Your Weekend Performing Arts Preview

There Is An Elephant In This Dance-Highlights from from Cari Ann Shim Sham* on Vimeo.

Lionel Popkin comes to Velocity Dance Center as part of their Guest Artist Series tonight and tomorrow with There Is An Elephant In This Dance, tickets $15, in a special performance with Seattle favorites Peggy Piacenza and Mark Haim. His choreography is deceivingly playful mixing human and creature movements as his dancers slip in and out of pieces of a furry elephant suit. He's holding drop-in master classes ($15 each) this weekend, also at Velocity.

If you're under the impression that master classes are only for the "masters," they are open to the public and for anyone interested in getting to experience the movement you saw on stage on your own body. I had a great time at the Kidd Pivot master class a couple weeks ago, when they were performing at On the Boards.

Speaking of OtB, choreographer Sarah Michelson joins playwright Richard Maxwell at On the Boards with Devotion next week for one weekend only, tickets $25. Last time she was here in 2005 she turned OtB white with Daylight. This time around her piece will feature the The New York City Players company, the minimalist sounds of Philip Glass, and no less than the holy family themselves.

The piece engages the figures of the Christian narrative with those of Michelson's own (portraits of her by TM Davy share the stage). Claudia la Rocco's New York Times review of the work's world premiere praises the Michelson's "gloriously severe dancing." The work pushes its performers and pushes the audience members right up close "to see just what these punishing stretches of movement cost the performers, and how the effort exalts them."

News Wrights United takes The New New News: A Living Newspaper to its final stop at North Seattle Community College tickets $15 (or pay what you can), where it will run for the next two weekends (March 4-6, 11-13). Our own Michael van Baker saw it last week at the Erickson Theater off-Broadway and he found "real drama in the way the play catches people struggling with a profound insecurity in the face of technological disruption... an experimental hybrid of news-gathering and drama." The work brings topics like web traffic and monetization to the stage--an experiment that pays off and leaves you talking as you're walking out the door.

Also "in the news" this week is the Live Girls! Theater premier of Victoria Stewart's Hardball, directed by Meghan Shalom Arnette, which runs through March 26 at Annex Theater, tickets $5-18. Rather than the print (pixel?) coverage, the play is set in the "24 hour cable news landscape" and tracks Washington Post reporter Virginia Eames' firing for openly displaying her politics in the office, and her ensuing crusade to prove that bias in media is inevitable.

Tonight at Annex is their monthly late-night variety show (going on for 14 years!), "Spin the Bottle," at 11 p.m., tickets $10. Sweet songs, sideways smut, and puppets will be tonight's fare.