Monthly Archives: March 2012

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

Hurry to Catch the Limon Dance Company

When Lizt Alfonso Dance Cuba canceled its gig on the UW World Series with less than seven weeks to go, a perfect happenstance came about. Limon Dance Company just happened to be free for just those same dates, able to come and, what’s more, offered the first preview performance of a new work.

Limon chooses to try out new works for a series of previews, so that the work can be modified, changed, tightened, or whatever choreographer, composer and dancers feel is needed to make it the strong work they envisioned it to be.

Thursday night at UW Meany Theater, the preview of Rodrigo Pederneiras’ Come With Me was the last work on a program of classic Limon works, celebrating the company’s 65th season, and the 40th since Jose Limon’s death.

The timelessness of Limon’s choreography came through clearly. His 1956 There is a Time, to music of Norman Dello Joio, the 1942 Chaconne to Bach’s music and, perhaps the most famous, The Moor’s Pavane from 1949 to Henry Purcell’s music, all were as absorbing as ever, the choreography as strong, as imaginative, as undated.

There is a Time takes its rationale from Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,” plus the list that follows, so both movement and music are a series of variations reflecting the words.

It was superbly danced by the company, every member of which seemed to have gone inside the words and brought them out in their movements. It was a shame that the words of each variation couldn’t be glanced at as they happened, but the auditorium lights were too low to be able to read. Some variations were obvious—“A time to kill,” “A time to weep,” “A time to laugh,” “A time to love,” were all clear, but—but others needed a momentary reminder to understand what was being danced.

Chaconne is a solo, danced Thursday by Raphael Boumaila dressed simply in a black shirt and pants.What strikes the watcher here is how Limon follows the music so carefully, enlivening it with movement. Gestures repeat or are slightly changed as the music does the same, and in an absorbing performance Boumaila captured the flow of this marvellous expressive, rich yet unadorned, towering edifice of Baroque music. It’s not easy to dance, being long for a solo and quite slow, so that balance and flow maintain their strength to the end.

For many, The Moor’s Pavane needs no introduction. It takes its cue from Shakespeare’s Othello, but intends its tale of love, betrayal and murder to be more universal. It’s one of those works which sticks in the mind long after it’s been seen, in my case perhaps 40 years.

Limon would be proud of his company and its quality today. Moor is as breathtaking to watch today as it was all those years ago: the slow unfolding of sheer wickedness and its consequences.

Pederneiras’ work is, luckily, strong enough to hold its own with these three preceding it. Paquito D’Rivera composed the score thinking of the Cuban “Ladies in White” who walk silently through the streets protesting the inhumanity of Castro’s government. Pederneiras does not follow that theme particularly. He does take the jazz and unmistakably Latin flavor of the music into the dance. Quicksilver footwork, sharp, often edgy, crisp, clean movements, loaded with rhythm abound, with a fine sense of using stage space. The whole is perhaps a bit too long, but that is what previews show.

Performances continue 8.p.m. Saturday March 4 at UW Meany Theater.

Health, News

Seattle Looks at Joining a Prescription Discount Card Program

Yes, you can stop in at boutique healthcare offices for under a $100 per visit, but what happens when you need that prescription filled?

City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen is pushing for Seattle to join nine other Washington cities–Tacoma, Shoreline, Sammamish, Puyallup, Auburn, Marysville, Burien, Airway Heights, and Union Gap– in participating in the National League of Cities Prescription Discount Card program. In other cities, the average discount has worked out to about 23 percent off the regular retail price for medication. “I expect that this program can begin in Seattle by early April,” said Rasmussen.

The program is run by CVS Caremark, which has a relationship with tens of thousands of pharmacies across the U.S., including Walgreens and the in-store pharmacies of Safeway and QFC. (Walgreens offers its own Prescription Savings Club, which comes with an annual fee of $20 per individual, or $35 for the family. If you don’t realize enough savings to cover the fee, the difference is refunded.)

The NLC’s program is free, and would cost the City of Seattle nothing, save distribution of the cards to those who wanted it. It also applies to pet prescriptions.

You don’t need to be uninsured to benefit from the NLC program, as it may provide discounts on prescription drugs not covered by your insurance: “There is no enrollment form, no membership fee, and no restrictions or limits on the frequency of use.”

For a growing number of people, though, programs like these are the new face of uninsured healthcare. From 2008 to 2010, the number of uninsured people in Washington state grew by 180,000, says insurance commissioner Mike Kreidler. By the end of 2011, Washington state was estimated to have a million uninsured, or almost 15 percent of its total population. Uncompensated medical care–where medical bills simply weren’t paid or were written off as charity–exceeded $1 billion.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Your Live Music Bets for March 2nd to the 4th

It’s the spring, and from the frigid temperatures you’d never know it; all the better to pack into a local music venue this weekend.

Tonight (Friday, March 2):

Peter Case and Paul Collins, Summer Twins, Bang sha Bang @ The Funhouse. $20 day of show. Doors at 8pm.

