Performing Arts Preview for This Weekend and Next

Tonight is HERE/NOW Installment 8 at Open Flight Studio, one night only, $8 suggested donation at the door. This is the blind date of Seattle dance, a quarterly improvisational event which pairs eight previously selected sound artists and movement artists at random to create an 8-minute piece of something completely new. Like a blind date, bound to be exciting!

Choreographer Sarah Michelson joins playwright Richard Maxwell at On the Boards with the final performance of Devotion tonight, 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, a no less than the holy family themselves. [MvB's review is here.]

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.”

Next weekend, the latest of the Live at the Film Forum series, dancer Ezra Dickinson and sound artist Paurl Walsh bring us Actually Really, for a three-night run March 17-19 at the NW Film Forum, tickets $15. Dickinson will be scoring the piece while wires score his body, generating the audio from the movements of his body. I saw Amy O’Neal’s too at this event last year, and the space is kind of like a box with its side sliced off, audience privy to the action and projection on the back wall via steep stadium seating. Win tickets to Actually Really here! TSB is giving away a pair every night, courtesy of NWFF.

Seattle Theater Group’s BILLY ELLIOT: The Musical (sneak peek here!) opens next Wednesday at the Paramount Theater, tickets available after 6:30 p.m. at the door that evening.

The next two Saturdays performances for The BOOST Dance Festival will be at Erickson Theater on March 19 and 26, tickets $15. The Festival will showcase eight artists, present these works over the course of two weekends, and offer a variety of low-cost master classes open to the public Tuesday through Thursday (3/23 to 3/24). The master classes focus on fusing different dance styles. This years artists are Daniel Wilkins/DASS dance, Christin Lusk, Alana O. Rogers, Jennifer Elder, Aliza Rudavsky/The Kinematic Dance Project, Kate Wallich, Maya Soto/Soto Style, and Marlo Martin/bad marmar dance.