mainstream explosion, the genre was at its peak and producing some amazing bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, The Promise Ring, and Texas is the Reason.

The Get Up Kids appeared on the scene in 1997 and straddled the line between underground and mainstream just enough to keep their indie credibility. A couple years after forming and releasing their debut on Doghouse Records (whose Doghouse 50 compilation first introduced me to the band), the Kansas City, Missouri, quartet was signed by a tiny label called Vagrant Records and went on to make that label an indie household name. However, they never really broke into the mainstream.

Fans of The Get Up Kids often explain this in a simple way–their first two studio records were awesome, the last two… not so much. Four Minute Mile and Something to Write Home About are albums filled with songs that make you want to sing along because you feel the same things they do. The songs rock out when they need to and scale it back to create the proper tension when they’re supposed to. My sister and I wore our voices out on I-5 express lanes singing along to Something to Write Home About on the way to work many times. However, with On A Wire and Guilt Show, The Get Up Kids toned it down and lost all of their soul. There are a couple flashes of decency, but the records just don’t have the same emotion, and that’s what this genre is all about.

After a couple years off, the band started working on new material in 2009. While touring for Guilt Show, the band looked like they hated each other and played like it was their job. I saw them last year and, with the crowd singing along, the band was smiling and actually moving around the stage. Now a new record is on the way this year, and they are back in town to sing along with us again.  The new songs on There are Rules are decidedly more electronic and will probably appeal to the all-ages balcony section, while us old folks are on the floor waiting to sing along to the old material. Check out this track from the upcoming release, warm up your voices, and come out to the show.

SDP reprises Heidi Vierthaler’s “Surfacing” (pictured: Dana Hanson, from Project 2)

Across town, tEEth was winning night two of The A.W.A.RD. Show!, on the strength of “cross-platform, multi-media acrobatics,” and “performers barking, miming angst and literally chewing on each other’s face” (OtB’s Blog), but Seattle Dance Project had also assembled a sold-out crowd for their “Project 4” (at Erickson Theater Off Broadway, through Feb. 5). 

“Project 4” features works by Molissa Fenley, Heidi Vierthaler, Ellie Sandstrom (who also has a work in The A.W.A.RD. Show!), Stacy Lowenberg, and Hilde Koch–at least three of the choreographers were present last night. It’s hard to express just how exuberant Seattle’s dance scene is just now, but these two showcases happening in tandem gives you some idea.

While On the Boards crowds go in for edgy, cross-platform, boundary-defying pieces, watching Seattle Dance Project perform reminds me of how lively and virtuosic Seattle’s chamber music scene is, fed by the supply of talent at Seattle Symphony. In the same way, Pacific Northwest Ballet and other dance programs make SDP possible–and Seattle audiences get to see a range of new works, danced by mature artists with an amazing store of technique in just their fingertips.

Molissa Fenley’s “Planes in Air” is one of her “Prop Dances” and just had its premiere last November. Two dancers (Betsy Cooper and Oleg Gorboulev, last night) hold 3-foot balsa-wood-and-rice-paper fans, whose resistance dictates that arms become wings–they can push air or slice through it, but always with regard to the space the fan takes up. So the dancers’ arms are necessarily extended, and sweeping. In turns, one foot drags lightly behind. The cello music accompaniment is by Joan Jeanrenaud, and Fenley occasionally rhymes the foot-drag with the bow-drag on the strings. It is a delight to watch elfin Cooper perform–she finds a joyfulness in Fenley’s repetitions, and glee in a few runs down a diagonal that interrupt the more serene ambulations. At points, one dancer shares a fan with the other, so one is fully “winged”–it’s not a statement so much as an experiment, a “Here, see what you can do with this.”

“Surfacing,” the program says, is brought back by popular demand. Choreographer Heide Vierthaler shares credit with the dancers, which you sense as you watch. This and “Torque” initially put me off slightly–the style of movement used in “Surfacing” is eye-catching, angular contortions that emphasize the mechanics of jointed limbs, but a whole piece of twining arm around ankles, or impersonating irrigation sprinklers, would get boring. The title “Surfacing” may put you in mind of waterborne-life, large and small (at times I thought of paramecia under a microscope). But it turns out the dancers interact, in addition to forming shapes, and are curious creatures. They inspect each other–and, with equal interest, a lamp–and approach each other hands behind head, pointing with their elbows or an uplifting chin. The piece becomes a discovery of a new world of gestural behavior–a freshness I felt was undercut by the spotlight-going-out-on-single-dancer close. 

Ellie Sandstrom’s “Al Poco Tiempo” uses excerpts from Mozart pieces (well, it is his birthday), arranged by Chad Bieler, and counterposes Mozartean heights with a heaviness of foot, with awkwardness, with effortful movement, and with collapses to the floor. For some reason, there was a fan blowing streamers one side of the stage, and a trail of crumpled papers, though the dancers (Julie Tobiason, Alexandra Dickson, and Timothy Lynch) take no notice of any of it. They may well appreciate having a fan blowing, for all I know, but I couldn’t discern an artistic motivation. Tobiason has a solo in a shaft of light, reaching upward, then falling, and has little to do with Dickson and Lynch. (This is a work I bounced off almost completely–I just could not find a way in. I’ll be interested to see if someone else can illuminate it.)

Stacy Lowenberg’s “Rodin,” on the other hand, invites immersion. It’s a short, but sensual, balletic piece, danced to perfection by Michele Curtis and David Alewine, who seemingly never come to a full rest before reconfiguring in another dynamic pose. Lowenberg, who is leaving PNB after 17 years, knows to let the momentum build, and I liked the way she used the space: at one point, Alewine catches Curtis in a corner downstage, and Curtis at first puts the arrest into a slow forward rotation, her head ending up near her feet–and then she rotates all the way through, popping up again, unstoppable. Let’s see a statue do that.

Hilde Koch’s “Torque” comes with a little program note on “torque, moment of inertia, and angular acceleration,” and music from Arvo Pärt that is at the outset a little grating–loud bursts from silence. From an informal beginning–one dancer lying flat on the floor, others walking on–the piece constructs itself, with one or two of the eight-member ensemble dancing while the rest hold their position, facing offstage and rotating forward and backward slightly on the axis of their hips.  Then two lines of four intersect, curving and swerving through each other, before all eight join in unison. The trio of Alewine, Gorboulev, and Lara Seefeldt is worth the price of admission–Seefeldt is held between Alewine and Gorboulev, one leg free and torquing like loose electrical cable. Gorboulev grabs the free leg, dropping the other, and that one comes to alarming life. The work closes with a backwards retreat in a darkening room (all the evocative lighting is from Peter Bracilano).

Ballard farmers market photo courtesy of our Flickr pool’s lwestcoat

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