Together as The Nerves and separately as members of The Plimsouls and the Paul Collins Beat, Case and Collins helped lay down the groundwork for the punchy/sweet dichotomy that is power pop. If you’re a fan of Weezer, Ted Leo, or OK Go, and you want to hear the roots of those sounds, this should be unmissable. Expect to hear plenty of gems from these guys’ deep back catalogs, and Case will surely  belt out that classic of classics, “A Million Miles Away”.

Steel Tigers of Death. Partman Parthorse, Halcyon Daze @ The High Dive. $7 at the door. Show at 9pm.

Local punks Steel Tigers of Death bust out furious noise that still manages to be catchy (and funny) as all get out, and the band frequently sports the most inspired wardrobes of any punk band in town.

The George Tisdale Band, Kissing Potion, Down North @ The Skylark Cafe. $10 at the door. Show at 8pm.

West Seattle’s most fun hole-in-the-wall club brings the funk tonight. I’ll abstain from rattling on (again) about the snap and greatness of Down North, largely because The George Tisdale Band‘s swaggering brand of eighties-influenced funk and Kissing Potion’s jazzy variation on thick 1970’s soul will make this bill a stem-to-stern booty-shaker.

Saturday, March 3:

The Spittin’ Cobras, Witchburn, Zero Down, Ancient Warlocks, Piston Ready @ El Corazon. $6 advance, $10 day of show. Doors at 8pm.

It’s all local metal, wall to wall, at South Lake Union’s most metal of venues with this bill. The two headliners bring gloriously old-school headbanging to the table: The Spittin’ Cobras sound like Judas Priest beating the shit out of Kiss in a back alley, while Witchburn‘s call-and-response metal attack sports some serious firepower thanks to iron-lunged lead singer Jamie Nova’s hellstorm of a voice.

Sunday, March 4:

Andrew W.K, The Evaporators @ The Showbox at the Market. $25 advance, $28 day of show. Doors at 7pm.

It’s hard to believe Andrew W.K’s ripe and robust cheese-metal-pop masterwork, I Get Wet, is a decade old, but there you go. This tour’s an unashamed roll in the Elysian Fields of nostalgia, so you’ll likely hear all of I Get Wet, and heaps of the old hits. Party Hard, indeed.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

tEEth Packs An Emotional Wallop At On the Boards

On the Boards‘ presentation of Portland dance company tEEth‘s Make/Believe packs an emotional wallop as its four dancers wrestle with power, voice, and microphones. Angelle Herbert’s choreography, together with Phillip Kraft’s sound design, openly lays claim to the audience from the get-go and doesn’t release its hold for a moment as the dancers struggle to find their literal and figurative voices.

Make/Believe has all the fundamentals of a great performance; there’s drama, character and a refusal to let the audience get away with passivity. Have no fear of (or hopes for) being asked to get on your feet, but don’t think you’ll escape emotionally either. This show will not let you off the hook and the only thing more devastating would be if they were to shut the audience out. Witnessing these performers struggle to communicate engenders pity, horror and fear as well as delight, sympathy and laughter. The physical, electronic and emotional obstacles that choke back words and make speech inarticulate let through just enough meaning to send ripples of laughter through the audience as we recognize a phrase out of that special garbled language in which only dental care workers and drive-through clerks are fluent.

In addition to Kraft’s composition, sounds come from the dancers, who carry microphones in their mouths, around their necks, and between their legs. Sometimes they actually hold them in their hands, yet even when speaking directly into the microphone the dancers work hard to disrupt our understanding of the sounds and their sources. This draws attention to the non-vocal sounds of limbs and breath. The movements make their own music only to have that music overwhelmed by the amplified soundscape, suggesting that the sound derives from the movement rather than the conventional reverse. With the music at a volume that becomes palpable the dancing takes on the silence of distance.

With the exception of a few lifts, both graceful and harsh, and one extraordinary leap, the movements remain grounded and often focused on the torso. Minimalist unison quartets go from languid to fierce, followed by staccato sections with rapid emotional shifts, before breaking into alternating duets and a few solos.

The dancers’ roles are often highly gendered and sexualized. The women take prominence as characters but the men frequently stifle the women’s voices. Though this dynamic is subverted in a variety of ways these scenes create some of the biggest emotional impacts in the performance. The violence and intimacy of some movements inspires questions of who is in control amongst the dancers, in the performer/audience relationship, and between the individual dancer and her own voice—to say nothing of the technology that keeps threatening to gag and garrote.

There is one really deafening moment during the performance, so it’s helpful to take note of the earplugs available next to the programs as you enter the Griffin (I didn’t take a pair but came out okay: any tinnitus that followed didn’t make it to curtain call).

The technical side of the production is stellar. Alex Gagne-Hawes’s lighting includes extraordinarily sharp focus and extreme shuttering, while Kraft’s soundscape, could almost stand alone as a performance.

This is not dance made purely for an esoteric dance-knowing crowd. It’s accessible without pandering, moving both intellectually and emotionally, and playing here for far too short a run: In addition to yesterday’s opening-night performance, Make/Believe is presented tonight and tomorrow.

News, Transportation

Seattle’s War on Cars Fails, Again, to Achieve Predicted Nightmare Outcomes

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(Image: SDOT)

With a full year of traffic data under their belts, Seattle’s Department of Transportation is reporting on how the Nickerson Street “road diet” affected traffic. Average weekday traffic was down one percent, to 18,300 vehicles from 18,500. SDOT has not been able to find evidence of diversion to alternate streets.

On the safety side, the primary reason for the rechannelization that converted the four-lane road into two lanes, collisions were down 23 percent compared to a five-year average, the speeding population dropped 60 percent, and the number of people doing 10 or more miles over the speed limit was down 90 percent.

The $242,000 project included pedestrian crossing improvements at three locations, smoothing a sharp curve, a two-way left turn lane in the middle, and an uphill bicycle lane. Though Nickerson was Seattle’s 28th road diet (as of March 2012 we have had 36 battles in the “war on cars”), the proposal was met by substantial outrage from people who argued that a four-lane road could not be reduced to two lanes without traffic volume being cut drastically.

On neighborhood blog Magnolia Voice, the community appeared split on the viability of a change that, remember, had been successfully implemented 27 times since 1972:

A survey we took back in June indicated that, of the 711 who participated, 48.4 percent were in support of the road diet, while 51.6 percent were against the plan.  The topic generated more discussion on this site than any other topic we have ever posted.

At the time, the City Council’s transportation committee chair, Tom Rasmussen, wanted to delay the project “until 2016 — when other corridors including two-way Mercer Street and the Alaskan Way Tunnel are completed, and their traffic detours let up.”

UPDATE: Rasmussen’s office has written in, claiming that he was incorrectly characterized in the Seattle Times: “The reference to waiting until 2016 for changes to Nickerson came from a letter from Mayor Nickels when he was in office that Tom was paraphrasing at the MDC meeting in 2010. Tom was never advocating for waiting. He was only interested in receiving more information from all viewpoints to be able to make a subsequent decision if the city council decided to weigh in.” You can decide if “receiving more information from all viewpoints” would result in what’s more prosaically known as waiting.

The Manufacturing Industrial Council (MIC) also complained that freight mobility would suffer. (Freight use of Nickerson Street post-diet hasn’t declined at all–it’s actually up slightly.)

Because bicyclists were for the proposal, it had to be bad for cars. A Crosscut guest editorialist opined that “Losing lanes to bikes will produce a jobs exodus.” And things went from there. KING 5 included road diets in their “war on cars” segment. “The Emerald City has been put on a road diet,” proclaimed FOX News.

SDOT actually tried to mollify people by pointing out that many of the changes simply involved paint, and if it didn’t work–if this 27th Seattle road rechannelization didn’t work–they could always switch it back, and people could return to traveling at in-city speeds that kill pedestrians. A year later, it’s not as easy to find people arguing for SDOT to road binge.

News, Real Estate

Seattle Real Estate Getting Its Mojo Back?

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Is spring in the residential real estate air? (Photo: MvB)

It may be hard to believe, but overall, the nation’s real estate market has been slowly on the mend for some time. As Redfin points out in their milestone bottom-calling post:

A year ago we said sales would be up in 2011, and despite the unfair comparison of a 2011 with no tax credits to a 2010 that had the homebuyer tax credit in effect for half the year, 2011 did indeed see about 2% more sales than 2010 in the markets we serve across the country.

In Seattle, realtors are perking up, trading stories of that now-mythical experience, multiple offers above listing. For Seattle, Zillow lists 7,300 homes “recently sold” versus some 3,200 for sale. That’s not to say it hasn’t been a cold winter for home-sellers–all three Case-Schiller price tiers fell in December, points out Seattle Bubble–but a stagnant inventory was helping to push prices down. More recent numbers suggest a “surprise sales spike.”

Redfin currently counts some 530 foreclosed properties in the Seattle area (280 in Seattle proper) that are for sale, but that number is likely to increase in 2012. An AP story on the national foreclosure picture says that a recent $25-billion mortgage settlement is likely to turn the foreclosure faucet on wider:

At the end of January, there were 645,000 bank-owned homes in the U.S. that had yet to be sold, representing a 17-month supply at the current sales pace, Blomquist said. In addition, another 710,000 homes were in some stage of the foreclosure process. Other estimates put the number of homeowners who are either behind on their mortgage payments or in foreclosure at the end of last year more than 6 million.

Redfin’s (and Seattle Bubble’s) Tim Ellis argues that the stream of foreclosures will act to keep real estate prices from rising for the foreseeable future, but that (barring major external shocks) Seattle’s real estate market won’t continue to lose significant value.

Commercial real estate in Seattle is another thing entirely. If there were a heat index, you’d see warm waves spreading out from Amazon’s South Lake Union headquarters. TechFlash reports that their proposed designs for a 3-million-square-foot expansion in Seattle’s Denny Triangle call for towers up to 37 stories tall. Developer Martin Selig now plans, says the Seattle Times, a 4-story office building by the Sculpture Park. Previously it was to have been an apartment building, but Eric Pryne writes that Selig is concerned about overbuilding: “[m]ore than 6,000 apartments are under construction in King and Snohomish counties, with thousands more planned.”